Next to Jesus, Mary is the most central person for the faith life of many Christians, and it is only fitting that the church remembers her birthday.

People even see reasons why God should not temper justice with mercy. But following Jesus’ example we should “Just Do It.”

For Jesus, there was nothing wrong in satisfying one’s hunger on the Sabbath day, especially for ordinary people like his disciples who lived a simple lifestyle. After defending his friends, he declares himself to be “Lord of the Sabbath”. Sunday is our Christian Sabbath, and on it any work which serves human needs is allowed.

The Pharisees could not recognise the mysterious divine power in the words and actions of Jesus. They wanted to keep religion under strict control, and were not open to the God of surprises. Trying to put the Gospel message into a new rulebook would be like patching a new garment with old material, or pouring new wine into old wineskins. What Jesus brought was something living and new. To receive it, one must be willing to be surprised by grace.

Most of us will have tasted the experience of failure in one shape or form. We may have failed to live up to the values and the goals that we had set ourselves; some enterprise or some initiative that we had invested in may have come to nothing; some relationship that was important to us may have slipped away from us. All such experiences can leave us feeling disheartened. Such a move from failure to success is told in the gospel. We can hear Peter’s discouragement when he mutters, ‘we worked all night and caught nothing.’ Then after the miraculous haul of fish he shouts out, ‘leave me, Lord; I am a sinful man.’ Their initial failure does not have the last word. Jesus changed their fruitless labour into a marvellous catch; and he draws the reluctant Peter into his own work of gathering people into God’s kingdom.”

Even Paul’s converts did not have any shortcut to heaven but often seemed to lose sight of their Christian identity. Paul reminds them that every church leader was God’s co-worker and that the church is nobody’s private property, or rather, “you are God’s garden.”

Even if we stubbornly cling to what is familiar, there is still hope. Just as he did for the troubled man in Capernaum, God can come into our lives to drive out whatever anxiety or fear is holding us back. Like the people in that synagogue, we listen spellbound to Jesus, for his words have the divine ring of truth. Let him speak to our heart and pour freshness into the dark reserves of our unconscious. If we feel our need, we can ask him to set us free from any addiction or compulsion that may ail us. It is through our closeness to Jesus that we can develop our full potential.

When he read from the scroll of Isaiah and then sat down to comment on the reading, Jesus indentified himself with two famous prophets, Elijah and Elisha. Oddly, stating this broad scope for his mission made the villagers of Nazareth angry. Since he was one of their own they expected to get special treatment from him. But Jesus has come for all. His aims have not changed. If he has any favourites it is those who are most needy in body, mind, or spirit. He still reaches out to those who need him. All he asks is that we receive him on his own terms, which the Nazareth villagers could not do. The Lord is always close to all of us; it is our need, our suffering, whatever form it takes, which can bring us close to him.

Jesus spoke of John as a “burning and shining lamp.” John the Baptist is a great inspiration to us to allow the light of our faith to shine, the light of the gospel, even when it is not popular or convenient to do so. Our calling is to allow the light we have received in baptism to shine brightly, in season and out of season. In his first encyclical, “Light of Faith,” Pope Francis declares, “there is an urgent need to see once again that faith is a light, for once the flame of faith dies out, all other lights begin to dim. A light this powerful cannot come from ourselves but from a more primordial source: in a word, it must come from God.”

When the Lord calls us to be his followers, it is always for the long haul; he looks to us to keep our light burning right to the very end, through the good times and the bad times. Earlier in Matthew’s gospel Jesus had addressed his disciples as the light of the world and called on them to let their light shine so that people might see their good works and give glory to God for them. Keeping our lamps burning, letting our light shine to the end, amounts to doing the good works the Lord calls on us to do, for as long as we are able to do them.

TThe Lord lives in constant awareness of us; we are called to live in constant awareness of him. We find it difficult to be aware of the Lord all the time, because so many other things fill our minds and hearts. Yet, that is what the Lord asks of us. We are to attend to, be aware of, his constant presence to us. This is what might be termed the contemplative attitude. There is a sense in which we are all called to become contemplatives — with a small c.

The “heart” is the seat of the emotions, the intellect and the will. What matters to God is the heart, how we feel, how we think, how and what we desire. We are to bring our feeling, our thoughts, our desires into line with how God feels, how God thinks, what God desires for us. Our hearts are to reflect, in some way, God’s heart, which means Jesus’ heart. As Jesus says elsewhere in Matthew’s gospel, “Learn from me for I am gentle and humble in heart.” It is the Holy Spirit who comes to us from God and the risen Lord who can mould our hearts into images of the Lord’s heart. We pray today that this work of the Spirit will be brought to completion in us.

We can all be prone to getting worked up about minor matters while not attending sufficiently to what really important. On this occasion, Jesus lists what is important as justice, mercy and faith. Justice and mercy concern our relationship with our neighbour; faith concerns our relationship with God. Jesus is saying, what really matters is getting those two relationships right; everything else is secondary. St Paul says something very similar in one of his letters:”the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love.” We pray that this may always be our priority.”

It takes generosity of heart and spirit to recognise when we have got it wrong, and recognise that our opinion of some person or place was based on our prejudices rather than on reality. Nathanael’s honesty and generosity of heart can be an inspiration to us on this his feast day. The final word of the Gospel, however, is given to Jesus, not to Nathanael. It takes the form of that wonderful promise Jesus makes to him: “You will see greater things! You will see heaven laid open and, above the Son of Man, the angels of God ascending and descending.”