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When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue,
and many who heard him were astonished.
Jesus came to his native place, to Nazareth, and began to teach in the synagogue. And although there was some initial positive reaction it was ultimately swallowed up in a wave of criticism. They had watched Jesus grow up in their midst or had grown up alongside him. Who was he to now put in airs and come back to them like some kind of big shot? How did he now suddenly seem to think himself so much better than rest of them? He taught with authority. But the neighbors and relatives of Jesus had already placed implicit limits on what they would accept from him. Anything too different from that to which they were accustomed would be rejected outright.
They said, “Where did this man get all this?
What kind of wisdom has been given him?
What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands!
Before we condemn those who failed to hear Jesus we should first be sympathetic to the fact that this Jesus who now came to them must have seemed unaccountably different from Jesus as a child and young adult. During his earthly life to that point the God-man had apparently lived in such a humble way that his divinity had been unrecognized if not unrecognizable. It is hard to imagine any of us having such power and not standing out in some way. So this newly revealed aspect of Jesus must have been hard for them to grasp. In calling to mind his mother and his relatives they were asserting that they did in fact have a deep familiarity with his past and that it provided, to their knowledge, no evidence to substantiate the way he now carried himself in their midst.
If something becomes too familiar in our minds it ceases to be a living and dynamic thing capable of change and becomes merely a blueprint or a caricature of what we had know if it to that point. This is always dangerous with any person, since within everyone there are entire worlds that others will never completely know. But in the messiah it was more dangerous still. The idea that the messiah himself would lead such a humble life and then suddenly reappear as a prophet with a voice of authority seemed incongruous to them. The humility of Jesus had the eventual result that they took offense at him because it allowed them to imagine that they and he were cut from the same cloth. He had never exhibited himself or boasted. This in turn allowed people to make all sorts of assumptions about who he was and his limitations.
A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and among his own kin and in his own house.
Our churches are meant to be the native place of Jesus. But oftentimes we too have pigeonholed the ways in which we will recognize his action and in what ways we will respect his voice of authority. If we insist on basing everything on what we have known so far we will always run this risk. For Jesus does not make all things what they had been before. He makes all things new. Only a dynamic and personal relationship with him ensures that we remain open to this newness, ready to be surprised again and again by the goodness he brings into our world.
So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there,
apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.
He was amazed at their lack of faith.
We might have assumed that Jesus would have performed mighty deeds in Nazareth in order to prove himself and provoke faith among those who doubted. And perhaps something like that might have happened if there had been a larger atmosphere of faith as an environment for such miracles. There was simply too much doubt. There were too few individuals who were open to the possibility. Healings sometimes resulted from the faith of the individual, sometimes from that of others. But an excess of doubt seemed like a problem that had to be rectified before Jesus was truly free to work, such as when he raised the daughter of Jairus (see Mark 5:21-43).
Our Church can be both the native place of Jesus and still welcome the something new that he is ready to unleash (see Isaiah 43:19). So can our hearts, for that matter. We can provide for him an atmosphere of faith in which mighty deeds become more the norm than the exception. It may not be us that gets healed. It may not be through us directly that someone else is healed. But even so that doesn't mean our own faith lacks value. People healing and being healed is generally not an isolated phenomena but one that becomes increasingly likely when an atmosphere of faith predominates or at least when at atmosphere of doubt has been overcome. The secret is to never allow ourselves to believe that we have seen all that Jesus has to offer.
He was amazed at their lack of faith.
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