Rejected at Home

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I’ve noticed when somebody comes from a ways away, there can be a little bit of excitement about them. Being there, I remember when I was in college, a friend of mine from church that I had gone to high school with, he went off to school in Arkansas, and I remember him coming back for the big Thanksgiving dinner at our church, and everybody was so excited to see him, because he had come all the way from Arkansas, And I thought, well, I drove back from Norman today. Nobody’s excited to see me.

But, you know, you get used to somebody being around all the time, and you can kind of overlook that person. I noticed there’s a big difference between being a guest speaker and being an all-the-time speaker. Like, I started out in ministry as a pulpit supply person.

I was the guy that the pastor would call if he started throwing up at 6 o’clock in the morning on Sunday and needed somebody to drive to Ponca City. Well, okay. And so I spent several years before I started pastoring, just driving all over Oklahoma, filling in at these various churches.

And those people, they just love you. You’ve experienced this too. Yes, they just, they think you are the best thing ever.

And then I became a pastor at my own church. And I experienced that the first Sunday. And after that, it was like, oh, you again, right?

And I don’t say, we don’t do it for the admiration. So I’m not saying that at all. I’m not saying that because that would make me uncomfortable if y’all came up and slobbered all over me every day.

Somebody now, just to be funny, is going to run up and act like I’m one of the Beatles next time you see me. Don’t do that. Don’t be that person, all right?

that’s not the point. But I just noticed from that experience, and it’s true, it’s true. I picked up on this when we went to the apologetics conference a few weeks ago.

You know, they had the guest speaker that had flown in from Florida, and everybody, people were lined up afterwards to talk to that speaker, and people were lined up to talk to the guy from the North American Mission board. Brilliant professor there at OBU and nobody’s lined up to see him because he’s there all the time. Why do they care?

It’s just human nature. It’s just human nature. Abigail lights up when I walk in because I’ve been gone all day.

You know, that’s just part of it. We gravitate toward the new. We get excited about the new.

People who are from here don’t get as warm a reception. And Jesus experienced something similar to that when he returned home to teach in Mark chapter 6 that we’re going to look at tonight. When he returned home to teach, they weren’t super excited.

Nobody lit up to see Jesus. Granted, he’d been gone for a little while, so I don’t know that my thesis really holds up there. But Jesus being from there, they weren’t just all that enthusiastic to hear what he had to say.

And so we’re going to be in Mark chapter 6. We’ve been working our way through the book of Mark on Sunday night. And we’ve finally, it’s been close to a year now we’ve been doing this.

Of course, it doesn’t help that there are a lot of Sunday nights we don’t have services. I blame that and not just me camping out everywhere in Mark. But we’re finally to chapter 6 after about a year.

Did not expect to take this long. But we’re going to start in verse 1. If you find it in your Bible, if you would stand with me as we read together from God’s Word, if you can do it without too much trouble.

It’ll also be on the screen for you if you don’t have your Bible with you tonight. But Mark chapter 6, and we’re going to look at the first six verses tonight and see what Jesus experienced. It says, Then he went out of there and came to his own country, and his disciples followed him.

And when the Sabbath had come, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many hearing him were astonished, saying, Where did this man get these things? And what wisdom is this which is given him, that such mighty works are performed by his hands? Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon?

And are not his sisters here with us? So they were offended at him. But Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor except in his own country, among his own relatives, and in his own house.

Now he could do no mighty work there except that he laid hands on a few sick people and healed them. And he marveled because of their unbelief. Then he went about the villages in a circuit, teaching.

And you may be seated. So what’s happened? Jesus, after his very full day or so, a lot of the chapters we’ve just looked at took place, and I don’t remember offhand, but it’s maybe three days at the longest, a little over a day somewhere in there.

He’s been very busy up to this point. And he gets back on a boat. He goes back across.

He goes up to Nazareth. It says back to his own country. That’s to Nazareth.

He takes his disciples with him and he goes into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and he begins to teach. He begins to teach and it upset the people. It upset the people.

