March 24, 2025 - Monday of the Third Week of Lent

Artist Sister Mary of the Compassion, OP (1908-1977)

The first time I returned home from California after having had a spiritual experience that took me by surprise and told my parents that I felt called to vow the Evangelical Counsels of poverty, chastity, and obedience in order to live as close a life of perfect charity as I could for God and neighbor, they were not amused. It was a far cry from anything they'd ever heard me say. They interrogated me for hours. Rather unwittingly, I was prefacing all my responses with “God is calling me…” They thought I was out of my mind. It got to the point where the phone would ring and my dad would ridicule, “Thomas! You better get that… it must be God calling!” 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus is kicked out of his hometown synagogue by the people who helped raise him in the Jewish faith because they resent Him for telling them that He cannot perform the same miracles for them that they heard He performed for strangers in other cities. Seeing into their hearts, Jesus understands that those who have “known” Him from the outside since his youth expect miracles from him, not as the Son of God, but as a native son who owes them a debt of gratitude in the natural hierarchy of filial obedience to one’s progenitors. So, he proclaims their verdict from God: “Amen I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his native place” (Lk 4:24).  

A pro-phet is literally an intercessor – someone called and anointed with a charism for the salvation of others to “speak for” God to His people and to “speak for” His people to God. He or she does nothing on their own but is ordered to do God’s will for the person standing in front of them based on their relationship of dependence on God by faith. 

Perhaps you’ve heard of the “rockstar missionary” phenomenon – the faith-filled response some American evangelists get on volunteer service trips to foreign lands. Or you’ve heard that bishops rarely place seminarians and newly ordained priests in parishes where they grew up, because it often gives rise to pastoral complications and the appearance of conflicts of interest. When God seems distant to us, it is always easier to accept that a mysterious stranger from an exotic land could be a representative of God than it is for us to re-frame our perspective for someone we’ve known all our lives – someone who claims to have undergone a conversion experience, but their familiarity breeds contempt when they insist on relating to us on different terms.   

Can you drink this cup with Jesus? A person’s gifts and talents can be overlooked by those close to them. As you seek to deepen your relationship with God this Lent and become a more faithful representative of His love to those whom you love most, have you considered that you might not be the best messenger of the Gospel God could send into their lives? Arranging for loved ones to speak with “strangers” about their lapsed faith and spiritual problems will often let “fresh water” into the stagnant flow of your family relations and make greater headway with reawakening their faith to God’s faithfully unchanging love for them. Truth be told, this is one of the mysteriously counterintuitive ways God honors the importance of our personal faith response and connects families to the wider human family of God as He gathers His people together. 

May your unfailing compassion, O Lord, cleanse and protect your Church, and, since without you she cannot stand secure, may she be always governed by your grace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. (Roman Missal)

Thomas Pluhar, Seminarian, Diocese of Metuchen

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