Kicked Out of Town

He Came to His Own, and His Own Received Him Not

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Jesus comes to Nazareth

When someone from a small-town goes out into the world and becomes a kind of celebrity, you expect that when they come back home they’ll be given a hero’s welcome. Everyone likes a local boy who makes it big. He’s a credit to the people he comes from. But that wasn’t what happened with Jesus.

When He came back to Nazareth, no one took Him seriously.

They said, “We know Him. We know His parents. Where does He get off, acting like a big deal, a big prophet and teacher and wonder-worker?”

They had no faith in Him. The people He belonged to wouldn’t accept Him.

It was one of the greatest sorrows of Jesus’ life. And it is, sometimes, one of the greatest hardships of ours.

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Rejection by the Chosen People

Jesus wasn’t just rejected in His home-town, by His extended family and the people He grew up with. He was also, by and large, rejected by His people.

The Jewish people, the chosen race, the one whom God had prepared for centuries to bring the Messiah to the world, Jesus retained some faithful followers, but in the end most of His people would reject Him.

This is the sadness you hear in the Gospel: “He came to His own, and His own received Him not.”

At one point, Jesus looks down over Jerusalem, and you can hear Him mourning, with the voice of God Himself, the rejection by His favored people: “How often have I longed to gather you under my wings as a hen gathers her brood, but you would not!”

God loved the descendants of Jacob and the nation of Israel more intimately than any other people on earth – but apart from a small core group of disciples,  it was those He loved most dearly, with whom He had the most history, who refused to accept Him.

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No Prophet is without Honor

When Jesus met with the disbelief of His own hometown, He said, “No prophet is without honor, except in His native land, and in His own home.”

How true does that ring for us!

How many times is our witness of the faith rejected by those in our own families? How many times has a sibling or parent expressed disinterest in the things that matter most to us? How many times do our family members seem to have nothing more than a mild contempt for our practice of the faith, and our commitment to Christ and His Church. Worst of all, how often do our children reject the faith we tried to bring them up in?

These are the people we care about most, the people we have the most intimate history with, and they shrug off our witness to the Gospel as if it was nothing.

Why does this happen? Why does it so often happen that our witness to other people, sometimes even to strangers, seems to bear more fruit than it does when we try to give the faith to our own kids?

It’s a mystery, and there are probably many reasons for why our friends and family stray from the truth. But we should know, as we mourn over the lost faith of those nearest and dearest to us, that Jesus felt the same sense of loss and disappointment as we do.

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Rejection from God’s People

Again, Jesus wasn’t just rejected by His hometown or family. He was rejected by a very large proportion of God’s Chosen People as a whole.

Now God’s new Chosen People is the Church and, there too, we may feel as though we are largely rejected and marginalized.

Whether it’s by a group of Catholics, or by a member of the hierarchy, or whether it’s something we read about, we can feel repeatedly rejected and alienated from the Catholic Church. We can feel as though people like us aren’t wanted, aren’t appreciated, aren’t accepted by those who set the tone in the Church.

And here again, it’s a mystery. It’s a mystery how, at one point or another, nearly every saint the Church has canonized was somehow persecuted or marginalized by the very institutional Church that would later on declare them a saint. And nearly every Catholic will undergo some share in Christ’s experience of feeling rejected or neglected by the Chosen People.

But that shouldn’t surprise us. That shouldn’t cause us to doubt, or to renounce our faith in Christ and His Church.

After all, if we’re trying to follow the Lord, our experiences will probably run parallel to His.

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Making Sure We Don’t Reject Christ

So there is consolation in knowing that Christ was rejected by His own. If we feel rejected or ignored, we can remember that Christ felt that way too. If we feel discouraged that our witness to the Gospel has been ineffective with those who are closest to us, we can remember that Christ felt that way too. But there’s also a warning here for each of us.

Because, of course, we probably haven’t been the best Christian witnesses to our friends and families.

There have probably been times when we’ve behaved in a way that actually makes it harder for our kids and our extended family to believe the truth of what we profess. And, of course, we probably haven’t been the best Catholics we could have been.

If we sometimes feel unjustly marginalized in the Church, it’s probably still true that some valid criticisms could be made of how we’re living out our faith.

And the point is, we’d better not just spend our time lamenting that we’ve been unjustly rejected or neglected. The best thing we can do for our immediate circle and for the Church as a whole, is to recommit ourselves to trying to be more perfect disciples of Jesus.

It is hard to be rejected or neglected, especially by those who you care about the most. But the best thing we can do for those we care about is to look at the ways we are still neglecting and rejecting Christ’s invitation to greater holiness and self-sacrificial love. Then, at least in our case, He will come to His own, and find that He is honored and welcomed. And then we will be most fit to sanctify our families and build up the Church