When our Lord in His journeyings came to Nazareth, where He was brought up, and went into the synagogue according to His custom on the Sabbath day, and read to them from the book of Isaias the prophet, and applied what He read, they not only rejected His words with scorn and anger, but thrust Him out, and even sought to cast Him headlong from the precipitous hill on which their town was built. Awful hardening of heart! But let us learn a lesson of warning not to rest in our privileges as Catholics and Christians, as if the having them will suffice to make and keep us right before God and in His favour. These people of Nazareth were members of God's Old Testament Church; they had a synagogue or church; the Law of God and the Scriptures of the Prophets, probably the Psalms of David; and met for the worship of God on Sabbath days. But their hearts were not given to God: and He did not, and does not, approve of any service while the heart is far from Him. They were full of conceit, pride, and prejudice. They had known Jesus living among them as the son of the carpenter Joseph and the poor and lowly Mary; and they despised Him, and hated His plain spoken truth. We must not rest, let all remember, in the outsides, which are but the shell of piety. God looks for the kernel, and says to us, Give me thy heart. When we keep this back, and rest in profession and privileges, God may leave our hearts to rest in our evil passions. Let our earnest daily prayer be: Let my heart he undefiled in thy justifications, that I may not be confounded. Mark the difference between the ignorant and erring Samaritans, who received and believed in Jesus, and the proud and prejudiced Nazarenes, who rejected Him and drove Him from them.
- text taken from Daily Bread - Bring a Few Morning Meditations for the Use of Catholic Christians by Father Richard Waldo Sibthorp