Proper 9, Year B, Track 2
Ezekiel 2:1-5
Psalm 123
2 Corinthians 12:2-10
Mark 6:1-13
"The summer of 2008 was an exciting and memorable time for Galt. Almost 6,000 miles away in Beijing, one of our town’s native daughters, Stephanie Brown Trafton, was competing in the Summer Olympics. Competing at such a prestigious level would by itself have been cause for celebration, but Stephanie took home the gold medal in her event and remains one of only three American women to have done so. On her return home, she was showered in celebration. The mayor presented her with the key to the city. She was invited to speaking engagements and honored at many community events as a role model for young aspiring athletes. In small, sleepy towns like ours that often get overlooked, we laud the accomplishments of these hometown celebrities partly because they show we’re just as capable of producing remarkable people as better-known places. When they are honored, we as a community are also honored.
In Jesus’ lifetime, Nazareth was an utterly unremarkable little village. It was looked at primarily with indifference or condescension to the extent it had any reputation at all. In John 1, when Phillip finds Nathanael, he tells him, “We have found him about whom Moses in the Law and also the Prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael responds skeptically, asking, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”
Naturally, we would expect this little backwater with no positive reputation to rejoice at the prominence their native son Jesus was gaining in his ministry. In Capernaum in Galilee, Jesus had “astounded” the people with his teaching in the synagogue. He’d cast out demons, healed the sick, and stilled the storm. He’d preached to multitudes and shared some of his best-known parables. When Jesus first got to Nazareth and began preaching in the synagogue, we again read that many were “astounded” at his teaching.
But then things start to take a turn. “They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offense at him.” Our instinct here might be to scoff at the reaction of the Nazarenes. Don’t they get it? This is Jesus! The Jesus! But we have a radically different understanding of Jesus than they would have. We have the whole story, from incarnation to resurrection and ascension. These folks were Jesus’ neighbors who would have watched him grow up. They would have seen more of Jesus’ humanity than perhaps anyone else.
Their offense at Jesus manifests in two ways. The first relates to honor. Jesus grew up in a society with a very rigid understanding of honor. He was born into a family without any notable wealth or influence. As a carpenter, he likely would have apprenticed under Joseph and not had extensive advanced education. The most damning indictment of his station, however, is likely the noticeable omission of Joseph from the list of Jesus’ family members in this passage. He is called “the son of Mary,” not the son of Mary and Joseph. In a manner both indirect and pointed, Jesus is being called a bastard, one of the most dishonorable things one could be in society at the time. Illegitimacy was a stain that would follow people all their lives.
Honor would also have been considered a zero-sum game in Jesus’ time. Honor gained by one person would necessarily have to come at the expense of another. We see this play out periodically in the gospels through Jesus’ verbal sparring with the Pharisees and other religious officials seeking to challenge him. To the leaders of that synagogue, who would have known him as little more than a fatherless carpenter, Jesus’ skillful teaching undercut their honor. To borrow a phrase from my grandmother, those in Nazareth with a place of high honor would have thought that Jesus had gotten too big for his britches.
The second cause of their offense at Jesus is indicated at the start of their response. “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him?” The extent of Jesus’ earthly education is somewhat of a mystery. We know he was literate and probably received a basic education in the synagogue in his younger years. In John 7, however—another passage in which the audience expresses “astonishment” at Jesus’ teachings—they explicitly ask, “How does this man have such learning, when he has never been taught?” Jesus responds, “My teaching is not mine but his who sent me.” Jesus does not need an extensive earthly education in the scriptures because he embodies the Word. In the beginning, before there was scripture, there was the Word. This can be a tricky concept for us to wrap our heads around, and it would have been utterly alien to Jesus’ audience in Nazareth. It’s no wonder that some accused him of being possessed by or in league with demons; they could not conceptualize any alternative to explain Jesus’ supernatural understanding of scripture.
However, the people do not criticize what Jesus is saying. They even refer to his words as “wisdom.” But they cannot get past their perception of the messenger to get to the message. We see this play out to a lesser extent with Jesus’ disciples throughout the gospels. This portion of today’s reading ends with the words, “And he was amazed at their disbelief.” I think our lectionary does us a bit of a disservice by lumping in the sending of the Twelve with this confrontation. We never want to end the gospel proclamation on a “downer,” of course, but this encounter speaks to a universal experience of skepticism, closing our hearts, and stubbornly insisting we already know all the ways God is talking to us. I believe we benefit from hearing this story on its own to get the full impact. How often do we dismiss a message, either because we’re not ready to hear its words or because we’re not interested in hearing from that particular messenger? Can we imagine there may be times when Jesus is amazed at our disbelief or inability to put our preconceived prejudice aside to hear something truly divine?
Yet today’s reading from Ezekiel gives us a reason to hope. As God prepares Ezekiel to minister to the people of Israel, he grouses about them, calling them impudent and stubborn rebels. None of his words stoke the kind of inspiration that one might expect God to give to a new prophet, and much of the passage leaves us wondering why God is even bothering to send Ezekiel in the first place. Then, right at the end, he gives his reason. Whether or not Israel hears or refuses to hear, “they shall know that there has been a prophet among them.”
God does not stop speaking to us. Even at our most distant, our most disinterested, our most willful, God keeps speaking. He may not speak to us in the ways we want or expect, but he does speak to us in the way we need to hear in the moment. How can we prepare ourselves to listen? Amen."