EPISODE 146 GOSPEL OF MARK CHAPTER 6 "The homecoming"

Welcome to Share the Word. One of the focuses of today's podcast hovers over the aspect of rejection and disbelief from those who are so close to Jesus that they can't begin to see the truth in spite of the evidence. Perhaps the forest for the trees? Let's listen in. Mark chapter 6, The Homecoming. My how perceptions change.

When I was young, I used to follow the sport of boxing, probably because my dad liked it. I grew up in the golden era of professional boxing with fighters like Roberto Duran, Thomas the Hitman Hearns, Sugar Ray Leonard duking it out in the ring. Those were the guys my size, and I followed that weight class. But of course, the heavyweights always get the most attention: champs like Joe Frazier, George Foreman, and of course Muhammad Ali. Ali probably best illustrates the big idea I want to flesh out in today's podcast. When I first heard of Muhammad Ali the fighter, it wasn't even Muhammad Ali yet.

When he won the heavyweight title by beating the champ at the time named Sonny Liston, he was still known by his given name, which was Cassius Clay. He was a very brash and unusually self-confident young man from Louisville, Kentucky. When he first burst onto the boxing scene, he was as known for his mouth as he was for what he did in the ring. In fact, he was tagged with the nickname The Louisville Lip. He made up poems about what round he'd knock his next opponent in and talked about how beautiful his face was. He called himself The Greatest.

Most people didn't like him then. That's what I remember. It made matters worse when he changed his name to Muhammad Ali and joined a fringe religious group. Other fighters and their promoters refused to call him by that name at first and kept calling him Cassius Clay. People wanted the former heavyweight champ Sonny Liston to knock his block off in a rematch and put him in his place. But at the rematch, he couldn't, and Ali won again and kept winning over big names at the time like Archie Moore and Floyd Patterson and many others.

Things really came to a head when he was drafted into the Army in 1967 because instead of reporting, this was the early days of the Vietnam War, he claimed he was a conscientious objector now based on his new religion. A court didn't agree, and Ali was suspended from professional boxing for three whole years. You'd think that would be the end of him because boxers have a notoriously short shelf life. But after the suspension was lifted, Ali made a comeback, and he beat Jerry Quarry in his first fight in three rounds. Some in the boxing world at the time likened it to the resurrection, and he continued to win, regaining the heavyweight title and defending it several times in huge fights against Joe Frazier, who can forget the Thrilla in Manila, or the Rumble in the Jungle where he outmaneuvered Big Bad George Foreman with his rope-a-dope tactic.

I can't even express how many people wanted Ali to get destroyed by Foreman, who was an American Olympic champion, a young man who had paraded around the ring proudly waving an American flag after he won the gold medal at the '68 Olympics in Mexico City. Every Vietnam War vet for sure, and a lot of other people on the right flank of American body politic for sure, wanted to see Ali brought down. Ali beat Foreman too, and a lot of other good fighters after him throughout the 1970s. By the time he finally hung up his gloves and retired from boxing, he'd become a legend in the sport. Ever since he was the young brash fighter from Louisville, Kentucky, he'd been calling himself the greatest. By the time his career was over, he was acknowledged by virtually everyone in the sport of boxing to be just that, the greatest heavyweight of all time.

He died in the summer of 2016 after suffering many years from Parkinson's disease. The last time I remember seeing Ali publicly was at the opening of the Summer Olympics in Atlanta a decade before that. His hands were visibly shaking then as he stood on the podium and lit the torch for the opening of the games. If you Google that scene, it's hard not to get goosebumps now. One article I remember seeing about his death in 2016 asked, Why do we love Muhammad Ali? Because we hated him first.

At his homecoming funeral in Louisville, American presidents sent tributes. And if you visit Louisville today, his hometown, you'll have a hard time finding anyone around anymore who will admit to being offended by the Louisville lip of long ago. Today, the airport is named the Muhammad Ali International Airport. The Muhammad Ali Boulevard runs through the city, and downtown civic center is named the Muhammad Ali Center. There's a festival every summer that lasts a week in honor of Muhammad Ali. How times and perspectives have changed.

