These readings are reinforcing something that I have talked about a lot. The faith is not something to be kept to yourself. It's obvious that Andrew and Peter had talked to Philip because they're in the same area and Philip becomes a believer.
And Philip encounters Nathaniel and says, look, we found this guy, the Messiah, we have found him. And lo and behold, ultimately Nathaniel finds him. Now, it would have been an interesting thing that Jesus comes from Nazareth and not Bethlehem because that's where the Messiah was going to come from. That's why the birth of Jesus needed to occur in Bethlehem because that was the city of David. That was David's home and it was the place in which the Messiah was to return.
But Nazareth, on the other hand, is a completely different place. Think Las Vegas. Okay, Nazareth was not a, first of all, it wasn't a Jewish city. It was located in a place where all kinds of people would come and go in terms of their travels. And much like a place where there are people who don't stay there a long time but tend to travel through it a lot, we could say in the ancient world what happens in Nazareth stays in Nazareth.
It was not necessarily a place of good moral living. And so it's not surprising that Nathaniel says, well, what good could come from Nazareth? It didn't have that reputation of being a place where someone would come who, in fact, was the Messiah. It's a reminder to us that sometimes in our own life we develop, I should say, just kind of prejudices or biases against people simply from where they live or from other external factors that make no difference whatsoever.
Today we celebrate St. John Newman, who, or Neumann really, probably more accurately, was a bishop. The bishop of Philadelphia found himself kind of unworthy for the task but went about it anyway. But if you're in western New York and Pennsylvania, there are many, many Catholic schools that were started by Bishop Neumann.
And it's a reminder to us that he too saw his arrival into this country, he saw an important part of that arrival to share the faith, to create the culture. In many ways we could ask the question today about many aspects of American life.
Can anything good come from the United States? We could ask that question today. That's not to bash our country, it's not to say that our country does not do many great things, but we've got a lot of interesting problems in our country. We still haven't figured out how to feed everyone or to house everyone or to clothe everyone.
It seems that it feels anyway, I know it's not perhaps literally true that we have a mass shooting in this country every single day, it just doesn't seem to come to an end. And yet in the midst of this, in many ways we are like the church in this country at the time of St. John Neumann, namely a place that is in need of evangelization, that is deeply in need of the presence of Jesus, a recognition of what it is that Jesus wants us to do and how it is that Jesus wants us to live.
Let us pray that we might be willing to share our faith with others so that people might know the good things that come from wherever we find ourselves this day.
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