Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time

When people leave home for the first time to build their own lives, it can be a challenging experience for everyone involved. The person leaving may have mixed feelings, wanting to be independent but also feeling the pain of separation. Parents may also experience mixed emotions, feeling happy that their child is ready to move on but knowing they will deeply miss them.

On the other hand, homecomings are typically happier experiences for everyone, but they can be complex. The person returning home may have changed considerably since leaving, and those at home may have also changed. There may be expectations based on how things used to be, which may not align with the current reality. Adapting to these changes can be difficult.

In today's Gospel, Jesus returns to His hometown of Nazareth after leaving for some time. He had spent about thirty years there, known to all as a carpenter and the son of Mary. However, Jesus had taken a new direction since leaving home, dedicating Himself to the work given to Him by God. He returned not as just a carpenter but as a teacher and a healer. There was much more to Jesus than His townspeople had ever realized while he lived among them.

The Gospel suggests that the people of Nazareth could not accept this new reality and rejected Him. They wanted Him to remain as the person they had always known and were reluctant to accept his growth and change. His homecoming was more painful than His departure. The people of Nazareth saw God's unique Son as a thorn in the flesh, unable to see beyond their preconceived notions of Him.

We often assume we know someone when, in reality, we only know one side of them. Our strong opinions about people can be based on past experiences, making us unwilling to see beyond them, even when there is evidence to challenge our views.

There was more to Jesus than the people of Nazareth were aware of, just as there is more to every human being than we know. We are each made in God's image, and there is a profound mystery to each of us. We must approach everyone with the awareness that there is more to them than meets the eye.

Jesus' ordinariness made it difficult for the people of Nazareth to recognize the mystery within him. God was powerfully present to them through someone as seemingly ordinary as they were.

God continues to come to us today through the ordinary, through those closest to us. While there may be a fascination with the extraordinary and the unusual, the Gospels suggest that the Lord comes to us primarily in the everyday - this is what we mean by the incarnation. The ordinary is filled with God's presence.

The Lord can even come to us through what we initially perceive as negative. According to our second reading today, St. Paul discovered this for himself. He struggled with what he called a 'thorn in the flesh.' While he wanted to be rid of it, he realized in prayer that God was present in and through this struggle.

When we struggle with something, inside or out, we may want to eliminate the struggle entirely. However, like St. Paul, we can discover that this challenging experience can open us up to God's presence. What we consider to be of little or no value can create space for God to work in our lives. There is a dichotomy in what St. Paul hears the Risen Lord say to him, "My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness." It is often in our most difficult moments that God can touch our lives most powerfully and creatively.