A couple weeks ago, an old friend of mine posted a picture on social media. It was scanned from, of all things, one of our high school yearbooks. It showed the two of us—we must have been sixteen or seventeen—at the movie theatre where we both worked after school—awkwardly smiling in front of this huge movie-theatre-sized popcorn maker, wearing our uniforms complete with very unfortunate clip-on bow-ties.
I don’t remember this picture ever being taken or that it was printed in the yearbook. My friend didn’t either. I told my friend that I almost didn’t recognize myself. She said she had felt the same way when she first saw it. We remarked on the time that had passed between then and now, the experiences we’ve both had in the years since, the distance traveled. We both realized that neither of us would have ever predicted that we’d be living where we live now, working the jobs we have. But our memories of that job—right down to the smell of the popcorn—were crystal clear.
Many of you, like me, came to New Haven from somewhere else. And one of the things about hometowns is, when you go back to them, even in memory, there’s a sense in which you pick back up some part of yourself that you left behind. Seeing that old picture and talking to my friend took me right back to that after-school job in the 1990s. However we craft our lives as adults, our formative years are still always with us—and the people we grew up with and around will always us, in some way, in that light. Whoever I might be now, in that yearbook photo, I’ll always be a geeky teenager in a bow-tie.
This “hometown dilemma” is something Jesus experiences in our reading this morning. The first few chapters of Mark narrate Jesus’s baptism and the beginning of his ministry—a ministry marked by remarkable acts of power—calming storms, healing the sick, even bringing back to life a young girl apparently dead. And after much activity he comes back to Nazareth, to his hometown. This return doesn’t seem to be for the purposes of rest or recreation; we’re not told that he’s gone to spend time with his family or attend a celebration of some kind—it just seems that the ordinary course of Jesus’s business takes him back—and he does pretty much what he’s been doing all along. On the sabbath, he goes to the synagogue to teach.
The reception he gets is very different that what he’s gotten used to. In previous scenes, the crowds have listened with rapt attention; they’ve followed him even as he’s tried to get away. In the Gentile countries, people have been astounded with Jesus’s powers to command demons; in the Jewish regions, people have come from far and wide to hear him. But here, at Nazareth, they question. “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”
Didn’t we know this guy when he was a teenager? Didn’t we watch him grow up? Isn’t he just a carpenter, an ordinary tradesman? Isn’t this just a normal person from Nazareth, just like all of us?
In one sense, the answer to all these questions is “yes”—a corollary of the doctrine of the Incarnation is that as a fully fledged human being, Jesus would have grown up—like all of us he would have been a child, an adolescent, a teenager—and people would have seen him in these phases—and sure, the people who knew him best would probably be surprised when he begins teaching astounding things in the synagogue.
The problem for the people of Nazareth was not that they knew Jesus too well. The problem was that they let what they knew of Jesus block out the greater truth about who he was and what he came to do.
This is something that can happen to any of us, right, being limited by other people’s expectations or preconceptions of us? If opinions people form about us in one point in our lives become fixed, this can be bad for us—we are all, for example, much more than might be captured in a high school yearbook photo.
The people of Nazareth see, in a very real and up-close way, Jesus’s humanity—but their view of his humanity is so strong that they’re unable to recognize the divinity beginning to reveal itself as he teaches. Their expectations about who Jesus is, or who he should be, cloud their ability to see who he really is.
This isn’t the only time in Scripture that human expectations limit our ability to see God at work in the world. The prophet Elijah expected God to be in a fire or whirlwind, not in a sheer silence. As a Pharisee, Paul looked for God in a rigorous traditionalist application of the Jewish Torah—and was unable to see God moving in the small band of disciples who follow the teachings of Christ.
After the people of Nazareth take offense at Jesus’s astounding—perhaps seemingly presumptuous—teachings, Mark tells us that Jesus “could do no deed of power there”—except for still curing a few people by laying on his hands, which still seems to me like nothing to turn your nose up at. Jesus, Mark tells us, was “amazed at their unbelief.” Coming as it does just a few lines after Jesus heals a woman of her hemorrhage, saying “Your faith has made you well,” this is particularly striking. I don’t think Mark is suggesting that God is somehow stripped of divine power if we don’t believe—but rather that God’s actions in our lives invite some manner of our participation—at least, at the most basic level, some amount of trust in God on our own part. We cannot be healed by God if we do not trust God, and our trust in God will be hindered if we try to put our own limitations on who God is or how God will show up in our lives.
How often do we let our expectations put limits on God? How often do we imagine God as a figure sitting in judgment, full of wrath and anger—and mistakenly put ourselves beyond the reach of God’s healing embrace? Or do we conceive of an infinitely permissive God, whose love for us is such that we never need to take stock of our own wrongdoing or grow towards the holiness God desires for us? Perhaps we, like the people of Nazareth, don’t recognize Jesus when he shows up in front of us—when we fail to see the image of God in our neighbor, in the vulnerable, in the stranger, in someone whose behavior or way of life violates our expectations.
The Good News, friends, in all these possible failures, is that God keeps showing up—that God keeps reaching out to us in new and unexpected ways. Even with the people of Nazareth taking offense, Jesus is still there, healing the sick, and sending out the disciples to witness to the Kingdom of God drawing near. Even if our preconceptions would put limits on how God would look or act, God will not be limited—God will continue to surprise, to astound, to challenge us. And in keeping our hearts and minds open to God’s presence, to God’s invitation to trust him, to God’s call to join in sharing that Good News—in being open to God’s unexpected presence, we will be made whole.