Not an exact parallel, to be sure, but that's the best analogy I could come up with to what Mark 6 tells us about Jesus' early reception in his hometown. The city of Nazareth today in south central Galilee is the largest Arab city in the nation of Israel. Most people outside that country probably don't realize that more than 20 percent of Israeli citizens are actually ethnic Arabs, and Nazareth is almost 100 percent Arab. But in Jesus' day, this place was a small Jewish town estimated to have a population of around 500, large enough to have a synagogue, but a very unremarkable place. One of Jesus' own disciples, when first told about Jesus of Nazareth by his friends, asked sarcastically, Can any good thing come out of Nazareth? As we've seen, when Jesus began his public ministry, he left Nazareth to do so.

All the things we've been talking about so far in Mark's Gospel have been happening in Capernaum, in the vicinity of the Sea of Galilee to the east. But chapter 6 begins by describing Jesus returning to his hometown, where his family still lived. He's been gone some time now, perhaps a year, so this is well after his fame has spread across Galilee and beyond because of all the astounding things people have seen and heard from him. Here's how Peter briefly told Mark the homecoming went. So he went away from there, that is Capernaum, and came to his own hometown, and his disciples followed him. When the Sabbath day came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him there were astonished.

Where did this man get these things? they said. What is this wisdom that's been given to him? How are all these miracles performed by his hands? Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon? Aren't his sisters here with us?

So they were offended by him. Then Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own household. As a result, he was not able to do many miracles there except for laying his hands on a few sick people and healing them. And he was amazed at their unbelief. You know, there are fanciful stories about Jesus doing miracles when he was a child in Nazareth. In one second-century document known as the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the young boy Jesus fashioned birds from clay and made them come alive and fly.

And he also struck some neighbors he didn't like with blindness and healed one of his brothers from a deadly snakebite. Of course, that's all apocryphal nonsense. Jesus never did anything miraculous until after he was baptized by John the Baptist, when the Holy Spirit came on him to empower him for his public ministry at about 30 years of age. He grew up in this small town where everyone probably knew everyone, half of them were related, like many other small rural communities anywhere in the world. The people in Nazareth knew Jesus as one of the local boys and as someone who worked in his family's carpentry business as he grew older. Joseph must have died during the years Jesus was growing up because he's never mentioned again in the Gospels after that mishap at the temple when Jesus was 12 years old.

At the point of this visit back to Nazareth, we read in Mark chapter 6, he, Jesus, was still thought of in his hometown as the carpenter, apparently having taken over the business from Joseph at some point. Another interesting tidbit to me here: the locals referred to him as the son of Mary. Did you notice that? Mark quotes them as calling him that. If people in his village believed he was Joseph's biological son, even after Joseph's death, Jesus would have been known as Jesus, the son of Joseph. The only time a son would be identified as Jesus was, that is, as Jesus, the son of Mary, with only a connection to their mother, is if the child was illegitimate, born out of wedlock.

So, this was likely the local scuttlebutt, no doubt dating back to the time when a very pregnant young Mary left this village with Joseph, not yet being married. Calling Jesus the son of Mary in that conservative culture was an insult. Make no mistake about that. It suggested that Jesus was, in fact, a bastard, to use the rough word. And this notion followed him in his public ministry. I remember at least twice in the Gospel of John where he was insulted in this same way by religious opponents in Jerusalem.

We're the sons of Abraham, they said to him tauntingly, but nobody knows whose son you are. After the rise of Christianity, Jewish opponents still wrote and spoke about this, some even going as far as naming who they suspected was Jesus' real father. Of course, the Bible admits Joseph was not Jesus' biological father, although he treated him as his own son. Joseph was assured by God in a dream, remember, that Mary's pregnancy was, in fact, caused by a miracle of the Holy Spirit, that Jesus was, in fact, the Son of God. But back in Nazareth, at the synagogue, this is the place he attended for his first 30 years to worship with his family. He was known as Jesus the carpenter, you know, Mary's illegitimate son.

