GET THE PICTURE?

I may have mentioned before that I’m not exactly the greatest early-morning person in the world. I fall down pretty badly in terms of becoming “healthy, wealthy and wise”. It’s all really to do with the sprite, possibly even the tooth fairy, who comes during the night and sticks some velcro on the side of my face, so that it is very difficult to separate it from my pillow in the morning. (I can’t think of a better story at the moment. I don’t think it would have worked if I’d arrived late to school long ago, unlike the boy from the poor Irish family who explained to the teacher that the reason why he was late was that he was the youngest in the family and so had to wait until last to use their only spoon to eat his porridge!)

But this is a special week-end, and so I decided I should make a special effort. Today, Saturday, we are having the celebration of First Reconciliation for our First Communion class, and so I felt I needed to be fit in mind and body to take on board the burden of sin that would come my way later in the day. In fact, it was such a lovely morning I thought it would be a good idea to take a brisk walk on the Champs. Thanks possibly to the cold, the place was practically deserted, and most of those who were there were suicidally standing in the middle of the street, taking photos of the Arc.

One particular ‘photographer’ caught my eye. Her parents, presumably, were standing on top of a bench, and she was taking their photo, with the Arc in the background. Nothing remarkable there, you may say, except that she can’t have been more than about 5 years old. I thought, how things have changed! It brought me back to my own youth and the Brownie box camera we had. It took for ever to load the film into it, and probably two or three shots were wasted before one could get the film to catch properly on the cogs.

Then, in order to take a picture, one had to hold it somewhere down around one’s knees in order to be able to look straight down on the viewfinder, and even then if one didn’t have the angle exactly right all one saw was a splodge of grey. And if the film wasn’t all used on the one day, it might lie in the camera for months, and by the time one got it developed you’d forgotten what was on it, and even then you mightn’t find out, the success rate was so low, with decapitation a constant risk! The ‘good old days’?

It wouldn’t be too fanciful to say that today’s Gospel is a kind of snapshot of the Lord’s ministry. It begins with him explaining the real meaning of the scriptures, and meeting with ‘the approval of all’. But as soon as it got personal, as soon as He made clear that He wasn’t there to have His preaching admired, but to bring about change in people’s lives, He suddenly became ‘that upstart Jesus from down the road – getting too big for his boots’. They totally missed the irony that by trying to kill Him they were verifying the words that enraged them so – “no prophet is ever accepted in his own country”!

And the fact that He slipped away from the mob this time, highlights the voluntary nature of His eventual dying on the cross out of love for us. We come to church, not to admire that love, but to be challenged by it, and to allow it to be the guiding principle in our lives.