"Familiarity breeds contempt." That was what Jesus experienced when he paid a visit to his hometown, Nazareth. His townspeople knew him very well. He had grown up among them. They knew his mother and foster father. Both were simple, maybe even rather poor people. While growing up, Jesus had learnt the carpenter's trade. Then he left home at about the age of 30, only to now return trying to teach people about God and claiming to be able to perform miraculous feats. The people were not impressed. They must have wondered what Jesus, the carpenter, was trying to prove. "Who does he think he is? Bo! Let him go and sit down."
Jesus must have been upset at their attitude. Everywhere he had been before then: Capernaum, Cana, Bethsaida, even Jerusalem- people had accepted him -most people, at least. But here in his own hometown, among his own people, his kith and kin, hardly anybody would take him seriously. He• expressed his disappointment with the now famous statement: " ... no prophet is ever accepted in his own country"; or, in the more common version, “A prophet is not without honour except in his own country.”
Familiarity can indeed breed contempt. That is true of persons ("prophets"). It is also true of institutions, customs and traditions. Take the Church, for instance, the Catholic Church. Some people have been Catholics all their lives. They were born into Catholic families, baptised, confirmed, married in church, and so on. They were brought up on the various Catholic devotions and liturgical practices: Holy Mass and Holy Communion, maybe on a daily basis, Benediction, weekly Confession, daily Rosary, Legion of Mary, Block Rosary Crusade; and so on. If they are not careful, their very familiarity with these sacred things can lead to contempt. They can begin to take them for granted, not seriously any more. They will go to Mass out of sheer routine, receive Holy Communion without adequate preparation and no thanksgiving afterwards, go to confession without real repentance and a firm resolve to quit sinning, they will recite the rosary without really praying it. The result IS that none of those exercises will bring them any real spiritual benefits.
Some others will lose interest in their own Catholic devotions and practices and become fascinated with the way other churches do their things. That is the situation when people begin to value prayer meetings and revivals more than the Mass, when they abandon the Catholic Hymn Book in favour of choruses, some quite meaningless, when they begin to cast aspersions on the Rosary and even the person of our Blessed Mother. That is the extreme of familiarity breeding contempt. But familiarity need not breed contempt. It can and should rather breed better appreciation and love of what is ours. Familiarity between husband and wife should not breed contempt; neither should familiarity between parents and their children, between bosom friends, even between an employer and his employee. That is what should happen where our own . Catholic devotions and liturgical practices are concerned. We should appreciate them, cherish them, treasure them, seek to know and understand them better, and teach them to our children and youths. They have nourished the spiritual lives of countless generations of Catholics for two millennia. They can still do the same for countless more generations of Catholics for all the millennia yet to come. <>
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