I have a friend, who in his third year of high school, got caught stealing a package of cigarettes in his neighborhood drugstore. The owner banished him for ever from the store.

Fourteen years later, the week after his ordination as a Jesuit priest, his mother asked him to go to the same drugstore to get her something. He walked in and the older owner shouted, “I told you never again to come in here!” So he left with a big smile and went to a more welcoming place.

In today’s Gospel for this First-Friday Eucharistic liturgy, Jesus is not only returning to His home town, but is teaching to His old neighbors in their Synogogue. These faithful Jews question among themselves about his wisdom and power. They think they know Him, because they knew His parents and extended family. He had been urging the, by His words, to a more faith-based, more personally relationship with the God of their ancient faith. They resisted Him and His words, because they clung. His life-giving Word-Seeds fell on hard soil and so He moved on where there might be a more welcoming growing area.

Jesus did not need popular-acceptance. He was advancing in holy self-acceptance and so came and went. He was growing in the awareness of Who He was. He did not need any validation for His growing into. It would be attractive and easy for me to fill out this Reflection by writing about our need to grow in self-acceptance, so I won’t.

I write just a closing thought about living with memories of what we thought in the past which have frozen into the comfortable concrete. Memories can form images and we grow holding them tightly against the intrusion of the new, different and so uncomfortable.

Now here’s the punchline. What Jesus really came to do was to change the ideas of God! Imagine that! Once a relationship is concretely comfortable, it is dying and probably dead.        So, if we are unmovable and relaxed with our image of Jesus and or the unknowable God, that Jesus and His Father are moving on to more receptive soil.