Ezekiel 2.3 – 5
Psalm: 123
2 Corinthians 12. 7 – 10
Mark 6. 1 – 6
Who would be content with weakness? Most of us would want to be strong and in charge, at the
top of our game. In fact, we are more likely to minimize or disguise our limitations or difficulties.
So why would Paul be happy not only with weakness but also with “insults, hardships,
persecutions, and constraints” (2 Corinthians 12: 10)?
Because all of his suffering, including the “thorn in the flesh” that he describes in today’s second
(2 Corinthians 12:7), had taught Paul a lesson. When he was at his weakest, humanly speaking,
God’s strength flowed through him the most. When he stopped relying on his own strength and
trusting him the most. When he stopped relying on his own strength and trusting in his own gifts,
the Lord’s power dwelt within him more perfectly.
St. Therese of Lisieux learned a similar lesson. Painfully aware of her own “littleness” and
inability to “climb the stairs to holiness,” she found an elevator – the arms of her heavenly Father.
Just as a small child relies on her father to lift her and carry her up the stairs, so Therese came to
trust and rejoice in her heavenly Father’s strength to carry her in her weakness.
There is a freedom that comes with recognizing our limitations an embracing this kind of child
like dependence on God. The more we honestly acknowledge our weakness, the more room we
make for God’s strength to grow in us. We realize that there’s only so much we can do ourselves.
But we also realize that as soon as we stop thinking everything depends on us, God’s strength so
that we can reveal his power more and more clearly.
In today’s gospel, Jesus returns to his home town of Nazareth, having left there some time
previously. He had spent the best part of thirty years in Nazareth. During that time he was known
by all as the carpenter, the son of Mary. However, since leaving Nazareth, Jesus’ life had taken a
new direction. He had thrown himself into the work that God had given him to do. He had left
Nazareth as a carpenter; he returned as a teacher and a healer. There was in fact much more to
Jesus that his own townspeople had ever suspected while he was living among them. The gospel
suggests that they could not accept this ‘more’; they rejected him. They wanted him to be the
person they had always known; they would not allow him to move on from that. Jesus’
homecoming turned out to be more painful than his leaving home. God’s unique Son who
proclaimed the presence of God’s kingdom was experienced by the people of Nazareth as a thorn
in the flesh, to use an image from today’s second reading.
The people of Nazareth thought they knew Jesus. The image they had of him, which they held on
to with great tenacity, became a block to their learning more about him. We too can easily assume
that we know someone, when, in reality, we only know one side to them. We can form strong
opinions about people on the basis of past experiences. We can become so attached to these
opinions that even when the evidence is there to challenge them, we are completely unmoved.
There was more to Jesus than the people of Nazareth were aware of. Indeed there is always more
to every human being than we are aware of. That is true even of those we would claim to know
well, such as family members and good friends. We are each made in God’s image. There is a
profound mystery to each one of us. We can never fully probe the mystery of another person’s
life. We each need to approach everyone with the awareness that there is more here than I can see.
It was Jesus’ very ordinariness that made it difficult for the people of Nazareth to see him as he
really was, in all his mystery. God was powerfully present to them in and through someone who
was as ordinary, in many respects, as they themselves. God continues to come to us today in and
through the ordinary, in and through those who are most familiar to us. In the religious sphere
there can be a certain fascination with the extraordinary and the unusual. The gospels suggest that
the primary way the Lord comes to us is in and through the everyday. This is what we mean by
the incarnation. The Word became flesh and dwelt among us. The ordinary is shot through with
God’s presence.
The Lord can even come to us in and through what we initially experience as something very
negative. St Paul made this discovery for himself, according to our second reading today. He
struggled with what he called a thorn in the flesh. It is not easy to know what he means by this.
Whatever it was, Paul wanted to be rid of it. He saw no good in it and he prayed earnestly to the
Lord to take it from him, fully expecting that his prayer would be heard. Paul’s prayer was
answered, but not in the way he had expected. In prayer he came to realize that God was
powerfully present in and through this thorn in the flesh. When we find ourselves struggling with
something inside ourselves or with something outside ourselves, some person perhaps, we can be
tempted to see the struggle as totally negative and just want to be rid of it. Like Paul, however, we
can discover that this difficult experience is opening us up to God’s presence. The very thing we
judge to be of little or no value can create a space for God to work powerfully in our lives. There
is something of a paradox in what Paul hears the risen Lord say to him, ‘My power is at its best in
weakness.’ It is often when we most feel life as a struggle that God can touch our lives most
powerfully and creatively.
Today’s gospel suggests we need to confront any tendency to judge others, take hurt and offence
from them, reject them, and make them scapegoats of our own unrecognised aversions and
resentments. We need to become more aware of how we spread negativity at home, among our
friends at work—or wherever—lest we become like Pharisees or Herodians, or those of Jesus’
own people who so readily rejected him. We need to realise how easy it is to confuse reality with
our own ingrained prejudices and preferred viewpoints. We need to see that every story has
another side, every person has his or her own reasons for what they do.
With St Paul I need to acknowledge my own “thorn,” my own complex, shadow, inferior
function, potential for neurotic behaviour; call it what you will, each of us has it! If I really want
to be disciple I need to learn to rebuild the centre of my existence on God’s terms lest I scatter
myself and lose myself because I have no ground of coherent meaning on which to base my
relationship with reality. This is spirituality, this is what psychology so often discovers we need.
May we remember God’s grace, may we remember that it precedes us along the way, may we
allow it to set us on our feet and make us courageous. May we permit it to energise us for the next
few steps on the perilous, wonderful, bright, dark journey to abundant life.
God bless!