Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Ordinary Time, February 1, 2023

Mark 6, 1-6

Jesus departed from there and came to his native place, accompanied by his disciples. When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished. They said, “Where did this man get all this? What kind of wisdom has been given him? What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands! Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon? And are not his sisters here with us?” And they took offense at him. Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.” So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them. He was amazed at their lack of faith.

St. Mark places the story of how Jesus returned to Nazareth just after his accounts of the Lord’s calming of the waters, the exorcism of Legion, and the raising of the daughter of Jairus (combined with the healing of the woman with the hemorrhages).  This contrasts with what Matthew does, setting it after a series of parables, and with what Luke, who is most concerned with the proper chronology, does, showing it to happen before he moved to Capernaum.  In setting the story here, Mark emphasizes to his Gentiles audience the state of the Jewish people in rejecting one who had so amply demonstrated himself to be God — not only in these miracles, but in all the others.

After the tremendous signs he performed, the Lord returned to little, out-of-the-way Nazareth, where he grew up.  We can understand the Jews of the time, particularly their leadership, through Nazareth and the behavior of the people there.  Parochial and insular, they had a high opinion of themselves.  Probably only resettled by Jews from the south a century or two before, some feelings of inferiority may have persisted resulting in a certain defensiveness.  They were governed by their daily routines and suspicious of strangers or of anything new, like in many small, isolated towns all over.  

“When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished.”  The Greek  verb here is much stronger than “astonished”.  The people were “thunderstruck”, “dumbfounded”.  The Lord Jesus shook up their world with his teaching, his authoritative presence, his wisdom.  Mark presents their confusion in a collection of their responses.  Some thought he was wonderful, some could not reconcile the Jesus whom they thought they knew with the Jesus now teaching them, and they reacted with doubt and anger.  “Is he not the carpenter?”  They ask this of themselves as though expecting him to return to his trade the next day.  But they are also weighing what they know or think they know with what they see.  Altogether, they cannot accept him.  “The son of Mary, and the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon?”  The Greek word adelphos can mean any male relative other than a father or son.  These “brothers” mentioned here were the sons of another woman named Mary, said to be a relation of the Blessed Virgin: “Mary the mother of James and of Joseph and Salome” (Mark 15, 40).  “They took offense at him.”  The Greek word, the basis for the English word “scandal”, is difficult to translate: “They were caused to stumble on him”, “they stumbled on him”, or, “they stumbled on this”.  As St. Luke shows, even the holy priest Zechariah stumbled in his encounter with the supernatural when the angel announced the conception of .John the Baptist to him.  This ought to aid us in our appreciation for what the Son of God did in becoming incarnate, and in the difficulty we humans have in recognizing the supernatural.  We say we believe in God, but do we really believe God will answer our prayers, or that he will heal us of our illnesses?  Do we really deep down believe, or do we settle for a vague superficial level of belief that is easily shaken?

“He was amazed at their lack of faith.”  “Lack of faith” can also be translated as “distrust”.  The Lord showed himself to be amazed at their lack of faith as a way of making the people question themselves.  We also see in these last verses of the Reading that the Lord required a certain level of belief for a person to be cured.  That is, a person cannot be cured against his will or without his cooperation.  The Lord is not performing magic.  The picture is is that, contrary to what happens in other towns, the afflicted did not come before him to be cured in great numbers; only a few came to him.  And no one asked him to go to their sick relatives.  

Mark’s account of his visit to Nazareth does not include a description of how the people tried to kill him, as St. Matthew’s does.  While Matthew’s leaves us horrified, Mark’s leaves us sad.  We see how near the Lord came to these people, and they would not believe.  We pray that we may believe more deeply, and for the conversion of the world.