Monday in the Third Week of Lent, March 8, 2021

Luke 4:24-30

Jesus said to the people in the synagogue at Nazareth: “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place. Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah when the sky was closed for three and a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land. It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But he passed through the midst of them and went away.

Back on Ash Wednesday, in accordance with a decree from the U.S. Bishops Conference, priests did not use the word “one” — as in, “one God forever and ever” — in the opening prayer (the Collect).  I don’t know how many people noticed this or if priests provided an explanation for this.  During the first three hundred years of the Church, prayers ended very simply, usually with a formula similar to “through Christ our Lord”, to which the people responded “Amen”.  The prayer might even end only with the “Amen”.  Towards the end of this period, however, certain teachers arose who challenged the doctrine of God as a Trinity of Divine Persons, primarily by attacking the doctrine of the divinity of Jesus Christ.  To combat this, the custom arose, especially after the definition of the Holy Trinity st the Council of Nicaea in 325, in faithful Catholic churches of concluding prayers, especially the Collect which opened the Mass, with a manifestly Trinitarian formula.  This became codified over time and was made the rule with the Council of Trent. Different translations of the formula are found in the hand missals and prayerbooks which proliferated beginning around that time, and they tended to end with “God, forever and ever” in accord with the Latin, which has Deum per omnia saecula saeculorum.  Beginning with the reform of the Mass in the 1960’s, the Latin was translated into English as “one God, forever and ever.”  The reason for this is to be understood with the rationale for the vernacular translation of the Mass as a whole, part of which was to simplify and explain.  This actually led to an oversimplification which was largely corrected by the new translation of a few years ago.  For some reason, the conclusion of the Collect was unaffected by this.  Perhaps it was simply overlooked.  The meaning of the prayer is not changed by this, nor is one version of the conclusion necessarily better than the other.  “God” without the “one” is certainly an older usage.  What the addition of “one” does is to emphatically declare that the Father, to whom the prayer is addressed, the Son, through whom the prayer is addressed to the Father, and the Holy Spirit, in the unity with whom it is addressed to the Father, are “one God”.  The translation, then, is a matter of emphasis and not one of doctrine.  

In looking at the Gospel reading for today’s Mass we see the Lord Jesus on his only visit during his Public Life to his childhood home.  St. Luke gives much more detail to the event than Matthew and Mark do in order to show why the Lord made Capernaum his home base rather than Nazareth, a question which must have puzzled those to whom Luke was writing.  The way this episode is cut up in the lectionary, we do not see how the Lord entered the synagogue at Nazareth, read from the Prophet Isaiah, and was initially received favorably: “And all spoke well of him, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth.”  But as the people in the synagogue continued to talk, they began to grow more critical.  “And they said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?” And he said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, Physician, heal yourself; what we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here also in your own country.’ ”  From this point, we have the words for today’s reading.  The subsequent riot results not from the Lord’s teaching on Isaiah, but from the objection, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”  That is to say, Does he not belong to us?  The people wanted him to “do here also in your own country” all the wonderful things they had heard him doing first in Capernaum.  The Lord reminded them of the need for faith for the healings they demanded, and gave the examples of Naaman and the widow in the land of Sidon as examples of faith that even the Gentiles could possess.  But for his former neighbors and friends, it was too late.

These folks turned on the Lord because they saw him as preferring other towns to his home town.  It came down to pride,  and their pride was so outraged that they tried to throw Jesus over the side of the hill on which their town was built.  The Lord left them, then, and never returned.  For the next two to three years the countryside rang with his praises and stories of the wonders he had worked.  But Nazareth stood by as a mere spectator and had no share in his glory.