Sunday, 4th July 2021, Trinity 5

Today I’d like to reflect on what it is to see, what it means to
perceive correctly. Might we be challenged to be aware of the
assumptions we hold that stops us seeing and learning something new?

What did the people around Jesus see about him? Well, we know that
Jesus’ family thought he had gone mad. They tried to take custody of
him. His brothers didn't believe in him. Today’s reading has Jesus
back in his hometown synagogue. It’s seems to start well. His own
people are amazed at Jesus’ wisdom. But then they take offence. I
wonder what provoked that? Might it have been a jealous voice? Who
knows. They ask, ‘isn’t this the young whipper-snapper that we saw
growing up, the carpenter, the son of Mary?

Barbara Brown Taylor says that the only reason to identify someone by
his mother in Jesus’s day is to question his legitimacy. It’s
highlighting the fact that no one knows for sure who his father is. To
refer to Jesus as ‘the son of Mary’ is a calculated act on the part of
his fellow villagers, a weaponized use of Jesus’s birth story to
humiliate him into silence.

We’re told that many ‘took offense of him’ — literally, ‘were
scandalized’. He didn’t have the appropriate pedigree of a respectable
family. He didn’t have a decent education. And so on.

The people's small-mindedness and their inability to embrace a new
facet of Jesus's life and mission, keep them in spiritual poverty.

The uncomfortable truth in this story is that Jesus offends his
beloved community. And if the point of religion is to comfort the
afflicted and to afflict the comfortable…. maybe, if the Jesus we
worship never offends us, then it’s not really Jesus we’re
worshipping.

Debie Thomas puts it so well. The call of the Gospel is not a call to
stand still. It’s a call to choose movement over stasis, change over
security, growth over decay.

When we think about change and growth – in others and ourselves – I
wonder: how do I refuse to let others in my life grow and change?

When do I box them into identities that are narrow and constricting?
Where in my life do I silence the unfamiliar, instead of leaning into
newness with curiosity and delight? Do I allow the people I am close
to to become? Do I allow myself to become? Or do I cut myself and
others off with expectations that are severe and stifling: "You will
always be small, weak, broken, insufficient, disappointing. You’ll
never outgrow your background, race, family, upbringing, wounds,
addictions.”

These are questions to ask ourselves as individuals and as
communities, and also as the church. Whose faces have we not seen or
side-lined across history? Whose perspectives do we still deem
unworthy of prophetic authority?

A few weeks ago I reflected upon how the church in this country had
side-lined and ignored those from black and Asian communities.

In a Church Times article last week, it asked whether the Church is as
alert to social prejudices as it now is to race and gender bias. It’s
an important question to ask if we’re going to have a richly diverse
church. A church that expresses its true catholicity by an expansive
embrace of difference. For example, whilst the church has always been
involved in working-class areas and those of greatest social need, its
vicars tended to be from a different social background.

Asking these sorts of questions will affect the selection criteria and
training of future priests because this currently favours the middle
class, most of whom already have a university degree and professional
qualifications. Change is already happening here. I must confess here
to being challenged because I’m a bit of an academic snob – I want
those being ordained to have gone to decent universities. But we’ve
got to recognise that there are other ways of training future priests
that will be different.

That’s one aspect of change the church is slowly engaged in – the
selction and training of future priests.

Seeing differently and openly will also affect how we welcome people
to church. The artist Grayson Perry described how middle-class people
see something ‘chaotic’ in the working-class body shaped by years of
manual labour, with a beer belly and tattoos in contrast to the
tightly buttoned-up middle-class body. ‘I often feel discomfort in
spaces dominated by the middle and upper classes in a very bodily way.
I have had more negative and sarcastic comments about the way I look
in Church of England spaces than I care to mention.’

Sobering words to reflect upon as we seek to become a richly diverse
and inclusive community. Because the challenge of the gospel is to be
open to seeing in new ways; of finding God working in surprising and
perhaps unfamiliar places and people.

The theology that grounds this perspective is the Incarnation. It
affirms that God doesn’t limit himself to our small and stingy notions
of the sacred. God exceeds, God transgresses, God transcends. The
lowly carpenter reveals himself as Lord. The hometown prophet tells
us truths we’d rather not hear. We might be scandalized by expansive
vision, but he’s not. We might amaze him with our unbelief, but he
will nevertheless challenge us, daring us always to see and experience
him anew.


Reference: Debie Thomas

Revd Dr James Heard
Vicar, United Benefice of Holland Park