Readings: Ezekiel 1.1-5 / Psalm 122. 1-2a. 2, 3-4 (R/v 2cd) / 2 Corinthians 12.7-20 / Mark 6.61-6
Were you lucky enough to play hide-and-seek with your parents when you were young?
I remember my siblings and I playing it with Mom and Dad every now and then. As little ones, our two-story semi-d house in Changi seemed huge: there were many places to hide. There was an air of suspense whenever we hid quietly. And when Mom and Dad found us, there was always plenty of laughter. Hide-and-seek was a delightful game to play.
Writing in The New York Times last Tuesday, Alison Carper, a psychologist, reflected on the foundation children must have to play hide-and-seek. They will only play this game, she noted, when they have the confidence that they will be found.
It is not the act of being found that gives them this confidence. Rather, it is faith: faith in someone they know who will look for them because this person really wants to find them.
Today’s gospel reading invites us to consider the kind of faith we have in God as Jesus’ followers.
Last Sunday, we reflected on the faith the hemorrhaging woman and Jairus had in Jesus who embodied God’s healing power. Their faith moved them to reach out to Jesus for healing. Throughout the gospels, many of the sick, and those who interceded for them, did the same. We think of the blind man, Bartimaeus, the 10 lepers, the paralytic lowered through the roof, and the centurion’s servant. They came; they asked; and they let Jesus heal them in the ways he wanted to. And Jesus often said to those he healed: “your faith has saved you.”
This evening we hear that Jesus “was not able to perform any mighty deed” in his hometown Nazareth, “apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.”
Jesus could not perform miracles because the Nazarenes lacked faith in him as a teacher and a healer. They did not come to him like sick with hope; they approached him scorn: “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? … Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary?”
Why did the Nazarenes not have faith in Jesus? Because they did not have a personal relationship with him. They knew of him; they had heard of him; they probably had seen him from time to time in Nazareth. Some of them might have remembered him as a young boy and teenager in their town. But they never were in relationship with him.
Faith is always founded on a relationship. We have faith in someone, never in something. Why? Because faith is rooted in trust, and trust involves care and love. The kind of care and love that enables a young child to play hide-and-seek because she knows and trusts that daddy or mommy will always find her. This is how children learn to have faith in their parents and to grow in this faith. Charity begins at home, they say. What they should add, especially, for parents is this: “teach your child to have faith in you.” When children have faith in their parents and in their love for them, they can begin to better understand what faith in God can look like.
The Catechism teaches us that “Faith is a personal act—the free response of the human person to the initiative of God, who reveals himself” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, §166). Christian faith is founded on the interaction between ourselves and God: because this relationship is always rooted in trust and love, we become familiar with God and with God’s ways in our lives.
We glimpse what this familiarity can be like in a married couple; they are intimate. This is why if one says to another, “I have no faith in you any more,” and if he means it, the bond they share is temporarily or even permanently overturned. And faith is broken.
For John Foley, “the deepest meaning of faith is to trust in God, to let his love into us and then to respond to it. Faith is like a home in which personal relationships take place between people and God.” This is why, “If we fail in faith, how can faith save us?” he asks.
As Christians, we come to have faith in God through Jesus. And we grow in this faith by following Jesus more closely. It follows that where our friendship with Jesus is lukewarm, our faith in God is probably lacking. This is why Jesus’ words, “Your faith has saved you” must challenge us: if the sick, the lame, the blind can come to Jesus to ask for God’s healing, what about you and me? Do we come to Jesus with as much trust and love, with as much faith in God, as they do? Or, do we ask for God’s healing in Jesus’ name with a half-hearted and shallow faith?
Today we see Jesus’ amazement at the Nazarenes’ lack of faith. This is the stumbling bock Jesus is warning you and me about. Like them, we can easily forget the faith-filled familiarity of being in relationship with Jesus that is so necessary for union with God.
What do we forgo when we become unfamiliar with Jesus? That Jesus frees us to do two things. First, to see ourselves as we are -- always in need of God in Jesus. Second, to see Jesus as he truly is for us -- the one through whom we receive God’s gifts.
But Jesus never forces us to choose friendship with him, and, through him, God. He will never do this. Patiently, he only awaits us to choose him. The Nazarenes rejected Jesus. What will your choice and my choice be?
The Christian insight to all who answer this question is this: that even if we do not choose Jesus, he will choose us. He will come and find us. We who sometimes complain that God doesn’t hear us, or answer our prayer, or seek us out in our suffering.
If we live lives playing hide and seek with God -- we hiding from God in our sinfulness, and God repeatedly seeking us out in mercy -- then Jesus’ appearance in Nazareth must be a hope-filled reminder for you and me. Why? Because Jesus will always find us in the most secretive places where we hide, conceal or closet ourselves from him, as he will also find us in Nazareths of our lives, those spaces we call families and friendships, work and play.
Jesus comes to us because he knows that deep down in each of us there is faith that God really does love and want to find us. And no matter how little this faith might be, it is for Jesus a very good reason to always look for us, and finding us, to say, “Found you!”
Will you and I then let Jesus find us, not once but always?
Preached at St Ignatius Church
photo: www.news.com.au
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