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The villagers recognize that Jesus has both wisdom and miraculous powers, but their problem seems to be that they need to understand the origin of these special qualities, need to discover his credentials just as the Pharisees do, and all the more so because they think that they already know and understand what it is that he is about. Because of our faith and the lives that we have lead in the faith we also tend to think that we have "gotten" what it is that Jesus is trying to say. We have not done so and never will do so fully, but that is what the joy of heaven will be, our listening to the Lord sharing all the care he has taken of us and our responding to that love. For the time being, we need to abandon ourselves to the Lord in faith, not waiting on our inadequate and slow intelligence to give its assent: it will never be sufficiently satisfied, in this world or the next, and any god that I could understand would not really be God. We have the intelligence to understand God in our childish way, but that cannot be a precondition for our belief in Him; it would not be a matter of trusting the person of the Lord and his personal call to each of us, the individual history he is creating with each of us. Jesus asks us to respond to Him as a person, our Shepherd and our Way, not to a rational proof, and the only way that we can do that is through regular and personal prayer. |