Daily Gospel Reflection – Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

Daily Gospel Reflection – Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time

Daily Gospel Reflection – Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time 

July 30, 2021 

Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time 

Gospel: Mt 13:54-58 

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue. They were astonished and said, “Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Are not his sisters all with us? Where did this man get all this?” And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house.” And he did not work many mighty deeds there because of their lack of faith. 

Source: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 

Bishop Robert Barron 

Friends, today, in Matthew’s account of the rejection of Jesus at Nazareth, Christ refers to himself as a prophet. 

In the Old Testament tradition, the prophet is a religious visionary and truth-teller. The great Jewish theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel said that the prophet is someone who feels the feelings of God and then speaks out of that experience. He stubbornly reads the world through the lens of the word of God and speaks the divine truth. And this mission implies opposition, confrontation, and critique, since the keepers of worldly order are frequently looking through other lenses and listening to other words. 

But Jesus is much more than one more prophet in a long line of prophets, one more speaker of the divine truth, one more reader of the divine word. Jesus is the Word made flesh; he is the Divine Truth in person.