ROME — Jesus is hard for many to accept because of his humility, Pope Francis told pilgrims to the Vatican Sunday.
We would “like to believe in a ‘special effects’ God who does only exceptional things and always provokes strong emotions,” the pope told crowds gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly Angelus address.
“Instead, God incarnated Himself: humble, tender, hidden, coming near to us, living the normality of our daily life,” the pontiff continued, which means that we risk failing to recognize Him.
“In the end, why didn’t Jesus’s fellow villagers recognize and believe in Him? What is the reason?” the pope asked, in reference to Sunday’s gospel reading. “In short, we can say that they did not accept the scandal of the Incarnation.”
“It is scandalous that the immensity of God should be revealed in the smallness of our flesh, that the Son of God should be the son of a carpenter, that the divine should hide itself in the human, that God should inhabit a face, the words, the gestures of a simple man,” he said.
Christ’s incarnation and his apparent ordinariness can scandalize us, Francis added, whereas “an abstract and distant God” who doesn’t get mixed up in our lives would be more “comfortable.”
“Jesus’s fellow villagers knew him for thirty years in the same way and they thought they knew everything,” he said, and yet, “they never realized who he truly was.”
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