Luke 4,24-30 – Monday of the Third Week of Lent
In today’s Gospel of Luke, Jesus pronounces a phrase that has now entered the common imagination of many of us: “No prophet is welcome in his homeland”. It is a short phrase, but profoundly revealing of the dynamics of human relationships. Jesus pronounces it in the synagogue of Nazareth, in front of the people who have always known himin front of those who saw his growth, his ordinary life.
Precisely those closest to him struggle to recognize something new in him. The meaning of these words is quite clear: often those who have known us for a long time, those who live next to us, are also incapable of truly seeing the deepest truth of who we are. Not necessarily out of malice, but because the gaze is now conditioned by an already formed image. AND the power of prejudice. Once we have pigeonholed someone into a definition, we struggle to realize that that person can be much more. But the problem doesn’t just concern others. Probably we too, very often, behave in the same way.
We have stopped really looking at the people around us. We observe them through the filter of our beliefs, our labels, our memories. We think we already know everything about them and, precisely for this reason, we stop letting ourselves be surprised. The Gospel invites us to a very concrete conversion: giving up our prejudices. Converting, in this case, means learning to look again. It means accepting that God can act precisely where we don’t imagine him. It can hide behind the obvious, behind the everyday, behind the face of a person we think we know perfectly.
