ROME, Italy — Pope Francis said Sunday that those who seek miracles will never find Jesus but only those who humbly accept him as he is.
Jesus “is not found by those who seek miracles – if we look for miracles, we will not find Jesus – by those who seek new sensations, intimate experiences, strange things; those who seek a faith made up of power and external signs,” the pontiff told those gathered in Saint Peter’s Square for his weekly Angelus message.
“No, they will not find him,” Francis said. “Instead, he is found only by those who accept his ways and his challenges, without complaint, without suspicion, without criticism and long faces.”
Reflecting on the gospel reading of the day, which narrates the rejection Jesus experienced by his townspeople of Nazareth, who attempted to kill him, the pope said Christians must be ready for Jesus to challenge them.
On returning to Nazareth, “Jesus finds incomprehension and even hostility,” Francis noted. “His fellow villagers, rather than a word of truth, wanted miracles and prodigious signs.”
“Jesus asks you to accept him in the daily reality that you live; in the Church of today, as it is; in those who are close to you every day; in the reality of those in need, in the problems of your family, in your parents, in your children, in grandparents, in welcoming God there,” he said.
“It takes humility to encounter God, to let ourselves be encountered by him,” he added.
“The way of receiving God is always to be ready, to welcome and him and to be humble,” the pope proposed. “Faith passes through here: readiness and humility” and not “rigid and closed.”
People who say they know everything about Jesus are fools, Francis declared. “Don’t be foolish, you don’t know Jesus.”
When we think we know Jesus, we “get used to Jesus” and then “we close ourselves off to his newness, to the moment in which he knocks on our door and asks you something new, and wants to enter into you,” he said.
“The Lord always surprises us: this is the beauty of the encounter with Jesus,” he said.
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