54 Coming to His hometown, [Jesus] began teaching the people in their synagogue, and they were amazed. "Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?" they asked. 55 "Isn't this the carpenter's son? Isn't His mother's name Mary, and aren't His brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas? 56 Aren't all His sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?" 57 And they took offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, "Only in his hometown and in his own house is a prophet without honor." -- Matthew 13:54-67
"Familiarity breeds contempt." This saying captures an unpleasant reality of life that we live out in nearly all of our relationships. It's a lot easier to find a new acquaintance interesting and exciting than it is to maintain our interest in and be excited about a person whom we know well. While familiarity with a person allows us to become comfortable with him, the better we get to know someone the more fault we find in him. The people of Nazareth experienced this in their relationship with Jesus. While they were impressed with their favorite son, they couldn't accept Him as the Son of God. Even though He had taught them with unprecedented authority and performed miracles that had amazed them, they knew Him too well — or thought they knew Him too well — to believe that He was anything more than the carpenter's son who grew up playing with them in the dusty streets of their village. Being familiar with Jesus worked against the people of His hometown. Rather than embrace Him as the promised Messiah, God coming to His people in human flesh, they took offense at Him.
Like the people of Nazareth, we can get too comfortable with the Jesus we've come to know well. Reading and studying the examples and teachings of His earthly ministry, we can lose sight of His divinity as we grow increasingly fascinated with His humanity. We're rightly impressed with Him as a man who suffered the things that we suffer without letting His circumstances overpower Him. We find comfort in His compassion and care for those who struggle against hate, poverty, injustice, and weakness. We rejoice that He came to be the friend of sinners and outcasts, embracing the people whom the world passes by as unimportant and insignificant. But when we focus too much on His humanity we run the risk of getting too comfortable with Jesus. Forgetting that He is God in human flesh, we make Him into a casual buddy rather than the dear friend that He truly is. We start to develop our own expectations of Him and treat what He has to say as friendly advice rather than pay close attention to His teachings as revelations of the will of God. We take His presence for granted and give little thought to how incredibly amazing it is that God is with us. We carve out some space in our lives for the man Jesus whom we think we know so well, but do not honor Him as the Lord who created, redeemed, and owns us. We acknowledge that He is a man, but often forget that He is not simply a man. When we do, we join the people of Nazareth in taking offense at Him and the bold claims that He makes on our lives.
There is no question that Jesus is a man, but He is no ordinary man. He is fully human, but He is so much more. Jesus is the God-man, the one human being in all of history who possesses the fullness of God "for in
Christ all the fullness of the Deity lives in bodily form" (Colossians 2:9). God in flesh. God hidden in flesh. Here's the problem that the people of Jesus' hometown had. Here's our problem, too. God chose to hide His divinity in Jesus. If He would have come in an open display of His power, glory, and might all humanity would have taken notice and acknowledged that God was among us. But He chose to come to us humbly, being so much like us that we could not see with our eyes or reason with our minds that God had joined His creatures in the weakness of human flesh. If we could take it in, we would fall at His feet. Instead, we're constantly prone to taking offense at Him because we rely so much on our minds and senses that we leave no room for the faith that it takes to embrace this astonishing mystery. But it is just such a faith that our friend Jesus brings to us.
By faith, and only by faith, we have come to know Jesus well. Not only the man Jesus who has garnered the respect and admiration of people throughout the ages who are as amazed as the Nazarenes at His profound teachings, but also the God Jesus who has made us alive in Him by grace through faith. By faith we know why it is that He came to us in human flesh and what He has accomplished for us by becoming like us. We know Him as our friend and know that He has made us His friends — and so much more. We have come to know Him well, well enough to know that He is no ordinary man. And well enough to know that He, like His love, is wider, deeper, longer, and higher than what we can ever know. Always discovering more about Jesus as both God and man, we will never grow familiar with Him to the point of contempt and never consider Him an ordinary man.
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