Chapter 6 of Mark's Gospel highlights the rejection of Jesus by the inhabitants of Nazareth.
The Lord is amazed at the unbelief found in his homeland and the contempt reserved for him, so much so that he could not perform any miracles there.
Like Jesus, so is his disciple. Following in Christ's footsteps, Francis of Assisi also wished that the people of his time had been builders and choristers of other dreams. But in his life he met (and with him his friars) men in whom the inability to recognise the figure of the divine in the human often dwells.
A hardness that goes hand in hand with that contempt for the prophetic and that tends to nullify what is revolutionary in the spirit of the Poor Man: the happy intuition of the valorisation of the person.
We find in the authoritative Sources:
"If Guido [a benefactor] treated them with such regard, others instead covered them with contempt. People of high and lowly status mocked and maligned them, even to the point of stripping them of their miserable garments.
The servants of God remained naked because, according to the evangelical ideal, they wore nothing but that one piece of clothing, and moreover they did not demand the return of what was taken from them [...].
Some threw mud on them; others put dice in their hands, inviting them to play; still others, grabbing them from behind by the hood, dragged them on their backs.
These and other such wickednesses were inflicted on them, because they were thought to be such mean beings, that they could be scrambled at will.
Together with hunger and thirst, with cold and nakedness, they endured tribulations and sufferings of all kinds.
But they bore everything with imperturbable patience, according to the admonition of Francis" (FF 1444).
«No prophet is despised except in his own country and among his own kin and household» (Mk 6:4)
Wednesday 4th wk. in O.T. (Mk 6,1-6)