And what upset them was what he, not just what he had to say and not just what he could show them, but what it revealed about who he was. Because you notice their response was, wait, didn’t he just Jesus from around these parts? Didn’t he grow up around here?

It didn’t fit with their expectations, which we’ll get to in just a minute. But part of Jesus’ teaching and his miracles, it was all there to reveal who he is. We focused on the miracles largely up to this point in the book of Mark and what they reveal about who Jesus is.

But the Gospels make it clear that even his teaching pointed to him being more than just a teacher. pointed to him being more than just a man. Way back in chapter 1, if you remember that far back, when he had been at Capernaum, which is not too far from Nazareth, it says they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.

So he wasn’t just, these earthly teachers, they had to have some pedigree of authority. You had to be able to say, well, I was trained under this rabbi who was trained under this rabbi, under this rabbi. you had to have some line of authority behind you.

But the people at Capernaum recognized he doesn’t talk like them. He doesn’t teach like them. He teaches like someone who has actual authority, who’s not just relying on what so-and-so said.

But Jesus would say, you’ve heard it said. And never was he correcting the law. He was correcting their misinterpretations of the law.

But Jesus didn’t go, he would say, you’ve heard it said, you’ve heard this interpretation of the law, you’ve heard this rabbi, you’ve heard this teacher, but I tell you. Where everybody else would say, well, according to so-and-so and according to the commentaries, Jesus didn’t need those things. He said, you’ve heard, but I say.

That’s a pretty bold claim. And so Jesus came in and teach, not sure what happened there. Jesus came in and taught and it upset them because of what he was revealing about himself.

And what we need to understand from this tonight is that Jesus reveals who he is if we’re paying attention. Even today, Jesus reveals who he is. You may wonder, well, how is that the case if Jesus is not walking around in physical form doing miracles and teaching.

Jesus has revealed himself in his word. We know who Jesus is because of his word right here. And we can go to these pages and we can see the truth about who Jesus is.

And I believe that in every book of the 66 in here, it teaches us something about Jesus. It points to Jesus in some way, each of them. Jesus is all throughout the pages of this book, not just in the Gospels and not just in the letters that followed.

Jesus is even there in the Old Testament. We can look at the Old Testament sacrifices and learn something about what Jesus came to be. We can look at the law and we can see the high bar of holiness that we could never attain to and understand something about Jesus.

We can look back at the earliest pages of the Bible, back in Genesis chapter 3, and we can see pictures of Jesus already being portrayed. as God promises that there would be one who would crush the seed of the woman who would crush the serpent’s head. He’s talking about Jesus.

I believe that when he made the covering of skins for Adam and Eve, that it was a picture of Jesus because the skins had to come off an animal. It used to be an animal that wore those skins. That animal had to die to give up the skins, and the animal was not guilty of what Adam and Eve had done. And so we see the first instance in history of the innocent dying to cover the sins of the guilty.

But you can go back even further than that. In Genesis chapter 1, it says, let us make man in our image. God does not have a multiple personality.

I believe it’s the persons of the Trinity talking amongst themselves. So all throughout the Scriptures, we see the truth of who Jesus is. And we need to understand that Jesus has made it His habit to reveal Himself to us if we are just paying attention.

And to them, He revealed His nature through miracles. They said in verse 2, they asked, what wisdom is this which is given to him that such mighty works are performed by his hands? Now, he didn’t perform many miracles in Nazareth.

It tells us that he didn’t perform many while he was there. And particularly before this moment, he didn’t have a lot of time to perform miracles, but evidently they had heard about him. Word had gotten around.

You know, I don’t think human nature has changed all that much, and stories get around nowadays, don’t they? I’m sure gotten around about the things that he had done, things that people had seen just across the Sea of Galilee. Some of the things that they had heard before this time.

