Dear Friends,
 
In our gospel today, Matthew wrote, “The people in the synagogue were astonished, they said ‘Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son?’”
 
The place most difficult for anyone to give up and move away from is one’s own mindset—the stronghold of one’s beliefs and opinions, impressions, prejudices, and biases.
 
That is why the Greek word for “conversion” is Metanoia, which literally means “beyond the mind.“
 
Opening oneself to God involves moving out of one’s stubborn mindset to make room for an inconceivable and undefinable mystery.
 
In our gospel today, Jesus‘s new revelation of Himself, as a man of wisdom and mighty deeds, is met by His own townspeople‘s blind presumption that they know Him and His family background, and that He cannot be other than what they have known Him to be.
 
This episode could’ve been an occasion for Metanoia for the Nazarenes, but they refuse the opportunity and lost it. They rejected Jesus, just as the people of Judah rejected the prophet Jeremiah in the first reading.
 
I remember a line in a movie many years ago that says, “Lord, turn the hearts of the stubborn people, but if you cannot turn their hearts turn their ankles instead so that we will know by their limping.” Well, let’s not ask that.
 
Instead, let’s ask the Lord to give us the grace for us to move out from our stubborn mindset and close-mindedness and through His mercy, we can be converted into better disciples.
 
 In Christ,
 Fr. Gregg