And they took offense at him

 

Scripture readings for today's reflections can be found at Memorial of Saint John Vianney, Priest | USCCB

There’s an old saying that goes, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” The people of Nazareth knew Jesus since he was a child. They knew him as the son of Joseph the carpenter and Mary. They knew his family as well. He was, to them, just an ordinary person, no better or worse than any one of them. They never expected him to have this wisdom and knowledge that he was now showing. And further, he was doing all these mighty deeds of healing the sick and driving out demons from the possessed. They were asking, “Where did he get all this? He’s just one of us!”

 But Jesus showed that he was more than just that the son of Mary and Joseph the Carpenter. He was showing that he was the Messiah they had long been waiting for. But they struggled with accepting this and were unable to move beyond their preconceived ideas of who Jesus was. He didn’t fit into what they thought the Messiah should be. To them Jesus was just ordinary.

We have come to know that Jesus is certainly no “ordinary person.” We have come to know him as the Savior of the world, the Son of God. Yet there are people that we may know in our lives that have trouble agreeing with us. They view Jesus as just a nice holy man or prophet with teachings on how we are to live out our lives in relationship with God and with others. They cannot accept him as the Messiah. We are called to share with them that Jesus is indeed the Son of God and the Savior of the world.

Today we commemorate the feast of St. John Vianney, born in Lyons, France, in 1786. He struggled in the seminary to comprehend the studies he was expected to know in order to carry out his priestly duties. Further, he struggled with understanding Latin, which was an important part of his seminary training. He finally was ordained, and his superiors decided to send him to a place where they thought he could live out his priesthood with little struggle. They sent him to the small town of Ars and it was there that he started bringing people back to the faith with his down-to-earth preaching and being accessible to them in the sacrament of confession. People were able to feel the love of Jesus in John Vianney. John Vianney was doing in Ars what Jesus did during His ministry. Vianney was showing his parishioners the love God has for each of them. As a result, he was bringing them back to the practice of the faith. His superiors, I’m sure, thought, as the towns people with Jesus thought, “Where did this man get all this?” Jesus was working through John Viany to bring change to those people that he was called to serve in his parish.

Let us, like John Vianney, bring the love of Christ to those in our lives. There will be those that may not accept us and our belief that Jesus is the Son of God, but we are called, like John Vianney, to bring that love of God to all people that we encounter.