Perception and Prophets

From today's Gospel: Luke 4:21 - 30

Then Jesus began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen’. And he won the approval of all, and they were astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips They said, ‘This is Joseph’s son, surely?’
But he replied, ‘No doubt you will quote me the saying, “Physician, heal yourself” and tell me, “We have heard all that happened in Capernaum, do the same here in your own countryside”’. And he went on, ‘I tell you solemnly, no prophet is ever accepted in his own country.

‘There were many widows in Israel, I can assure you, in Elijah’s day, when heaven remained shut for three years and six months and a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to any one of these: he was sent to a widow at Zarephath, a Sidonian town. And in the prophet Elisha’s time there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these was cured, except the Syrian, Naaman.’

When they heard this everyone in the synagogue was enraged. They sprang to their feet and hustled him out of the town; and they took him up to the brow of the hill their town was built on, intending to throw him down the cliff, but he slipped through the crowd and walked away.

They say familiarity breeds contempt. Jesus was pointing out that it would be as difficult for his townpeople to believe in him as it was for the people in Elisha's town. when God moves through a person it is not always God who is seen in the action. Much of spirituality is about seeing God in the action of the world around us, or his nemisis. We must be aware the that we battle agains principalities and powers in the spititual realm everyday, and what you pervceive and what is the case may be two different thing.

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