ISN’T  HE  THE  CARPENTER?

INTRODUCTION

The title of my homily for this 14 Sunday in Ordinary Time [B] is, “Isn’t He The Carpenter?”

That’s a question in today’s gospel. It’s worded a tiny bit differently in the text we used today: “Is he not the carpenter?” I prefer the conversational sound of, “Isn’t he the carpenter?”

The scene in today’s gospel is one we all know: coming back home. So Jesus comes back home. Don’t we all from time to time?

While there, the Sabbath day arrives. So Jesus goes to the local synagogue and begins to teach.  I assume his mother was with him. Was Joseph still alive? Here was a native son! The village was watching.

Surprise - he’s an outstanding teacher. They are amazed and astonished.

Then they do something that happens many times. They don’t accept him. They reject him. After all when he was here, he was just a carpenter.

Was the reason for the rejection jealousy?  Or was it the content of his talk?  Was the down deep reason: they didn’t want to change the changes inside themselves that Jesus called to be changed? Dying to self is difficult. 

So they try to put him down with the comment, “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?”

Literalists like to use that to say Jesus wasn’t an only child. They won’t accept this was common village language in the Mediterranean Basin. Hey brothers and sisters, we’re all brothers and sisters.

And Jesus knowing the Jewish history of prophets like Ezekiel whom we heard in today’s first reading, said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.”

So once more he leaves his home town of Nazareth and heads elsewhere.

WHAT WAS IT LIKE?

What was it like for you when you came home the first time - like after that first semester in college or the military or what or where have you?

What was it like for you to come home for the first time - after your marriage - or with kids?  How did your mom and dad and family accept your style - your way of raising your children?

What was it like for you when your kids came home for the first time or some significant time - after they left home?

What was it like to meet old classmates, old friends, if you ever attended a class reunion?

What was it like to go back home again?

THOMAS WOLFE

Reflecting on this I remembered the classic book by Thomas Wolfe about all this.  He had a few books published before he died at the age of 37 in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins  - never recovering from an operation to save him from miliary tuberculosis of the brain.  

After Wolfe’s death, Edward Aswell of Harper and Row edited and pulled together a 700 page plus autobiographical novel - of something Thomas Wolfe was working on and the book was published as, “You Can’t Go Home Again.”

In it he talks about an imaginary small home town and the main character comes home and finds it suffocating.

As I thought about all this, that’s one more classic I have to put on my “To Be Read Bucket List” before I kick the bucket.

ISN’T HE THE CARPENTER?

The title of my homily is, “Isn’t He the Carpenter?”

What Jesus does is walk into people’s lives.

On the Sabbath he walks into the synagogue of our minds and challenges us in the gospel readings.

Do we do what the folks in his home town in today’s gospel do?  “Great stuff Jesus, but we've heard it all before. We’re Christians. We’re used to you, Jesus." And so we walk  away without him or vice versa.

Or are we like those folks in the other towns who accepted him and whose lives have changed?

That’s the great life choice that is at the heart of the gospels. It’s the key message of this homily. The Gospel of John in it’s prologue puts it very clearly.

“He was in the world,

and the world came to be through him.
He came to what was his own,

but his own people did not accept him.

But to those who did accept him.
But to those who did accept him

he gave power 
to become children of God,

to those who believe in his name….” [John 1:10-12]

Jesus is a carpenter.  That’s what hit me when I read today’s gospel. I thought the text said, “Isn’t he Joseph’s son?” Nope - that’s in another take on this story [Cf. Matthew 13:55].  Mark says Jesus was a carpenter.

CONSTRUCTION - DECONSTRUCTION - RECONSTRUCTION

I was talking to someone the other day and he used the words deconstruction and reconstruction - abut his life.

I’ve often noticed the phrase “deconstruction” when reading philosophers like Jacques Derrida. I get a bit of what he’s saying - and then again at other times - I don’t get what he’s talking about. [1]

So when I read that word carpenter in today’s gospel, I thought that maybe deconstruction  is  very, very simple.

We build our house - our lives - with how to do life - learning  from our families, our education, our church, our friendships, our decisions.

Then we hit a stage where some of us say, “Something’s wrong!” or “Something’s missing. I’m dissatisfied.” 

Sometimes this happens dramatically from a broken relationship, a divorce, alcoholism, the loss of a job, a death, what have you. We admit: our house, our life is a disaster.

Second stage: deconstruction. We have to knock it all down or get a bulldozer and then remove all the debris. We stand there and look  the structure and skeleton - the content and the stuff of our life.

Third stage: reconstruction.

Here is where Jesus shows up on our street as a carpenter and says, “Need any help! I’m Jesus the carpenter!”

BACK TO THOMAS WOLFE

I could end here, but as I was looking at some quotes from Thomas Wolfe’s book, You Can’t Go Home Again, I thought two of them might be relevant here.

The first step is to go back home in your mind and look at your home - look at your life - look at where you have come from and where you are right now.

It might be like the feeling these folks out west in Colorado and elsewhere have when they come home to their house. It’s destroyed and burnt to the ground. Talk about destruction. What next?

Thomas Wolfe in his book, You Can’t Go Home Again,  asks the question this way. He asks the question about what changes and what doesn’t change in one’s life.

Yes some things can be burnt or destroyed or fall apart - but there are some things that don’t change.


That would be another key question to ponder this week: what changes in life and what remains in life?

This was triggered when I found a very well written passage that begins on page 40 of the Signet Edition of Thomas Wolfe's, You Can't Go Home Again (1940). It goes like this: “Some things will never change. Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth and listen.

“The voice of forest water in the night, a woman's laughter in the dark, the clean, hard rattle of raked gravel, the cricketing stitch of midday in hot meadows, the delicate web of children's voices in bright air--these things will never change.

“The glitter of sunlight on roughened water, the glory of the stars, the innocence of morning, the smell of the sea in harbors, the feathery blur and smoky buddings of young boughs, and something there that comes and goes and never can be captured, the thorn of spring, the sharp and tongueless cry--these things will always be the same.

“All things belonging to the earth will never change--the leaf, the blade, the flower, the wind that cries and sleeps and wakes again, the trees whose stiff arms clash and tremble in the dark, and the dust of lovers long since buried in the earth--all things proceeding from the earth to seasons, all things that lapse and change and come again upon the earth--these things will always be the same, for they come up from the earth that never changes, they go back into the earth that lasts forever. Only the earth endures, but it endures forever.

“The tarantula, the adder, and the asp will also never change. Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, forever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April.”

CONCLUSION

Jesus Christ the Risen One is forever Rising - forever here. That is our belief. He was crucified - died - was buried - destroyed like a house in a fire or an earthquake or the World Trade Center Towers - but our belief, part of our life Credo is that he rose again.

We believe Jesus the Carpenter is here today. As Paul tells us in today’s second reading, “My grace is sufficient for you…”

As someone says in Thomas Wolfe’s book, You Can’t Go Home Again, “I have to see a thing a thousand times before I see it once.”

How many times do we have to come to Mass till we realize Jesus the Carpenter is right here, right now, ready to help us reconstruct and raise the rest of our lives. Amen.

Notes


[1]  Jacques Derrida, A Derrida Reader, edited by Peggy Kumaf, [New York: Columbia University Press, 1991].