The Jewish people of Jesus' time had some pretty-definite ideas about the messiah. One of the things they thought was that the messiah would be a man of mystery, that no one would know exactly where he came from. In today's Gospel (Jn 7: 1-2, 10, 25-30) we see the problems those definite ideas created. The Jews clearly knew where Jesus came from, and knew about his parents and relatives (see Mt 13:55). So, because they knew where Jesus was from, they thought He couldn't be the messiah. But when they looked at His teaching, and His miracles, they saw concrete evidence that He was the Messiah. The result was conflict. Some people thought He was from God. Others thought He was a deceiver (see Jn 7: 12). Some said He was possessed by deamons (Jn 7: 20). It was the classic conflict of human wisdom versus divine wisdom. In their human wisdom the Pharisees and others had come up with a whole idea about the messiah-- including the fact that no one would know where he was from. Of course, there's nothing wrong with human wisdom, as far as it goes. But when we rely on our human wisdom to the exclusion of the divine, that's when we get in trouble. And that's what the Jews did. The result was that they couldn't see who Jesus was, because He didn't fit the image they had created in their own minds. They didn't have the humility to look at what God was doing with an open mind and be willing to throw out their own preconceived notions of what the messiah would be like, even in the fact of miraculous evidence. In this society we often seem to do the same thing. We can see miracles, and yet not believe that miracles exist, because we have a notion that nothing can happen without a scientific explanation. That false framework goes back at least to Thomas Jefferson who, as a son of the Enlightenment, cut all the miracle stories out of his bible. Or we can clearly have the sense that God is speaking to us, and disregard what we hear, because we have the preconceived notion that God doesn't really speak to people. Or we can pray, and see that what we have sought in prayer actually comes to pass, and still wonder if prayers actually make any difference, because we are told so often that prayer is old-fashioned, obsolete, and useless. There are lots of hurdles in living a Christian life. Perhaps one of the greatest is having our minds made up about how God works, what God wants, and what form the Messiah will take in our lives. We need to cultivate an open mind, open to God's grace and to God's action in ways that might be surprising and outside our expectations. As the Jews of Jesus' time came to experience, pride-- showing itself as preconceived notions of how God works-- can be fatal to growth in the spiritual life.