Lent Retreat - Week 4, Saturday

Readings: Jeremiah 11:18-20; John 7:40-52

'Search and you will see that no prophet is to arise from Galilee': so today's gospel reading ends. Another translation puts it this way: 'go into the matter, and see for yourself; prophets do not come out of Galilee'. So that's that then. Here are people who know where God is allowed to show Himself and where He is not allowed to show Himself.

Of the different levels of conversion to which we are called intellectual conversion is perhaps the most difficult. The Greek term for conversion is metanoia which means 'change of mind'. It is not unknown for people to change their minds but if they have committed themselves to some position, and invested heavily in its being correct, then it can be very difficult for them to do so. It is like trying to move a mountain. Many intellectual convictions become so ingrained and precious to people that it becomes difficult to distinguish such convictions from prejudices, judgments that will not give a hearing to anything new. Donald Nicholl wrote of how Aquinas associates the beatitude of mourning with the gift of knowledge: it is the beatitude for intellectuals according to Aquinas. This is, says Nicholl, because

... whenever our minds yearn towards some new truth then we become afflicted with pain, because our whole being wishes to protect the balance of inertia and comfort which we have established for ourselves; and the pain is a symptom of our distress at its disturbance. Moreover, we experience a sort of bereavement when those formulations, images and symbols through which we had in the past appropriated truth have now to be abandoned. For those formulations, images and symbols have over the years become part of us. To lose them feels like losing part of ourselves. And we mourn that loss as we would the loss of a limb (The Tablet, 26 May 1990, p.662).

Lent offers us the possibility of thinking again about the new thing God has done through the prophet from a town in Galilee (where we do not expect God to reveal Himself) called Nazareth (can anything good come from there?!). It calls us to think again about our cherished convictions that may now be nothing more than prejudices protecting our balance of inertia and comfort.