January 23, 2022 (Third Sunday in Ordinary Time)

by Fr. Bob Glynn, S.J.

[This text is an edited version of an automatically generated transcript.]

At the height of the pandemic—I don’t think we’re at the height of it right now—but at what I thought was the height of it, when we had closed the university, and I was still doing, you know, my ministry from home remotely and I put together sort of a, a routine for myself because otherwise I feared what I might do with the day. So I had a very nice pair of headphones and I would go out and do spiritual direction by phone as I wandered merrily through the hills of Los Altos. And so I did spiritual direction, then, you know, I tended to just keep walking. So I would do my prayer during that time, and then believe it or not, there might have been some time left over. So I made good use of Amazon Kindle. And during those happy months, I read War and Peace, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, every Victorian novel you could imagine, anything that was free on Kindle, and I have come to discover one thing: the longer the book is, is more likely to be free. People don’t seem to be snapping up those bargains when they charge for them.

So now this last month, I have gone through, believe it or not—sometimes I don’t believe it—many, many long books that were quite difficult and required concentration, particularly those Russian names were a bit tricky for me. So I thought okay, let’s get a break. Let’s have something fun. So, my source for books is The New York Times Book Review, because I want something at least that’s, you know, even if it’s fun, it’s well written. So I looked in and I thought, Oh, well, this one looks okay. It’s a mystery, called The Plot. Now I’m not going to tell you the whole thing, but I am going to give you the basic sense of it, and why I picked the book up. Well, I picked the book up because I was bored. Alright, but the book is about a writer and at the very beginning of his writing career, as quite a young man, he wrote a very fine book. And he tells us at the very beginning of the book that his first book was in the “New and Noteworthy” section of the New York Times Book Review. Now for those who perhaps don’t, don’t scan this on a regular basis, this is reasonably impressive without getting a full book review. And it sold the good number of copies. And then his second book was not quite so good, and it didn’t have quite such a good publisher, and it was not in the “New and Noteworthy” column, but it sold some books. And then kind of the next book was less so, and he ends up at a rinky dink college somewhere in rural Vermont, where he has to teach difficult students to do creative writing. And the the thing that happens at the beginning of this book is that he has a very, very unpleasant student who doesn’t really want to come to class, but tells him the idea of his own—that is, the student’s—book. And it’s a brilliant mystery, just brilliant. And this this writer teacher is just taken aback to think such an idiot could have such a great idea for a book. Well, his career gets worse and he gets laid off by this rinky dink college, and he’s trying to figure out what to do. And it’s about a year or so later, when he learns that the boy who was writing the book that was going to be such a massive hit, has died in an accident, and that the book was never published. So he gets the idea: “Well, it was just an idea of a book. He didn’t write the book.” So he proceeds to write the book and becomes a massive success, bigger than he ever could have imagined. I will leave the story there because otherwise I will ruin it.

But I have found through the whole book, while, I tell you, the mystery was quite good, I was never taken up with the mystery as much as I was with the idea of this guy writing a first book that was a success. And then the sense of failure after that, and that each thing became a reminder of the first success. And then in order to be a success, you can’t just be a one time success, you have to keep having success. Because if you just have one time success, they say, Oh, it was a fluke. Or it was a flash in the pan. Or you know the right people read it at the right time and whatever. And so his whole sense of himself as a writer and everything else depends on this book that he kind of stole from somebody else. And well, you know, you can see this in writing, but does it happen in anything else?

Well, I think it happens in everything else. Because if it didn’t happen in everything else, we wouldn’t sometimes dread getting up in the morning. Because, certainly, you know, I have the great opportunity to work at a university that’s so fine as Stanford, everybody is attempting or involved in or doing something brilliant. But everything that’s brilliant is only as brilliant as the next idea. Because my P.I. could have told me that was a magnificent project you just did so well. Here. Let’s work on this next idea. Now if the next idea doesn’t pan out, or the next idea is a failure, the remembrance of the previous greatness disappears. If I’m great in sports, and I come and I’m at Stanford, and I’m on some brilliant team, and we have a winning season, but the next season we’re mediocre, they’ll say she was on the team that was great once but then they kind of fell apart. Or I might have a fellowship or I might have a chair might have something and everyone is always expecting that the next thing has to be as good if not better than the previous thing I did. The pressure is immense. And the pressure is something of what we bring to our lives and the way we look at the world around us.

The Gospel reading today is quite a peculiar one. No, the passage is not peculiar about Jesus and the in the in the synagogue but what's peculiar is we start with the very beginning of Luke's Gospel for an unclear reason. And then we immediately have Jesus swept into Galilee, in the spirit. Now we have skipped the baptism of the Lord. And we have also skipped—because it won't come up till later in the church year—the temptation in the desert, because it's after the temptation that Jesus is swept into the heart of his ministry. And we know what that temptation was about in the desert. It was about the way that he was to proclaim the kingdom of God. It was about how he was to save the world. It was how his mission was to be and the temptation was always to wow them with this, thrill them with that, overwhelm them in this way. Do all these things, and they’ll be in the palm of your hand forever. When Jesus comes into the synagogue, it sounds for a moment as though he's going to give them what they want. It tells us that this is the beginning of the gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. And then it tells us that the good news is proclaimed to the poor, sight given to the blind, the broken made whole, a year of God's grace run wild in the world. Now, this indeed is the mission. This is it. This is the good news. And he tells them quite frankly, it is here. Now. God's unfathomable and unlimited love is present. In a way it has never been present in the world before and you are here to be present to it.

So this is good news. It is indeed. But what we see immediately after this is the flip side of the temptation earlier, because the story continues, I think for those of us who remember this story well, that Jesus... It is not the crowd that says, “Do that here for us.” He says to them, “You would say ‘Do here in Nazareth what we have heard you did in Capernaum.’” He introduces what he believes they want, which is they want the same good things. They want the success they want it done for them again and again and again. And Jesus realizes that they indeed are his temptations, that here in his hometown to come home and to wow them with the wonders of God, wouldn’t that be a great thing? But Jesus knows that the Father is not about wowing and making people keep living up to these one exciting thing after another that we level of one perfection to the next that he says instead, “No,” because a prophet is not welcome, because of what you would expect. Jesus is not giving into the temptation of being the Messiah they want of a hero who will perform that day after day. He will succeed. He will be the Father’s love every single day, without any effort to please anybody at all, except the Father. And because he has no vested interest, that love flows out of him, and causes terrible struggle for others, who want him to do what they want him to do. So that that success continues to be theirs. And the temptation then for them is selfishness and greed, rather than love, and the mission as its told again and again, is to proclaim good news. It is not to satisfy our greed, our selfishness and our desire for power. But to live in that love, which is the Father’s, that fixes only those who are broken in heart and only those who desire to be filled with God’s love.