And He Passed By

When the Heart Is Too Small to Recognize the Humility of God

“Is not this the carpenter’s son?”

— Matthew 13:55

There is a terrible sorrow hidden in this Gospel.

God comes home, and they cannot receive Him.

Not because He has concealed Himself entirely. They hear the wisdom. They see enough of the works to be astonished. Something has broken into their familiar world that cannot easily be explained.

But then they look at Him.

Is not this the carpenter’s son?

They know His mother. They know His relatives. They know the village from which He came. They know too much about Him, or rather, they think they do.

And this becomes the obstacle.

The tragedy is not that God remained hidden from them.

The tragedy is that God stood before them in precisely the form in which He desired to be known, and they despised the form.

This is one of the great warnings of the desert.

The heart that has become small cannot recognize greatness when greatness comes clothed in humility.

We imagine that a small heart is merely one that does not love enough. But the Fathers understood something more frightening. A small heart gradually becomes incapable of seeing. Pride narrows perception. Familiarity dulls wonder. Judgment places everything into categories until nothing remains capable of surprising us.

We know who this person is.

We know where he came from.

We know his history.

We know what sort of people belong to his family.

We know what God should look like.

And so God passes by.

The people of Nazareth were not scandalized because Christ lacked glory.

They were scandalized because His glory had taken the form of littleness.

The hands that had fashioned the heavens had learned to handle wood.

The One whom the angels worshipped had lived quietly among neighbors who remembered Him as a child.

The Wisdom through whom all things were made stood in their synagogue without entourage, without worldly distinction, without anything that would compel the human ego to bow.

And they could not bear the nearness of such a God.

We often imagine that if God revealed Himself more clearly, faith would become easier. Yet the Gospel continually suggests otherwise.

God reveals Himself, and we object to the manner of His appearing.

He comes as an infant.

He comes from Nazareth.

He sits beside sinners.

He touches lepers.

He washes feet.

He remains silent before accusation.

Finally, He hangs naked upon a Cross.

At every point the human heart is given the opportunity either to expand or to take offense.

The elders of our own time speak constantly of acquiring a humble heart because only humility can recognize humility.

The proud heart looks for spectacle.

The purified heart recognizes presence.

The proud heart asks for credentials.

The purified heart senses grace.

The proud heart says, I know what this is.

The purified heart whispers, God may be here.

This is why the desert Fathers were so fierce about judgment. To judge another human being was not merely a moral failure. It was a catastrophe of perception. The moment I reduce another person to what I think I know about him, I become incapable of receiving what God may be giving me through him.

I have made the world smaller.

And eventually I may make it so small that there is no room for God Himself.

Perhaps this is why the Gospel says something so devastatingly simple:

“He did not do many mighty works there.”

Not because divine love had diminished.

Not because Christ ceased to desire their healing.

But because love does not violate the human heart.

He came bearing everything.

They could receive almost nothing.

And so He passed through His own country carrying within Himself healings that would never be received, words that would never penetrate, mercies that would remain unopened.

There is sorrow in this.

We speak often about our longing for God. Perhaps we speak less frequently about God’s longing for us.

Christ desired to give Himself to Nazareth.

He desired their faith, not because He needed their admiration, but because faith would have opened them to communion. Their unbelief wounded nothing in His divinity. It impoverished them.

Love stood before them.

They called Him the carpenter’s son.

And Love continued on His way.

I wonder how often this happens in our own lives.

We wait for God in the extraordinary while He approaches beneath the appearance of something painfully ordinary.

The aging parent.

The difficult brother.

The person whose weakness irritates us.

The interruption we did not want.

The work beneath our dignity.

The hidden life no one notices.

The prayer in which nothing seems to happen.

The day that looks exactly like yesterday.

Is this all?

Perhaps that question has caused us to miss more visitations of God than we will ever know.

The desert teaches us another way.

Become small enough to see.

Become poor enough to wonder.

Become silent enough that the familiar can become mysterious again.

Do not decide beforehand how God must come to you.

And above all, do not despise the humble form.

For the entire mystery of Christ is hidden there.

The Infinite makes Himself small.

The Almighty refuses coercion.

The Creator stands before His creatures and permits Himself to be overlooked.

This is the terrifying gentleness of God.

He will knock.

He will wait.

He will speak.

He will even allow Himself to be mistaken for merely the carpenter’s son.

But He will not force the door.

And there may be no greater sorrow than discovering one day that the Love for which we spent our lives searching had come very near - -

near enough to touch,

near enough to hear,

near enough to receive - -

and our hearts had become too small to recognize Him.

Lord Jesus Christ,

save us from the contempt born of familiarity.

Break open the narrow chambers of our hearts.

Give us eyes capable of recognizing majesty clothed in littleness.

And when You come to us without splendor, without explanation, hidden beneath the ordinary and the humble,

do not let us take offense.

Let us bow.

For it is You.