Sunday, August 8, 2021
You’ve all heard the saying from Geoffrey Chaucer, “Familiarity breeds contempt.” Isn’t it true? Why is that? Consider what happens when you meet an attractive person for the first time. Perhaps you’re drawn to them. You look at them more closely—their intelligence, their style, their values. The attraction remains. The longer you’re with them, the more familiar they become to you. The features that you once found so appealing begin to feel ordinary. That’s what we mean when we say that we take things “for granted.” Special things become ordinary. They fade into the background. In time, they become like wallpaper. Can you see what’s coming next? Once that which was special ceases to be special, what’s left to focus on but the discordant and ugly? Those are the things our consciousness starts to focus on when the harmonious and beautiful has faded into the background. When you become too familiar with somebody or something, what is left to see are only their flaws. The attraction dissolves.
In today’s gospel, the people who sought out Jesus and followed him like sheep without a shepherd—the same people whom he just fed with the five barley loaves and two dried fish—have turned on him, grumbling about his teaching. Up until this point in his gospel, Saint John has called these followers “the crowd.” Now, and from this point on, John calls them “the Jews,” not because of any antisemitism on his part, but because those were the people who grumbled, just as the Jews in the wilderness grumbled against God and against Moses because they had no bread to eat.
Jesus taught in parables—mystical sayings that required the listener to take them to heart, to go away and ponder them, to dig deeply into them to discover their meaning. The people whom John called “the Jews”—that is, those who had become Jesus’s opponents—declined to do the work. They allowed their familiarity with Jesus to become contempt. It got in the way of their understanding. They took Jesus and his teaching for granted because they thought he was familiar to them.
It’s way too easy, knowing what we know, to criticize “the Jews.” We need to be very careful about how we criticize others before we examine our own attitudes. The world is full of so-called “Christians”—the crowds who profess to be Jesus’s followers. Yet, when it comes to listening to the Father, “the Christians,” like “the Jews” of Jesus’s time, have fallen into the familiarity trap. “The Christians” are familiar with prayer and meditation, they’re familiar with the Scriptures, they know the church teachings and attend the liturgies. They even receive the sacraments regularly. They’re so familiar with their religion that these things no longer speak to them out of the mystical depths of their being. They no longer hear the call to delve deeply into the mystery of faith. Their creed is, “I’ve got this.”
But, in today’s gospel, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” Know-it-alls can’t learn anything. What does it take to “listen to the Father”? To hear the voice of God anew requires, first of all that we set aside our blasé familiarity and recapture some of the childlike wonder we felt when we first listened. It means recommitting to our prayer and meditation. It means taking familiar Scripture passages and asking again, “What does this really mean?” It means taking the articles of faith we learned as kids and asking, “Where did this come from and what is it trying to express?” It means allowing the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and movements of our liturgy to rekindle in us the awe they once held and inviting it to speak to our hearts as it once did. It means re-immersing ourselves in the mystery of the Eucharist where the ordinary becomes extraordinary, death becomes life, and bread and wine become transparent to the God within.
Saint Paul, in today’s second reading, warns us about being numbered among “the Christians” who grumble in hostility to the message of Christ. He says, “Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.” It is, after all, the Holy Spirit that empowers us to listen to the Father and to experience our faith with new eyes and hearts. When familiarity with God breeds contempt, we grieve the Holy Spirit. Those who do—“the Christians”—show the depth of their contempt in their actions: “bitterness, fury, anger, shouting and reviling…[and] malice.” Paul says recognize them, but do not be like them. Those awakened to the Spirit show kindness, compassion, and forgiveness.
We do not condemn “the Christians” any more than Jesus condemned “the Jews.” To condemn them would be to become one of them. Instead, we can practice a daily metanoia—a change of heart. Here’s how I do it. I have a very simple prayer that I use to start and end my day, and I use it throughout the day when I think of it. It goes like this: “God, grant me knowledge of your will for me today and the power to carry that out.” It is my prayer that I might allow the voice of the Father to pierce through the fog of familiarity that shrouds my mind and heart so that I might hear that voice anew in my prayer and meditation, in the Scriptures, in our shared beliefs, in this liturgy and, most of all, in the Eucharist. Listen to the voice of the Father, hear the voice of the Son. Jesus has promised us, and will not renege: ”I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live…forever.”