One thing I like to do, considering we can put some of these stories in more or less chronological order, I like to go back and as I try to understand some of these exchanges that Jesus has with the scribes or the Pharisees or other Jewish people or authorities. I like to go back and see what happened before this. And so I went back this week, and as best I could tell, before this time, Jesus had publicly healed at least 12 people.

He’d healed them of various ailments, including blindness, deafness, and leprosy. By this time, he had cast out demons from at least five people. He had raised at least two people from the dead.

He had calmed a storm and he had turned water into wine. All in front of witnesses by this time. Just knowing what I know about human nature, I can almost guarantee you some or all of those stories had gotten back to the people at Nazareth.

And that’s why they said, how can this be that such mighty works are performed by his hands? It’s probably what they were referring to in verse 2. They had access to all this evidence, all these eyewitness accounts of what had gone on with Jesus.

He had revealed himself in his miracles. He had revealed himself in his teaching. That’s why in verse 2 they said, where did this man get these things?

Where did he get these ideas, these incredible teachings that he’s bringing to us? Where did this come from? And to us, Jesus has revealed himself in the scriptures.

We can see him. We can know him if we’re willing to pay attention. Jesus was not meant to be a mystery.

I get so puzzled sometimes when I hear somebody saying, this is what God said. And somebody will respond with some kind of mocking or derision. Oh, it must be really comforting to be so sure that you know what God wants.

He told us, it’s not rocket science. I mean, it’s not like I had to go figure it out. He tells us.

And people say, well, you can’t know what the Bible actually means because people disagree. Sure, you can. And if we just read it correctly, we’ll agree more often than not.

I recognize that I’m sure there are some things I’m wrong about. I don’t think I’m wrong about the big things, but they’ll point to all the different Christian interpretations. When it comes to the big things, there’s a lot of agreement.

Even outside of Southern Baptist churches, there’s a lot of Christians that we would agree with on our understanding of the gospel, what Jesus did on the cross. I mean, a lot of our disagreements are in secondary things. Not all, but a lot of them.

So we can look at his word and we can know him. Jesus, he’s not hiding. Right?

If he was hiding, I mean, I know he told people at that time, don’t tell anybody when he was talking to the Jews. When he was talking to the Gentiles, he said, go tell everybody. But when he was talking to his own people, he said, keep it quiet.

That was just for now. But for us today, he’s not hiding. He wouldn’t have left this record for us.

He wouldn’t have by His Holy Spirit inspired these men to write this record. We can see Him and we can know Him if we’re willing to pay attention. They could have seen Him and known Him for who He is if they were paying attention.

But what we see happen with them is what happens so often today that people often reject Jesus when He doesn’t conform to their expectations. See, they thought they knew Jesus. They thought they knew what Jesus was about.

They said in verse 3, Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon? Are not his sisters here with us? So they knew his background.

They knew his family. They knew his upbringing. And so they had certain expectations about what box he was going to fit in.

We do this with people. And it gets done with us. We think that people go in a certain box because we know certain things about them, and we expect them to just be a certain way.

They had that expectation about Jesus. He’s just the kid that grew up here working in the carpenter shop. Who does he think he is?

And there’s a lot that the Bible doesn’t tell us about the time between Jesus’ birth and the start of his public ministry. And people have invented all sorts of stories to fill in those gaps. There’s all sorts of so-called lost gospels.

I think the Quran invented some stories, or maybe the Hadith. one of the Islamic books invents some stories about some odd things that Jesus did, supposedly. But this tells me, and I’ve wondered because of that, what was it like growing up with the Son of God?

I mean, some of us may have had that sibling that we thought they never got in trouble. They were always the favorite. Some of us may have been that sibling.

But you’ve got to think, okay, that would be hard growing up with somebody who’s perfect. Somebody who could do all these miraculous things. The Bible does teach that Jesus was without sin.

And so I know he didn’t do things wrong, didn’t cause trouble, didn’t make trouble. But as far as him doing miraculous things, as far as him talking about being the son of God, as far as him letting on throughout his childhood and his upbringing about who he is, this passage makes me think he played those cards close to the vest, that maybe he didn’t at that time show who he was. Because when they got to see who he was, they were shocked.

