Family Photographs – Br. Lain Wilson

SSJE Sermons

Matthew 13:54-58

Today’s Gospel lesson isn’t about Jesus.

Rather, it’s not about the Jesus we have come to know, to accompany in his ministry with the disciples. Instead, it’s about another Jesus, one of memory, of presumption, and of misplaced expectation.

In the Rule of our Society, we understand as part of the practice of silence the honoring of “the mystery present in the hearts of our brothers and sisters, strangers and enemies,” a letting go of “curiosity, presumption, and condemnation which pretends to penetrate the mystery of their hearts.”[1]

We can see in our Gospel reading today what this looks like in practice. It is significant, I think, that the only references to Jesus’s “hidden years”—those years of growth and formation between infancy and baptism—in Matthew’s gospel (and Mark’s) is this brief encounter between Jesus and those from his hometown. It’s a relic of a silent period, a family photograph held in the hands of these people, who glance uncomprehendingly between it and the living Jesus standing before them.

Is it any surprise that Jesus “did not do many deeds of power there” (Mt 13:58)? All those who have come to Jesus for healing have done so with the hope and expectation that he will be able to effect their transformation, that he will indeed have power to save them. These individuals from Jesus’s hometown instead hold this still family photograph in their hands, between them and the living Jesus. They expect them to match, and they’re surprised when they don’t. But their mistake is taking as real the image in the photograph.

Each of us has likely experienced this in our own lives. Reunions or weddings or funerals: all bring together memories and presumptions and misplaced expectations about who we are and who we were. My twentieth high school reunion is this year—I am acutely aware not only of the images, the still photographs, of people from my past that I carry with me, but also about those of me that they carry with them. Neither are real.

And each of us similarly carries an image of Jesus. Something from our childhood formation, something from our fear or anger, something that we hold out in front of us and that blocks us from an immediate, fresh encounter with the living Lord. Something that keeps us from being surprised by joy in that fresh encounter.

What is that image for you?

Just as in silence we honor the mystery at the heart of our brothers and sisters, so too in prayer we honor the mystery at the heart of God, letting go of that image, lowering the still photograph and allowing God to reveal Godself to us in new and surprising and, perhaps, unsettling ways. Know that this is the living God, speaking in our hearts, powerful to save.

Amen.

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[1] The Rule of the Society of Saint John the Evangelist (Lanham, MD, 1997), 54.