Too often, our prejudgments of other people put a limitation on them
Without really realizing it, our minds and hearts automatically characterize and categorize everything we see and hear. From early on in life, we learn how to group things together and distinguish familiar faces from the unfamiliar. This helps us to bring order out of the chaos that is our early life. Being bombarded by so many sensory experiences, we need some way of understanding what we encounter.
It is a gift to be able to do this, but it can also become a curse. None of us likes to be judged by the color of our skin or the language we use. We don’t appreciate that people make judgments about us because they hear that we’re Catholic or that we’re American. We have to admit that we unconsciously do this with other people, even though we don’t like it done to us.
In the Scriptures for the 14th Sunday in Ordinary Time, we are given two situations in which the prejudgment of other people put a limitation on that person.
When people begin to experience Jesus and His healings and teachings, they can’t fit the power of His influence with where He is from. They know that He comes from humble beginnings and is the son of a carpenter, but being miraculous and powerful and teaching doesn’t seem to fit for most people. The town He comes from isn’t a power center at that time, so they wonder about Him. Some people try to get Jesus to stay in the proverbial places where He belongs and not venture out into areas where He is forbidden. Jesus is labeled as a coward, a drunkard and a blasphemer. These are all judgments made against Him because He is doing or saying things that don’t seem to fit into the categories that He is supposed to belong to.
The Gospel passage might be a good source of meditation for us about our own conscious and unconscious categorizing of others. How are we limiting how God connects through others by the way that we judge them? What gifts from God are we missing out on because we believe that God works only through certain groups of people?
We might also take heart from the prophet Ezekiel, who is sent by God into a group of people who are not friendly. He has a fear of the unfamiliar, and he wonders if his teaching and prophecy will be accepted. In our own call to be a disciple of Jesus, have we ever felt like we’re being called to do or say something that is making us afraid? Is our fear based on our sense of where we belong and who we don’t belong to? Do we allow God to guide us and what we are to say or do, or do we let fear control us?
Through the different stages of our lives, we are called by God to move, grow and change. Most of us, because we live such comfortable lives, would rather stay in the situation we’re in. We’re comfortable with the people who surround us, and only in crisis do we open ourselves to change and growth. That usually happens because it’s painful or uncomfortable in our current existence.
Listen to the voice of God as He calls us into new situations, speaking different words and mixing with people who might not be exactly like us. Pray for the courage to go where He asks us to go and to be with the people He asks us to be with. I pray that we receive and listen to the prophets of our times, and are willing to speak the prophetic words that God gives us to speak.
Father Donald Wester is pastor of All Saints Parish in St. Peters.