It didn’t fit their expectations at all. I mean, it’s just the kid from the carpenter shop. And so when he came back teaching these remarkable truths about the kingdom of God, when he came in teaching with this amazing degree of authority, when he came in backing up that authority with all these incredible signs, these miracles that he had done, they couldn’t believe it.

They could not believe that he could be everything that he claimed to be. no I don’t buy it it doesn’t fit with everything I’ve seen it says in verse 3 they were offended at him this word offended I’ll tell you a couple of the songs tonight that we sang I had never heard before today I had to step out of practice early so one of them I had never heard until we played it just a minute ago you might have been able to tell but I’ve noticed some modern Christian music, not all, but some of it, is about as spiritually nutritious as marshmallow fluff, right? And I’ve heard a number of songs that just, it could be a love song and somebody just inserted the word God so they could get played on Caleb.

You know, it doesn’t mean anything. And so I’m always listening to the content of the songs. And I don’t care where it came from or what the music sounds like if it’s got a a good biblical message and by the way that’s one of the things that I loved about your song Kaylee it was just rich deep theology and the music was beautiful too but I just I just love the words to it and so anyway I’m where I’m going with this I was listening to one of the songs this morning in rehearsal and it said it’s nothing less than scandalous talking about his grace and and red lights start going off in my brain I don’t think that’s a good description And then I remembered what I’d studied.

I’m not calling Christy out here publicly. I’m just telling you, this thought flashed through my head, and then I remembered studying this passage this week, where it says they were offended in him. That word there in Greek is skandalizo.

It’s a verb. It means they were scandalized. It’s where we get the word scandal. And it comes from another word, a noun, skandalon, which means a stumbling block.

They were scandalized by Jesus. So my being scandalized by the word scandalous, you know, I was wrong to be offended. It was just a split second, me thinking, that word doesn’t fit, but it does.

They were scandalized by Jesus. I picture them swooning and gasping and clutching their pearls that he would have the audacity to say these things about himself. The truth about Jesus was a stumbling block to them.

It was something that they could not wrap their brains around. It was something that was so foreign to their expectations of who they thought he was that they just couldn’t deal with it. They couldn’t resolve it in their minds.

This word scandalized or offended, it doesn’t mean that they were offended in the sense of being insulted necessarily, although there may have been some of that as well. It’s more like they were just tripped up by the idea that he could be more than just a simple village carpenter. They just couldn’t reconcile what they thought they knew with what they saw in front of them.

And there’s something that I learned about in college called cognitive dissonance. It’s where there are two ideas that we have in our brains that don’t work together. Dissonance is when I hit a really sour chord because the notes don’t fit together.

And it causes me to cringe. Same thing with cognitive dissonance. It’s when two thoughts don’t fit together and they make us uncomfortable.

And we can’t, it’s just part of our thought process. We can’t live with cognitive dissonance. We have to resolve it some way or another.

We have to explain away one or both of the thoughts. We have to ignore one of the thoughts. We have to invent some way to get rid of it.

And so when they’re presented with all of our experience, says he is a simple village carpenter. that’s mary and joseph’s son and here in front of us we see he’s teaching that he’s got this authority he he he claims to speak for god he’s got these miracles to back it up these two things don’t fit together they’ve got to find one some way to resolve it or they’ve got to get rid of one of the ideas and so they did the easiest one they they looked at the newest idea and said we’re not even going to engage with that and they just tossed it aside they could not reconcile what he claimed and what he demonstrated with what they expected. So they just rejected everything he claimed and demonstrated.

And that happens today too. It happens all the time today. Jesus doesn’t turn out to be what people expect or what they hope.

He doesn’t conform to their beliefs and so they reject him for that reason. Whenever we hear the phrase, the Jesus that I worship or the Jesus that I believe in would not ever, and you fill in the blank, usually we’re talking about a Jesus who’s different from the Jesus of the Bible. People have these expectations of what they think Jesus is.