He returns there apparently now a rabbi somehow, and with a group of disciples in tow. This must have seemed more than a little bit odd to the locals. Nevertheless, in democratic fashion, he was offered the opportunity to speak at the next Sabbath service. Mark doesn't tell us the passage of the Old Testament that was read or any of the contents of Jesus' sermon that day, but only that the reaction in the place was to him of one of astonishment. No one could figure out where he'd gotten the skill he had in speaking and the authority with which he spoke, much less the power they had heard he had to do miracles. He's just a young guy who grew up here working in his father's woodshop.

His younger siblings are all still here with us. He's never been to rabbinical school. He's never had any formal training. Ever hear the saying, familiarity breeds contempt? These town folks who had watched Jesus come of age apparently never thought of him as anything special. So how does he come back now with a band of disciples and start preaching in our synagogue this way to us?

This was the take most of them had. And it says in verse 3, they were offended at him. The Greek term there is skandalizo. They were scandalized by him. They couldn't buy it. Something was wrong with this picture.

Jesus' response to them was, A prophet is never without honor except in his own hometown, among his own relatives, and his own household. And Peter told Mark, for his part, Jesus was amazed at their unbelief. Among those in unbelief there who refused to believe Jesus was anything special were not only the townspeople he grew up around, but even members of his own household, his brothers and his sisters. These were the natural children of Joseph and Mary who were younger than Jesus. Just as the rest of the hometown people, they didn't believe in him because they didn't want to believe in him. How could they?

He was just one of them. They were actually offended at the notion that Jesus, from the carpentry shop, would now be claiming to be someone special sent from God, telling them to repent and get ready for the kingdom of God. Their attitude was, Why would we ever need anything this one has to offer? The Gospel of Luke expands on this occasion when Jesus returned to Nazareth. It says there that some in attendance were so outraged by some of the things Jesus was claiming that they thought they should kill him. But God protected him from them, and he left that place to minister in more hospitable towns and villages of Galilee.

The word translated offended, as I said there in verse 3, they were offended at him, comes up in the preaching and teaching of his apostles later in the New Testament. The word comes from the root idea of stumbling over or tripping over. Listen to how the apostle Peter, who was there that day in Nazareth at the synagogue and saw the hometown people's reaction to Jesus, as well as heard Jesus' response to them, listen to how Peter expresses the reaction to Jesus that he witnessed. This is from 1 Peter chapter 2, and he begins with an Old Testament quotation that he thinks is appropriate. Look, I lay a stone in Zion, a chosen and honored cornerstone, and the one who believes in him will never be put to shame. So honor will come to you if you believe in him.

But for the unbelieving, the stone that the builders rejected, this one has become the cornerstone and a stone to stumble over and a rock to trip over. I remember doing an entire episode on this idea of Jesus being the cornerstone when we were at Luke chapter 20. It's episode 42. The Jews at Nazareth, Jesus' own townsfolk, were so put off by the suggestion he could be someone sent from God, someone they needed to listen to, that they stumbled over him. They wouldn't listen to him at all or in any way be open to the fact because he was too familiar to them, and he didn't fit their messianic expectations anyway. While we who believe in Jesus, as Peter says, see him as the cornerstone of everything God was doing, making a way of salvation for us, building his church, empowering his apostles to pursue the Great Commission, really everything.

It's all about Jesus. It's all built on him, who he was and what he did. His own home folk dismissed him out of hand. We build our lives and our hope on the solid rock, while they stumbled over the same rock. And not only refused to believe into Jesus, they were offended even at the notion that they needed to, that he had anything to offer that they needed. I have a very hard time passing up online discussions about Jesus and Christianity.

Just this past week, I engaged with someone on a public forum who was scoffing at the naivete of Christians. You know how dumb we are, how easily we believe in myths from the past which have no foundation in facts, etc., etc. I answered the person's charges calmly, not so much for his sake, because he seemed like a scoffer, and Jesus told his disciples, Don't cast your pearls before swine, but I answered as calmly as I could for the sake of others who might read this discussion later. One thing I tried to point out to the guy was, why is he so hostile? Why would reading someone else saying something positive about Jesus and what their relationship with God through him has meant in their lives set him off the way he did, make him go on a diatribe against all Christians?

