Standing on the Horizon

Dear Friend,

Peace and all good be yours!

Maybe you’ve seen the cartoon that’s making the rounds on the internet this week. A woman sits behind the wheel of a small pickup truck, the rear end of which is jutting out over a cliff. A man stands at the driver’s window (her husband?). The caption reads: “You’ll have to get behind me and push.” 

The cartoonist - like the writer of this week’s gospel text - knows that the edge of a hill or mountain is a great place for drama (or comedy) and sometimes life and death situations. Our gospel concludes with Jesus at the precipice, with an angry crowd ready "to hurl him off headlong". What a great spot to intensify our focus as readers, a vantage point where our sight is readily engaged and tested. What’s going on here?

The climax of this week’s gospel signals that the citizens of a town built on a hill have ironically and disastrously lost their vision - and remember, this is Jesus’s hometown. Here Jesus, like Jeremiah, becomes a prophet, when, in the words of the Carmelite theologian Constance Fitzgerald, he becomes willing to stand on the horizon so that all can see the future, God’s future, different from the one we construct from our own limited capacities. In opposing Jesus, his listeners, like those of Jeremiah, are placing themselves in violent opposition to God's future.  

In his brilliant poem on love, St. Paul too is presenting us with a vision beyond our partial and hazy view. Here, in the words of N.T. Wright, “love is not just a duty; it is the present virtue in which believers anticipate, and practice, the life of the age to come.” Our willingness to enter the age to come, that is, to love, might well depend on our willingness to see as Jesus sees.  

Gratefully,

Fr. Dan ofm, Pastor