Margie Quinn
For the past few weeks, we’ve heard about Jesus in the gospel of Mark, a book that one theologian calls the “Gospel on Steroids.” Mark depicts a fast-paced Jesus, who has been on a healing tour in the first five chapters of the gospel. First we see him heal a man with an unclean spirit, then a man with a withered hand, then a paralytic, then a man known as a “demoniac,” who everyone deemed crazy. He continues his tour, touching and healing a leper, a woman who had been bleeding for twelve years who everyone thought dirty and disgusting and healing a girl everyone presumed dead. Jesus has been busy.
On this tour, people recognize him for who he is. The man with the unclean spirit and the man who everyone thought was crazy, they are the ones who say, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?” They know it’s him. And others, perhaps coming from a place of awe or curiosity who may not necessarily recognize him but want to know more, ask these questions: “What is this, a new teaching with authority!” “We have never seen anything like this!” “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?”
Do you hear the excitement and curiosity in their voices? They have a faith, a belief that is bold enough to recognize him, seek him out, touch the hem of his robe, or ask him for healing. They act out of a desperate faithfulness.
Crowds are chasing him, disciples are scrambling after him; Jesus can’t get one moment alone! That is how popular he is. That is how fast the word about him is spreading and then…
He comes home.
He comes home, and the first thing he does is enter the synagogue. Once there, he stands up to preach. While the gospel of Mark doesn’t reveal the content of his sermon, we know from Luke 4 that this is one of his most challenging, most memorable sermons. He tells the crowd, “...the spirit of the Lord is upon me today, to preach good news to the poor, to release the captives and to free the oppressed.” Perhaps as he preached, he spoke with a newfound confidence after seeing how many people were following after him, curious about what he had to say. And yet: the questions in his hometown are different from the questions he has heard on his healing tour.
As he looks out, he sees his siblings, his parents, the people who watched him grow up, who changed his diapers, asked him to make a chair for them, saw him rabble-rousing with his friends. They ask, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” “Where did this man get all of this?” “What is the wisdom that has been given to him?” “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, are not his sisters with us?”
What Jesus may have hoped would be a hometown reception quickly became a hometown rejection.
How could this woodworker preach and heal?
They can’t let go of the Jesus they’ve known to accept the Jesus they encounter. They can’t believe in his divinity, because of the very human boy with whom they grew up. This is not the Jesus they’ve known. They don’t know what to do with him.
Perhaps you have felt this too, what Jesus might feel here, when you go back to your hometown or even when you spend time with your family? I certainly regress or start to doubt myself, feeling insecure. I feel the need to prove myself and insist that I have changed and broken bad patterns, that I don’t fit into the old mold. At home, I run into people from high school who watched me sing musical theater in the hallways or get Cs on quizzes. They often balk when I tell them what I do now. “You’re what now? A minister?” I usually shrink or shrug my shoulders, pretending to be just as bewildered as they are, saying, “Yeah, you know what, I guess I am.” As if I haven’t worked for years to pray for, study for and discern this calling! Have you ever done this? Feigned surprise at the person you’ve become because of the person that people have known you to be?
I wonder if this is what Jesus is experiencing when he returns to Nazareth.
The people we might expect to grasp our calling, the people who we may have expected to understand Jesus’ significance, Matt Skinner writes, end up failing to do so. Perhaps the insiders are the ones expecting the wrong things of Jesus while the outsiders, the lepers, the bleeding woman, the man with the withered hand, see him for exactly who he is, beg to know more about him and crawl after him in order to be healed. They see and encounter the Jesus in front of them.
I don’t know how I would react in this situation if I were Jesus’ family. If the little boy I had seen playing with wood blocks stood up here and preached before me, maybe I would possess the same kind of skepticism or disbelief. Maybe I’d wonder, “What kind of son leaves his mom and siblings behind to say and do things that would ultimately lead him and the people following him to trouble? Now he only drops in every once in a while to see everyone before leaving again?” I think his hometown had very relatable responses.
Like many of the prophets, like Ezekiel, Jesus quickly notices that prophets are often honored in many places but when they come home…not so much. Listen to what we learn next: scripture tells us that Jesus could do no deed of power there. After he has preached, heard the whispers and the questions, after he has seen the lack of faith, perhaps he looks out at the doubt of those around him and begins to doubt himself. Perhaps he looks out at the lack of faith in his ministry and starts to lose faith in himself. He could do no deed of power there. The Son of God!
He could do no deed of power there except lay his hands on a few sick people and cure them. “And he was amazed at their unbelief.” Perhaps in taking Jesus for granted as Joseph and Mary's son, they took away some of the wisdom and knowledge that he possessed.
They didn’t have faith in this Jesus because of the Jesus they’d known. Unwilling to accept that we change, evolve and come into ourselves and our calling, unable to believe in that, they turned away from him and in doing so, perhaps he turned away from himself.
When we take people for granted, when we freeze them in time, confining them to the people we’ve known, not the people we know, we miss opportunities to recognize the presence of God working through the people in front of us. We limit ourselves in not believing in the blessings that could come from the very people we are most familiar with: the people in our families, the people at church, the people in our hometown.
Do we not believe God is expansive, creative and dynamic enough to use the people most familiar to us to bring about the kingdom of heaven here on earth?
We need to look around at the people in our lives with whom we have underestimated, or don’t believe in, and reevaluate our faith in them. We might be missing the very presence of Jesus right in front of us.
And for those of us who can relate more to Jesus in this story than to his hometown crowd, let me be clear that we are not responsible for how others perceive our own ministries and gifts. I do not have to shrink or be self-deprecating when I tell people here that “Yes, I was that girl and yes, I am that woman–a minister. Full stop.” We do not have to prove ourselves to anyone, especially those close to home.
Jesus reveals this to us in the latter part of this passage. He notices that he can’t do these deeds of power on his own and he looks out at the twelve men who have faithfully followed him this far. He commissions the Disciples, sending them out in pairs so that they don’t have to do this work alone. He tells them not to bring anything, just themselves, who they are and who they know themselves to be. “When you enter people’s houses,” he says, “if you feel like they refuse to hear you or are not welcoming to you, shake the dust.” Keep walking. I know who you are. I encounter blessings in you. I see the love of God working in you and through you and that’s enough for me.
This morning, I invite you and me to continue to spread the love of Jesus, even when we feel misunderstood or taken for granted or underestimated or yes, even rejected. And may we have enough faith that those we have underestimated or belittled, those who we have frozen in time just might be the very people who have a blessing for us.
May it be so.