Prophets don’t have an easy job of it no matter where they’re trying to speak truth to power, but there’s no question that the homefront is their toughest audience, as Jesus found out when he returned to Nazareth.

The people of Jesus’ “native place” had a hard time hearing his message. He was simply too familiar. They thought they knew all there was to know about him. How could a message so amazing come from somebody they knew growing up?

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” Jesus famously taught in his Sermon on the Mount. And he should know, because Jesus faced precisely this kind of treatment at his debut in Nazareth.

Watching television back in the 1950s was a whole lot easier than it is now. Sure, there was no cable or satellite dishes. There weren’t any remote controls to change channels and only a handful of channels to choose from.

When Mrs. Gates, a charity maven, and her husband, a successful Seattle lawyer, looked at their scrawny, scrabbly son, Bill, back in 1967, they would have hardly pegged him as a future world-shaker.

A friend of mine told me he wasn’t going to his high- school reunion. “Why not?” I asked. “Back then everybody thought I was a loser.

From our God we do not need to hide our weaknesses. With faith in God who knows and loves us, we make these our prayers.

Son of man, I am sending you to the Israelites. While the gospels use “son of man” to refer to the Second Coming, the Passion and Resurrection of Christ, or to Jesus himself, the term in Ezekiel describes the prophet’s human limitations, especially in comparison with God’s power.

I am not in the slightest displeased, Margaret, that your frailty causes you to fear. God gave us both the grace to despair of ourselves and to entrust ourselves entirely, in utter dependence, to the strength of hope. —Saint Thomas More (1478-1535), from a letter to his daughter