He’s just sweetness and love and he’s whatever you want to do, it’s fine. He’s just unconditionally accepting of everybody. And then we see the Jesus of the Gospels who preaches against sin, who calls people to repentance.

And when those two things don’t line up, people will often reject the Jesus of the Bible because he doesn’t fit their expectations. But here’s the bottom line. Here’s what even Jesus teaches about himself in this passage, and that’s that Jesus is who he claimed whether we accept it or not.

He is who he claims whether I accept it or not. And I’ve used the, this is not a difficult concept, because I’ve used the example all the time, or not all the time, It’s not like I say it every breath. But I’ve used it a lot of times is what I meant to say.

That people will do this after every election now. It’s just a thing that we do as a society. Trump gets elected, he’s not my president.

Biden gets elected, he’s not my president. I’m pretty sure both of those guys have been sitting in the Oval Office. I hate to break it to you.

Regardless of which side of the aisle you’re on. Pretty sure that guy gets to sign bills whether we accept it or not. You don’t have to like it, but it’s where we are.

There’s all sorts of things that are true whether we accept them or not. I don’t always like gravity, but it’s true whether I accept it or not, right? I don’t necessarily like the speed limit, but it’s the law whether I accept it or not.

Same thing applies. Jesus is who he claimed. My acceptance or rejection of those claims doesn’t change the truthfulness of those claims. See, Jesus, when they said, no, he can’t possibly, who does he think he is?

Isn’t he just the simple carpenter? Jesus didn’t back off of those claims in response just because people didn’t accept him. Jesus didn’t say, well, maybe I’ve got to think of a better way to convince them.

Here’s what he said. Look at verse 4. A prophet is not without honor except in his own country among his own relatives and in his own house.

Now this was a part of this comes from a saying that was fairly common around that time and as a saying the meaning of it is is similar to our saying that familiarity breeds contempt you know that the closer sometimes the closer you get to somebody the more I don’t want it I don’t necessarily want to say contemptuous but you know it does something to the relationship when you see somebody warts and all but notice what he says here using the term prophet. He’s talking about himself. We think of a prophet being somebody who tells the future.

That’s only part of the meaning, biblically. That was part of the job, but the reason why they sometimes told the future is because it’s part of the actual job of the prophet, which is to speak for God. That’s what a prophet is, somebody who speaks on God’s behalf, somebody who brings revelation from God.

Sometimes that involves telling the future, but not always. See, when the prophets of the Old Testament would speak on God’s behalf and say, you must repent. It’s not necessarily foretelling the future, but it’s a word from God nonetheless.

Jesus here calling himself a prophet, he’s saying, I speak for God. A prophet is not without honor except in his own country. You in my own country, you may not accept it because you’ve got these ideas of who I am, but it doesn’t change the fact that I speak for God.

And in addition, he indicates that this kind the thing is what happens all the time with those who are sent by God to speak for God. They tend to be rejected most firmly by those who should receive the message and receive them most enthusiastically. You know, in the Old Testament, we see Jonah go to Nineveh to the Assyrians who were so brutal, and they repented at his preaching.

We see the prophet Jeremiah go to the people of Israel who were his own people, God’s own people, and they locked him up. Jesus talks about the Israelites persecuting the prophets who came before. Many of the Old Testament prophets were rejected.

Many of them were persecuted. Many of them were even killed by their own people. And Jesus himself, he wasn’t just rejected by Nazareth specifically.

He was rejected by and large by Israel, but embraced by the Gentiles. Now as a prophet, as somebody speaking for God, as somebody in that role, he should have been enthusiastically received by God’s people, but that wasn’t the case. So Jesus was laying it out there and saying, I speak for God whether you accept it or not.

Their rejection didn’t diminish who he is. I want to look at verses 5 and 6 fairly quickly now. It says in verse 5, he could do no mighty work there except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.

