And they would not accept him. Homily for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.

Today’s gospel shows that the greatest enemy to faith can simply be “familiarity”: a refusal to believe that God’s presence - and prophetic agents of that presence - could come to us in so familiar a form as the person next door. The people of Nazareth had their own fixed ideas as to when and where and how the Messiah should come to Israel - and the one they knew as the carpenter, Mary’s son, simply did not fill the bill.