Hometown Blues

Music in the Air . . . 

“When Jesus had finished these parables, he moved on from there. Coming to his hometown, he began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed.
    “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?” they asked. “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? Aren’t all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?”
    And they took offense at him.
    But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town and in his own home.” (Matthew 13:53-57, NIV)

An interesting anecdote, this, particularly in that people first marvel at Jesus’ wisdom and powers and then take offense at it, supposedly because he’s just a . . . what, local show-off? Presumably the offense lies in his being an upstart, a “who does this guy think he is?” problem. How they are able to dismiss later what they recognized as genius on first impression escapes me. But talented kids in school classes often draw resentment; the harshest critics of Mennonite writers like Rudy Wiebe have always been fellow Mennonites.

“A prophet is not without honour . . . except in his own town and in his own home,” could be rephrased, “You might be honoured when you speak wisdom, but don’t expect that honour to come from the people with whom you grew up.” It would have sounded arrogant in his home-town synagogue, declaring himself a prophet when two-thirds of his audience were older than he and a whole bunch of them were educated Pharisees and Scribes.

Maybe just another reason among many to reject his radical teaching, though.

There were other reasons, obviously. We don’t know what he said in that synagogue encounter, but if it resembled the Sermon on the Mount, his audience would have to have tasted a dose of judgment, a call for repentance and admonitions that would have demanded serious life changes, none of which sat well with the audience, apparently. Most of us, most of the time, evaluate a teacher, preacher, “prophet,” on the basis of his/her support for what we already think, how we already live. Perhaps it was his “You have heard it said, but I say to you,” that rubbed them the wrong way.

The sermon part of the pastor’s role presents a weekly challenge: how will I deal with the tension between my own longing for acceptance, maybe even praise . . . and my obligation to be forthright, honest and objective when presenting the word? The same challenge faces every teacher in every classroom, every parent trying to raise a child well, every one of us at one time or another . . .

. . . and every Son of Man facing a home-town audience in Nazareth in about 30 A.D.