Mark 6:1-6
Isn't That Mary's Boy
1Jesus went on from there and came to His hometown, accompanied by His disciples.
2When the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard Him were astonished. “Where did this man get these ideas?” they asked. “What is this wisdom He has been given? And how can He perform such miracles?
3Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? Aren’t His sisters here with us as well?” And they took offense at Him.
4Then Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household is a prophet without honor.”
5So He could not perform any miracles there, except to lay His hands on a few of the sick and heal them.
6And He was amazed at their unbelief. And He went around from village to village, teaching the people.
Berean Standard Bible
He goes home. Not to Jerusalem, and not to a city that had it in for him, but to Nazareth, where he grew up and where the neighbors had watched him learn a trade, and that is where the ache comes from.
He teaches in the synagogue on the Sabbath and it starts well enough. Mark says many who heard him were astonished, and then he lets the room talk.
“Where did this man get these ideas?” they asked. “What is this wisdom He has been given? And how can He perform such miracles? Isn’t this the carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joses, Judas, and Simon? Aren’t His sisters here with us as well?” And they took offense at Him.
It starts as three good questions. Anybody who had followed them a little further would have arrived somewhere. Then the room answers itself with a list of names, and every name on it is accurate, and the whole list is doing the work of a closed door. We know the family, we know the trade, we watched him grow up here, so whatever this is, it cannot be what it appears to be.
There is one odd note in the list. He is called the son of Mary, and in that world a man was named for his father, living or dead. Mark does not explain why this line runs through the mother instead, and neither will we, but the phrase was chosen by the people in that room and it does not sound warm.
Jesus answers with something that carries the ring of a proverb, about a prophet being without honor in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household. Then comes the verse that stops readers.
So He could not perform any miracles there, except to lay His hands on a few of the sick and heal them.
Mark does not write that he refused. He writes that he could not, and in the same breath he says a few sick people were healed anyway, which means the sentence is not describing a man who had run out of power. How it works is not explained, and people have read it several ways over a long time. What the passage says plainly is that a town's settled certainty about a boy it had watched grow up shut the door from the inside.
The passage opens with a crowd astonished at Jesus and closes with Jesus amazed at them. What surprised him at home was that they would not believe.
How We Know
Verse 5 is a hard sentence and Mark keeps it: he could not perform any miracles there, except to lay his hands on a few of the sick. Mark writes could not, not would not, and then adds in verse 6 that Jesus was amazed at their unbelief.
Preserving a limitation like that, about the central figure, gives modest evidence of candor. The account has not smoothed its own side at this point.
Verse 3 keeps something else awkward: the town identifies Jesus as the son of Mary and lists four brothers and unnamed sisters. Mark reports the town's words and does not correct them.
Questions
1 Who is the person here who has known you the longest?
AnswerWhoever it is, they have an advantage and a problem, and the people in this synagogue had both. They had known Jesus since he was a boy, they knew his mother and his brothers and sisters by name, and all of that turned out to be in the way.
2 The people asked good questions to start with. What did they do with them?
AnswerThey answered them with what they already knew. We know his family, we know his trade, we watched him grow up. Every one of those facts was true, and the facts were used to shut the door rather than open it.
3 What does Mark say Jesus could not do there, and what did he do anyway?
AnswerHe could not perform any miracles there, except to lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. The passage does not explain how both halves of that are true, so we are not going to pretend we can either.
4 The passage begins with a crowd astonished at Jesus. How does it end?
AnswerWith Jesus amazed at them, at their unbelief. What caught him off guard in his own hometown was that the people there would not believe him.
What This Means for Us
Familiarity is not the same thing as knowing somebody, and it is very good at pretending to be. These people had a lifetime of information about Jesus, and the information is exactly what got in the way, because once you are certain you know what somebody is, you stop looking at them.
There is a person at this table you have decided you already understand. A brother, a sister, a parent. You know their patterns and you are usually right, and being usually right is how you stop noticing when they change.
So ask somebody here a question you assume you know the answer to. Then be quiet long enough to be surprised.
Prayer
Father, we get so used to people that we stop seeing them, and we do it to you too. Forgive us for deciding we already know. Open our eyes at our own table, and keep us from missing you because you came in through a familiar door. Amen.