Mark 6:3




'Then they scoffed, “He’s just a carpenter, the son of Mary and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon. And his sisters live right here among us.” They were deeply offended and refused to believe in him.'
This is an agonising moment. Jesus is rudely dismissed by the people of Nazareth. They can’t work out how someone who they have known for the past 30 years has such an amazing ministry. Some of the people may have been to school with Jesus. Others would have known him and Joseph through their business. Through the centuries it has been believed that Joseph, and presumably Jesus, were carpenters – although we can’t sure. The word in Greek describes people who worked with stone and metal as well as wood. However whatever their precise line of work, they would have had customers and so Jesus was being rejected by people who knew him well. And their rejection of him was brutal. They wanted nothing to do with him.
The people of Nazareth could only see Jesus in human terms. They knew his family and everything about him. They couldn’t bring themselves to believe that a local boy could be anything special. And that continues to be the challenge with Jesus. People are happy to see him as a remarkable human being. They warm to his teaching; they love the way in which he reached out to every kind of person; they are amazed by his miracles and impressed by his consistent love for people. But they want to leave him there. They are resistant to the idea of him being the Son of God. But Mark’s Gospel is good news only because Jesus was both human and divine at the same time. Only in that way was he able to bring salvation to the world and so, however dismissive people might be, we need to be absolutely clear that Jesus was both God and man.






Question: Why do you think the people of Nazareth were so reluctant to accept that Jesus was the Son of God?
Prayer: Lord Jesus Christ, I worship you and praise you for entering into the life of our world so fully. Amen

Released on 21 Oct 2022