Familiarity breeds…well, sometimes blindness. We do need familiarity—we couldn’t be working things out for the first time all of the time. What is regular and known can help us get on with the day or the job or the relationship. But there are times—we all have them—when sheer familiarity impedes our understanding and prevents our encounter with the new, the different and the radical.

Our case is, perhaps, the diametric opposite of that of the people of Nazareth. Our too comfortable faith familiarity with Jesus can hinder us from seeing the radical, the new, the disturbing. Sometimes a bit of defamiliarisation would be good for us!!

Prayer

Lord, take away dull familiarity and shake us up that we may ask ourselves honestly, “Who then is this?” Amen.

K O’Mahony OSA