When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. 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! Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. (Mark 6.3-4)
In 1940, the last novel written by the American writer Thomas Wolfe was published, two years after his death. Entitled, You Can’t Go Home Again, the book tells the story of George Webber, a neophyte writer who uses numerous veiled references to his hometown in his book, all of which the people back home recognize and none of which the hometown people like. They consider his depiction distorted, many of them sending him menacing letters and death threats.
When he returns to that town, he is shocked by the outrage and enmity that greet him. Even family and longtime friends want nothing to do with him, expressing their disdain towards him both in word and in deed. FInally, the cumulative ostracizing drives Webber out of town, leaving him aimless and anchorless as he travels across the world looking for a place to call home.
If it only happened in fiction, it would be one thing, but it also happened in scripture, causing the Rabbi from Galilee heartache and heartbreak as he faces the same enmity and envy. The evangelist puts before us the scene of Rabbi Jesus’ return to his native place after having taught and healed many others on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, making a name for himself as a prophet among these foreigners.
But the reception in his hometown is not so warm; in fact, it quickly becomes hostile, as the locals listen to Rabbi Jesus as he entered the synagogue in town on the Sabbath and began to expound on the sacred texts to people he had known all his life. It did not go well. “Where did this man get all this?” they ask, at one and the same time amazed and confused.
Quickly, their amazement turns to resentment, asking aloud who does he think he is, posing the question in this way, “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? And aren’t his sisters here with us?” Assessing the situation, the evangelist offers this summation, “And they took offense at him.”
For his part, the Rabbi simply remarks to his disciples who had come with him into the synagogue, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.” Taking his disciples with him, he leaves his hometown and goes to villages in the vicinity, disheartened that his own kinsmen and neighbors have rejected his teaching.
As we see, the evangelist uses the incident to expose the lack of faith among the locals, noting that the Rabbi “was not able to perform any mighty deed there apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.” It is the only instance in the Gospel of Mark that the Rabbi enters a synagogue; henceforth he simply preaches to the people in those places where he encounters them.
While it is fair to use the story as a platform for preaching against a lack of faith on the part of people who should know better, it is not the only lesson to be learned from this experience. An equally strong case can be made for viewing the story through the lens of people’s failure to see God at work in their midst, blinded by their own notions of who God is and where God can be found.
In fact, this blindness seems to be one of the greatest weaknesses in humankind, our inability to find God “outside the box,” in people and places that we deem impossible to host the Divine One, our prejudices and our predilections severely restricting the whereabouts of the Divinity, or at least our ability to find him.
We find this stance in the question that the people of Nazareth ask when they say, “Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary?” With those few words, they make it clear that they do not entertain the possibility that God can work through a carpenter and surely not through someone they have known for many years, in a face they already know, in a voice they already recognize. It is absurd, they think, that God could act in this sometime carpenter who left town, only to come back now as a Rabbi.
As a result, they hear nothing he says about the good news of the Most High God, their minds closed and their hearts hardened, for no good reason except this hometown carpenter doesn’t meet their criteria for a prophet, for one who speaks for God. Unable to get beyond their preconceptions of God, they miss out on a singular opportunity to hear the voice of God spoken to them, to find his face in the face of someone they already recognize.
It serves no purpose, really, to beat up on the people of Nazareth for their close-mindedness and their certain blindness in this matter, especially since we also are guilty of the same thing, more often than not limiting in our minds and to our eyes who and where God can show himself to us. Like the Hebrews who danced before a golden calf, convincing themselves that this molten idol was the real thing, we construct our own golden calves, safe bets on who and where God is.
Years ago, the British Biblical scholar and clergyman, J.B. Phillips, wrote a book that carried the eye-opening title, Your God is Too Small, a book that became a bestseller and carries an important message to this day. His message is simple. We all compress God, squashing the life out of him, as we stuff him into boxes of our own making, tight places that we try to squeeze the Maker of the Heavens into, certain that our misinformed and malformed creations are the Great One, when, in fact, he is never found in a box.
He told us as much, if only we were listening. When Moses encountered the Divine One in the burning bush while tending the sheep of his father-in-law Jethro, he demanded to know of this Invisibile One who he was. “I am Who I am,” was the answer Moses received, sometimes translated in the future tense, “I will be who I will be,” an answer that answers beautifully or obscures beautifully, depending on a person’s perspective or want.
Either way, the answer implies that we are not up to the task of defining or finding God, at least not without the assistance and guidance of his spirit that opens our minds and heals our blindness. As one great theologian once said, “If we think we have understood God, then it is not God that we have understood.”
A more contemporary writer, Anne Lamott, quipped that she finds it suspicious that our list of people that God doesn’t like matches almost to the letter our own personal enemies-list, more than a coincidence she argues, more likely our ever-present attempt to make God into our own image, rather than making ourselves into his own image.
Lacking a better term for it and so calling it the Nazareth problem, this failure to let God be who God is carries a high cost, limiting not God so much as limiting our experience of God, our forestalling and forbidding where he can be found denying us countless opportunities to gaze upon the loveliness of his face, because we can’t believe it is found in the countenance of a carpenter.
Ages ago, the old rabbis explained this same loss of an encounter with the Divine One in a simple way. They said that people climb up the mountain looking for God, while God has climbed down the mountain looking for us, and so we continue to look for one another in different places, never coming face to face with the Almighty One.
What are we to do if we want to find God in our midst, if we want to recognize his reflection in the face of a carpenter with calluses on his hands and with a wiry beard on his cheeks? A good answer, I think, comes from the preacher and writer Barbara Taylor Brown in her book, An Altar in the World, a wonderful call to find God anywhere and everywhere.
She writes, “The bush required Moses to take a time out, at least if he wanted to do more than glance at it. He could have done that. He could have seen the flash of red out of the corner of his eye, said, ‘Oh, that’s pretty,’ and kept right on driving the sheep. He did not know that it was an angel in the bush, after all.”
She continues, “Moses could have decided that he would come back tomorrow to see if the bush was still burning, when he had a little more time, only then he would not have been Moses. He would just have been a guy who got away with murder, without ever discovering what else his life might have been about. What made Moses was his willingness to turn aside.”
I suppose we could paraphrase her words and say, “He took a second look.” That is what the people of Nazareth failed to do and, in that failure to take a second look, never realized that the presence of the God of their Fathers stood right before them in the synagogue that Sabbath. Sure, he looked the world like the carpenter that they all knew, but he was so much more, if only they had turned aside from their preconceptions and allowed God to be God.
For us in these times and in these places, the message is much the same. If we don’t want to miss out on experiencing God in our midst, then we may want to open the lid on the tight little box into which we have placed him and instead look for him outside the box. In all likelihood, it will require a second look to recognize him, but it is well worth the pause.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 