Tunnel Vision
-
July 5, 2024The Gospel reading for this Sunday takes us to the story of Jesus’ rejection by the people of Nazareth. Jesus is coming “to his own country.” The literal Greek is patrída which means his fatherland, the place from which he hailed, his hometown. He has come back in order to teach and preach. But they took offense at him. They said, “Where did this man get all this? Ishe not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon?”
The Greek word for “take offense” is “skandalizō” from which we get the word scandal. Literally, a skandalon in Greek is as tumbling block. It is something people trip over. In this case,they trip over the particularities of Jesus. They recognize that his preaching is filled with wisdom. They even recognize that he is doing miracles. But they have a hard time accepting it because they trip over the scandal of his humanity, over the fact that they knew him when he was growing up, that he is the son of Mary.
They also trip over the scandal of his identity as a laborer.Jesus was neither a scribe nor a Levitical priest. In the first 30 years of his life, he was a carpenter but not a prophet.The Greek word for carpenter is tektōn, and it means more than just a carpenter. It refers to anyone who works with his hands in hard material - stone, wood, metal, horn or ivory.It can be translated into English by words such as carpenter,woodworker, artisan, builder, handyman or contractor.
New Testament scholar John Meier offers this explanation:“It was a calling involving a broad range of skills and tools.Indeed, archaeology, as well as written sources, tell us that a large number of tools were used in ancient woodworking. Thus, while Jesus was in one sense a common Palestinian workman,he plied a trade that involved, for the ancient world, a fair level of technical skill.” The people cannot reconcile that with the fact that he is now speaking as a wise man, teaching as a scribe,prophesying as a prophet, and performing wonders and miracles as a divine healer.
Brendan Byrne offers this reflection: “The episode shows that the greatest enemy to faith can simply be “familiarity”: a refusal to believe that God’s presence - and prophetic agents of that presence - could come to us in so familiar a form as the person next door. The Nazarenes had their own fixed ideas as to when and where and how the Messiah should come to Israel - and the one they knew as the carpenter, Mary’s son, simply did not fill the bill.” An important lesson is to be learned here: “Progress in the spiritual life - growth in the Spirit - almost always shows itself in the ability to recognize God more and more in the ordinary, the everyday.”
A teacher set her class an assignment during an excursion to a national park. Each student was to make a list of various plants, insects, animals and birds that they observed. After the students had been at this task for about an hour the teacher called the class together and asked each of the students to read out the list of the flora and fauna they had observed.The teacher noticed that one of her students had only two words on his list: No kangaroos. The teacher then said, “OK,there were no kangaroos, but what else did you see?” The boy replied, “But I was only looking for kangaroos.”
That’s tunnel vision. If you’re so fixated on only seeing one thing, you become blind to everything else.
