“We can be envious about the gifts and achievements of others. Envy, like a sly ghost, can creep into our relationships with them. Our words can become sharpened arrows. We can cut them down to size - our size.”
Fr Kevin Hegarty WHEN a hero or a heroine comes home, after a great exploit, there are lively celebrations. Banners, bunting and flags decorate the streets. People tumble out of their homes in droves to be there. Music is in the air. There are speeches and presentations. The day ends with a party in a local hostelry.
Strangely, this was not the experience of Jesus when he returned to Nazareth during his public ministry. In those three years he was the talk of Palestine. His words charmed, consoled and challenged his listeners. He attracted a huge following. His actions mesmerised them. People wanted to be near him, to touch even just the fringe of his cloak.
On his return home for a visit Jesus spoke in the synagogue. He inspired a negative reaction, as is clear in the account given in Mark’s gospel:
“Where did the man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been granted him, and these miracles that are worked through him. This is the carpenter surely, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joset and Jude and Simon? his sisters, too, are they not with us?”
Jesus was hurt by their sullen rejection, reflecting ruefully that ‘a prophet is only despised in his own country among his own relations and in his own house’.
One can imagine later conversations around the dinner table when they got home. Who does he think he is, telling us how to live? He grew up here, we know all about him and he is no better than us. There may have been stories that reflected negatively on his childhood and teenage years. Older people may have opened the archive of malign human memory and revealed the skeletons that are part of every family’s history.
Why did they reject him? Was it because of the cutting edge that lies at the heart of his message, which challenges our selfishness and complacency? Perhaps that was part of it. I feel, however, that there was another reason that reveals something unattractive about the human psyche.
We can be envious about the gifts and achievements of others. Envy, like a sly ghost, can creep into our relationships with them. Our words can become sharpened arrows. We can cut them down to size - our size.
I am reminded of an incident in John Millington Synge’s play, ‘The Playboy of the Western World’. At the start of the play, Christy, the main character, arrives, bedraggled and frightened, into a shebeen in Geesala. He tells his listeners a gory tale of how he has killed his father and run away from home. They are fascinated by his story for it brings some excitement into their humdrum lives.
Untroubled by the moral and legal implications of what he claims to have done, they start treating him as a hero and he becomes one. He grows visibly in self-confidence, especially when it becomes clear that Pegeen Mike, the main female character, is deeply attracted to him.
The next day he takes part in the sports on the strand and wins all the prizes. He is the subject of conversation between Jimmy and Philly, two of the spectators at the sports.
Jimmy tells Philly that Christy has ‘right luck’ as he brought ‘bankrupt ruin on the roulette man, and the trick of the loop man’ and won all in the sports below, ‘racing, lepping and dancing’. Philly, much less enthusiastically, replies: ‘If he has, he’ll be rightly hobbled yet, and he not able to say ten words without making a brag of the way he killed his father, and the great blow he hit with the log’.
It has been said that the gospel story has the capacity to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. The story of Jesus’ rejection in Nazareth has implications for those of us who try to follow the Christian way.
Envy distorts our vision. it can cripple emotionally not only those against whom we direct it but also ourselves. It is significant that the writer of Mark’s gospel comments thus on the reactions of the people to Jesus’ visit: ‘He could work no miracle there’.
As Christians we are challenged to see the presence of God in the personalities, talents and achievements of others. Everyone has the potential of revealing something of the meaning of God for us. We all can be what St Paul called a temple of the Holy Spirit, a place where the divinity can be contacted.
Artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, musicians and sports-people enrich our lives by their accomplishments. So do ordinary people. Desmond Egan has written a beautiful poem about Mrs Ned:
‘She would waddle out from their stone kitchen
gently on slippers,
her bandaged leg
giving inwards as if under the soft
bulk in the navy shopcoat
usually calling back at some of the childer
poor Marion never too far away
or Barney Thomas our pal
every year she’d have their shop window in flowers
with candles and a Sacred Heart for the procession
and my mother cried a long time
the evening Mrs Ned died.’
Let’s give thanks for the people who bring grace into our lives.