Now, there’s mention of this in your handout if you take a moment to look at it. But we need to talk for just a second about this phrase that he could do no mighty work. Now, that doesn’t mean that Jesus was unable to do miracles.

Jesus is not. . .

Is it Peter Pan where the play, not the movie, but the play, they say, if you believe, you have to clap, or I can’t do the. . .

Is that Tinkerbell? Okay. I’ve not seen it.

Sometimes you’re aware of these things that are just out there. I’ve not actually seen it. It’s not like Jesus was unable to do miracles because the people didn’t believe.

Because in the next phrase after that, it says, except he healed a few sick people. Okay, I’d say that’s pretty miraculous. When it says he could do no great work there, it’s not talking about his miracles, it’s talking about their faith.

Because what Jesus had done up to this point was to demonstrate who he was in part by his miracles. And at this point, the people of Nazareth, this is the second time that Jesus has been to Nazareth and taught in the synagogue and declared who he is. This is the second time he’s been rejected there.

And at this point, these people are so hardened in their rejection of Jesus that there’s nothing left he can do or show or tell them that’s going to change their minds. You ever seen somebody that’s just they’ve made up their mind and they are. It doesn’t matter what evidence you show them.

I’m not even talking about the claims of Christ. Just any anything you’re talking to them about, you’re trying to convince them about. And they are shut down to all evidence because they’ve made up their mind. And don’t confuse me with the facts.

Right. That’s where the people of Nazareth were.

and so Jesus at this point says I’m not when it says he could do no work it no mighty work it means there was nothing left that was going to convince them not that Jesus was somehow powerless and so what this tells us is that he didn’t waste a great deal of time trying to convince them because their unbelief wasn’t from a lack of evidence it was from a lack of will sometimes in spite of all the evidence some people will just not believe because they don’t want to and it’s as simple as that and it says in verse 6 he marveled because of their unbelief and then he went about the villages in a circuit teaching he he marveled it says he was he was amazed jesus looked at this and it’s not it’s not as though jesus said well I can see where you get that from that’s a valid opinion no jesus thought this is unreasonable that you’re looking at everything that I’ve done everything that I’ve taught and you’re still just so set in your ideas of the box I belong in that you can’t accept what is right in front of your eyes.

Jesus marveled at this. It’s like, this is crazy. And so he went on and took his message elsewhere.

Because he didn’t stop being God the Son just because they didn’t believe. He was everything he claimed to be, and their rejection of his claims didn’t change that. And folks, there will be people around us who refuse to accept Jesus for who he is, it doesn’t change the fact of who he is.

Now, I realize that in a crowd like this, that doesn’t represent many of you. Maybe somebody’s watching online. Maybe you’re here as a guest and you’re just here because somebody dragged you here.

And we’re glad you’re here regardless. But maybe you’re thinking, yeah, I’m not going to believe in Jesus. The evidence is there.

I mean, we can’t make you believe, but the evidence is there. If you have questions, I’d love visit with you and tell you more about how we know who Jesus is. There is historical record that points us to Jesus being who he claimed to be.

I’d say for the overwhelming majority of the people listening to me right now, you are believers, but even with us, sometimes our views of Jesus are shaped more by our expectations than by what he reveals. Sometimes we’re driven more by what we want Jesus to be than what he’s told us he is. Sometimes we want Jesus to be okay with the choices that we make.

We want Jesus to be okay with the things we believe. We want him to be a certain way. In our mind, we build up certain expectations of what we want him to be.

And then his word says otherwise, we have to be careful not to reject what he’s revealed in his word because we have built up expectations in our minds. If I think Jesus is just okay with whatever I want to do, and I read in his word, he says, repent. I should not, as a believer, say, no, I think I’m going to stick with the Jesus in my mind.

Folks, that’s exactly what the people at Nazareth did. Instead, you and I have a responsibility to be driven in our view of Jesus, to be driven by what he’s claimed and what he’s told us, what he’s revealed, as opposed to just what we expect, what we hope. Jesus is who he claimed to be, whether we accept it or not.