Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C 2022

Published: January 30, 2022

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily at St. Benedict Church in Subiaco on Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022.

Bishop Taylor

One of the buzz words — or buzz phrases — current these days encourages us to think outside the box. The idea is that creativity requires us to move beyond limited conventional expectations.

For instance, 20 years ago almost all cars used only gas or diesel, except a few experimental cars that used only electricity — and couldn’t go more than 100 miles before having to be plugged in and recharged. Gas or electric, those were the options.

Then someone thought outside the box and came up with a gas and electric hybrid where the gas engine recharges the batteries when extra energy is being produced — say going downhill — and the electric batteries supplement the gas engine when more energy is needed — say going uphill.

As a lot of people know, I have a Honda Civic Hybrid and it’s great: four cylinders, five passengers and on the highway, it gets an average of 49 miles to the gallon. I can go more than 600 miles on one 13-gallon tank of gas.

In today’s Gospel we have our first glimpse of Jesus as a person who thinks outside the box. The people of his hometown were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth in part because he went way beyond how they had remembered him as a child — Isn’t this the son of Joseph?

But Jesus had already moved way beyond their limited conventional expectations. They had heard he had worked some miracles in Capernaum and since those claiming to be faith healers were common in those days, they were willing to accept — if given proof — that he might indeed be a faith healer. But that was the limit to what their small-town piety was able to imagine.

And here was Jesus, who as we know from the other Gospels was unable to work any miracles there due to their lack of faith — here was Jesus, the miracle worker who worked no miracles, claiming now to be a prophet. And by so doing, he had stepped outside the box.

And what a convention-upsetting, boundary-crossing message it was: that God loves, sometimes even preferentially, the gentiles whom they regarded as enemies and unclean. That God, who had already used both Elijah and Elisha to extend his saving love to a widow from Sidon in Lebanon and to Naaman from Syria, was now going to use Jesus to do the same thing, to bring God’s saving love to the gentiles, their enemies.

Those who think outside the box often threaten those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo — oil producers prefer gas-guzzlers because they’d sell much less gas if we all drove hybrid cars — and the people of Nazareth felt so threatened and infuriated by Jesus’ message that their enemies were included in God’s plan of salvation that they tried to kill the messenger, by throwing him over a cliff.

But Jesus got away and continued to proclaim the good news of universal salvation elsewhere.