I asked him, Why are you so offended by the idea of God and Jesus, but you tell me at the same time you think they're unreal, that they are made up? As a Christian, I'm not offended at someone who believes in Zeus or Buddha or whatever gods they have made up. Why would I be offended if I think they are unreal? I'm still waiting for an answer to that. The truth is, I'm convinced of this anyway. Many unbelievers are offended and stumble over the message of Christ precisely because that message puts a finger on a tender spot.

It reminds them that they are answerable to God, that they are responsible to a holy God. They react against that. But God, in our accountability to Him, is a reality, I'm afraid, is embedded in every human heart, that we are God's creatures and are answerable to Him at some point. So for some, anything that in any way kind of pushes that button produces a response of anger and defensiveness, unprovoked hostility. Jesus produced that response often, and He's still producing it now when people hear His Word. The Apostle John wrote, Jesus came to His own people, and His own people did not receive Him.

But to as many as receive Him, who believe into His name, to them is given the authority to become God's children. I hope you received Him and believed into who He was and what He did for you on the cross. A real relationship with God is not something you inherit or are included in because of your family. Even Jesus' mother and His brothers and sisters had to make that decision to believe into Jesus for themselves. We know for sure that Mary did. Two of His brothers mentioned here, James and Jude, did.

Eventually, they are counted among the early Christians we read about in the Book of Acts. But it's unclear about the rest. Even more unclear about the other townsfolk who were offended at Jesus that day, that He would reappear in their town and presume to speak for God to them. As for Jesus, Mark writes, He was astonished at the hardness of their hearts. What else could he show them that he had not been showing them to prove God's hand was on him? Not pushing himself on anyone who was not open to believe, however, just as he had across the Sea of Galilee when the people there asked him to leave their country, he moved on from his hometown of Nazareth to teach in other villages around Galilee.

It's sad that those closest to Jesus, for the most part, did not appreciate him or accept him. With all the 20/20 hindsight that we have, I hope no one listening makes their mistake. As this chapter proceeds, Jesus for the first time sends out his disciples in pairs, multiplying his ministry, and they were sent to preach the gospel of the kingdom in many more towns and villages in Israel. And he told them that if people accepted their message, to stay on in that place and minister. But if people rejected their message, to shake off the dust of that place from the sandals on their feet and move on. That's what struck me as the parallel to the story of Muhammad Ali I began with.

More people than not did not accept Jesus when he was here. He was disliked for who he was, where he came from, and because of his seemingly outrageous claims. As Ali was not the kind of champion most people wanted in 1960s America, many people were offended at him. Jesus was not the kind of Messiah most people in Israel wanted in his generation, and they were offended at him. The suggestion he could be the Messiah was scandalous to them, and most were relieved when he disappeared from the scene. But one day, possibly soon, Jesus is going to make his triumphant comeback, and when he returns, everyone is going to realize at that point and acknowledge at that point that he is everything that he claimed to be, that he is in fact the greatest, and he will be given the honor and glory he deserves for having endured the rejection and the suffering that he did to become our Savior.

Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the great I Am, the King of Kings, and every knee will bow and every tongue will confess at that time He is Lord to the glory of God the Father. This is Paul for Share the Word. Thanks, Paul. Why do we seem to struggle with belief? How many times have you heard, I'll believe it when I see it, or, I saw it with my own eyes and I still don't believe it? Even with evidence, our emotions and our attempts to control everything has us doubting the truth at times.

Even today, how often have you heard the headlines about local boy makes good, as though it was a complete impossibility? I can't begin to imagine the disappointment that Jesus must have felt about the skepticism his own family and friends had, and yet he continued to do the will of his Father. Jesus has tasked us to continue his work with the Great Commission. But when you come up against disappointment and disbelief from your hometown, do you keep going or simply give up? Think about if Muhammad Ali had given up. From all of us at Share the Word, our blessings and prayers go out to all of you.