Mark 6:1-6
Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.
“Where did this man get these things?” they asked. “What’s this wisdom that has been given him? What are these remarkable miracles he is performing? Isn’t this the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon? Aren’t his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him.
Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.
The other day I was in a bit of a nostalgic mood I guess. I was looking at one of my old high school yearbooks. It is interesting when you get older, and you haven’t seen a lot of the people you knew in school, that you felt you were so familiar with, that you come to realize you really did not know them at all. You might see someone in public that you think you recognize, but you really are not sure if it is who you think it is or not. I have had this happen to me on a number of occasions. Sometimes I am hesitant to speak to them out of fear that it might not be who I think it is. Other times, I have spoken to someone that I thought was someone I knew, and it turned out to not be who I thought it was. It is always sort of awkward.
I have always felt awkward at reunions. I don’t know what to say to people after we get past the obligatory, “Hey, how have you been? What are you doing these days?” etc. An even more awkward situation is when you run into someone that you went to school with, and they remember you, but you don’t remember them, and you have to pretend that you do. Or perhaps you remember the face, but you can’t remember their name to save your life.
Anyway, the other day as I was looking at the yearbook, the thing that struck me was that there were so many people my age that I was exposed to in school year after year, and as I looked at their pictures, I realized that I really did not know them at all. And it struck me that that is rather odd if you think about it. When I was in school, basically the same group of people, except for those who moved away, or something happened to them, were in my homeroom every year. I was in the group whose last names started with A, B, and some C’s.
Well, sure I knew them in the sense that I was casually acquainted with them enough to know their names mostly, and there were a few that I hung out with here and there, but it was all very superficial. I really didn’t know very much about their family life, their interests, likes and dislikes, or really much of anything.
Another thing that is interesting about that phase of life is how I, like most school age kids, tended to stereotype people and form opinions about them based on very casual observations. It is funny how we can form an opinion of someone without knowing much of anything about them, simply based on their clothes, or how they wear their hair, or the things they say in passing. I think school age kids are bad about stereotyping each other. We are all familiar with the stereotypes. This really gets played up in an exaggerated way in television shows and movies about teen-agers. The jocks, the nerds, the red necks, the loose girls, the stuck-up cheerleaders, the dope heads, etc. Of course, all of this is pure nonsense, but when you are that age you think that way.
I am not really sure what category people put me in. I never asked. I honestly have always sort of felt like I don’t really fit in anywhere. I did not participate in any sports when I was in school. I was a scrawny little kid. I sort of shunned those whom I perceived as “rednecks” because I wanted to be thought of as “cool”. I did wear my hair long, and smoke pot, but I wasn’t a very good hippy. There was a lot of stuff that the so-called hippies did that I did not approve of. I wasn’t a scholar. My grades were tolerable, and got me through, but I am sure no one thought of me as an intellectual. I was mostly a bit of a clown, and that is how I coped. I was really very shy and awkward. I was not in any clubs, although my friend and I, who is now dead, used to go and photo bomb the club pictures when they were taken, I appear in some of the club pictures, even though I was never a member of any of them. I got credit for working my last two years in high school, so I was only there for a half day in both my junior and senior years.
Hopefully, most people, as they mature, outgrow that pattern of stereotyping people. It is really a lot of unproductive nonsense. Most people are much more complex than the versions of them that we make up in our own minds.
Notice I said, “As they mature”, not “As they get older” because, in some cases getting older has nothing to do with maturing. Some people never mature, they just get older. They get stuck in some phase mentally, emotionally and psychologically, and never move past that.
In this passage from the Gospel of Mark that I included at the start of this writing, I think that this stuck way of thinking is exactly what Jesus experienced from the town’s people. They thought they had figured Him out. “Oh, He is just the carpenter’s son. We know His mother. They are just ordinary, same old, same old people just like us. Now He has started acting weird. He is going around preaching a bunch of weird stuff, and some people think He is a miracle worker, but we know better. It’s just plain old Jesus. He’s lived down the road from us all His life.”
Sometimes we behave this way, with people we know, with family members. We think we know them. We put them in little boxes. “She will always be that way…” “You know how he is…” Admittedly, some people do in fact get stuck in certain forms of behavior and become somewhat predictable. But I think God desires for us to move beyond that. He wants us to move beyond our stuck patterns of behavior, and He wants us to move beyond our stuck assessments of each other.
—–The religious leaders in Jesus’ day were looking for the Messiah, based on their reading of prophetic writings. However, they had a preconceived idea about what that Messiah was supposed to look like. Their interpretations were wrong, and Jesus did not fit their expectations. They were looking for a political, and military leader, much like King David, to lead them in overthrowing the oppression of the Roman government. They had read the Scriptures, but they did not understand what they had read, and they tried to make the prophecies fit into their paradigm. People still do this today. People come to the Scriptures with pre-conceived ideas and prejudices, and they take Scriptures out of context and try to make them fit into their paradigms, instead of letting the Scriptures speak truth to them.
God wants us to be in a place in our faith life where the Scriptures can speak truth to us, even when it contradicts what our own ideas are. The Scriptures are supposed to change us. They are supposed to broaden the base of love and forgiveness in our lives. They are supposed to expand the empathy we have for others. They are supposed to make us grow in our understanding and love for others who are different from ourselves.
Jesus never chided anyone for being wrong. He never chided anyone for spiritual and moral failure. (That does not mean that He approved of it, but He knew that we have enough guilt and condemnation on our own without Him having to tell us where we were wrong.) He did, however, chide those who were unwilling to admit that they were wrong, and those who were unwilling to change in the face of truth. He chided those with the “My way or the highway” mentality, those that strutted around acting as if they had it all figured out. He chided those who looked with contempt at others who did not meet up to their standards or expectations. He chided those who stereotyped others and were unwilling to change in their perception of those whom God had changed inside.
What I believe God would like for us to get out of all of this is that we have to end our standoffishness (not sure if that is a real word, but you know what it means) towards those we think we don’t like, those who irritate us, those who dislike us for whatever reason, who are different from us, those who don’t fit into our nice, neat categories and stereotypes.
People are a rich, multi-faceted and complex composition of many different influences, both genetically and culturally. We hinder our own growth when we don’t love and engage others in a meaningful way.
Stop for a moment today. Ask God to bring someone to mind that you have put in a box. Ask God to bring to mind someone that you think you have figured out. Ask God to bring to mind someone whom you have treated as the town’s people treated Jesus. Behind that person, God is watching you, and as He says, however you treat them, you are treating Him. In whatever way you confine them in your own mind, you are confining Him. That is why the Scripture says that Jesus was not able to work many miracles among them. Not because He lacked the supernatural power to do so, but because that is the way God intentionally limits Himself.
After you realize who that person is, or who those people are, intentionally, with God’s help, seek to engage that person and get to know the real person, not your version of them. You might be in for a very pleasant surprise. I have found out, not a few times, that the real person is much different than the version of them that I had created in my little brain. Many ideas I have had about people I thought I knew turned out to be totally wrong.
Danny's Stump 