Hometown Scandal

Good morning.

Today's reading is from Mark six, one through six.

He went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him, and on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue.

And many who heard him were astonished, saying, Where did this man get these things?

What is the wisdom given to him?

How are such mighty works done by his hands?

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James and Joseph, and Judas and Simon?

And are not his sisters here with us?

And they took offense at him, and Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, and among his relatives, and in his own household, and he could not do mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them, and he marveled because of their unbelief.

This is the word of the Lord, please be seated.

Alright, Shelby's gonna stick around and uh uh give an announcement, so go for it.

Okay.

Um so we are going to be doing a toy drive this year, and we um there's gonna be boxes around the church starting next weekend, um, and we're gonna be doing it for Denver Children's Advocacy Center.

Um, so I wanted to give a little background on what the DCAC is.

Um, it's off of federal, a few streets down, um, and it's a place where they basically give free therapy and forensic help to children who've experienced sexual abuse and trauma.

Um, and so they work with children from the ages of three to eighteen and families who come from really, really hard backgrounds.

Um, this place is very special to me, and so I want to be able to serve them and serve them with y'all.

Um so if you feel called to give some gifts, that would be wonderful.

We're looking for ages three to eighteen.

So if you want to go with your kiddos to Target or Dollar Tree or wherever, that would be great.

And so we'll be collecting until December 15th, and then I will take them to DCAC.

And if anyone wants to come with me when I um drop those off, please feel free to contact me and we'll go from there.

Yeah.

Great.

Sound good?

So bring toys, there'll be toy boxes here.

Um, so bring toys.

It's a really wonderful thing to partner with uh this Christmas season.

Also, speaking of Christmas season, it's coming upon us fastly, and uh that means it's it's almost time to decorate our building.

So on uh November 21st, right after the service, we're going to have a Christmas decorating bonanza stick around.

Uh we'll be hanging lights on the outside of the building.

We'll be making it very Christmas crazy in here.

Uh, and that's all in preparation for the next the next Saturday, actually, the 27th, in which we'll be having a Berkeley, we're calling it the Berkeley Carol Sing.

Uh so we'll be gathering here and at 4:30, we'll be singing carols and uh caroling with hot cocoa and like mauled wine and things like that.

Uh and uh also that that's also small business Saturday.

So our hope is that we're we've been connecting with the businesses up and down Tennyson Street, and we're gonna offer free gift wrapping here.

So the idea is that, like, hey, come wrap your gifts uh and uh hang out, and then we'll all do a carol sing.

So it's an advent kickoff, also an outreach to the community, and it'll be it's gonna be a really fun night.

So come prepared for a lot of fun.

Sound good?

Okay.

Now let's go ahead and see what it's like when Jesus visits his hometown.

Let's pray.

Holy Father, as we discuss Jesus and his relationship to his family, it brings up our own relationship to our own families.

And Lord, those are some of the most sensitive parts of our lives.

I pray that we would see in you someone who has empathized with us at every level, including dysfunction in your family.

Lord, you have come that close.

I pray that you would open our hearts to see how you move through that, what it was in you that caused that, and how we find a new hope, even in family circumstances that might seem hopeless, we find a new hope in you.

Lord, I pray for our families as a church, pray for our children who are in the room just across the hall.

Lord, I pray that as they move through a text like this, that they would be encouraged and that their hearts would be formed after you, that we might grow together as families, Lord.

Lord, pray that we would see a clear picture of you, Jesus, in this text, that we would heed its warning, so that we wouldn't write you off because we think you're we know you too well already.

Lord, I pray that you would attend this time.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.

So there's a theological term that we're gonna go over in this text called the scandal of particularity.

And that was originally what I was going to name this uh sermon was the scandal of particularity, but the hometown scandal sounds cooler.

That could be like an Eric Church album, or I don't know, just sounds cooler.

So throughout the Gospel of Mark, we see that Jesus gets rejected for all kinds of reasons.

We get like a taxonomy of the different ways that a person can be rejected.

He gets rejected.

Uh, we saw him when he goes to Garasa, he gets rejected for killing all those pigs uh by causing them to become demon-possessed and run into a lake.

If you missed that one, you should download our app, Redemption Church Denver, and uh you can get a full recap.

Likewise, we see him get rejected by the Pharisees uh for a multitude of reasons for not washing their hands properly, for picking grain on the Sabbath.

We've seen him uh rejected by the Pharisees for not fasting while others fast.

Uh and we also see this pattern of Jesus being rejected by his own family.

Today, Jesus returns home after some time away doing ministry and preaching in multitude of places, as we've as we've seen, but he returns to his hometown of Nazareth.

And as he returns home, we see this particular shape of rejection that is the most personal of all the rejection that Jesus faces, because it's rejection from his hometown, his family, extended relatives, and even his own household.

As we see that, we're given a picture of the ways that our own culture rejects Jesus and the ways that we experience that rejection of Christ.

So this is actually a really relevant text for understanding how to develop and mature as a Christian and to give us a picture, a warning of the type of sabotage that we might experience in that process.

So, what we're going to see today is the inoculation of Jesus, how we can receive just enough Jesus to become immune to him.

Next, after that, we're going to see the scandal of Jesus, how his presence in our personal lives amidst our families becomes scandalous.

And then we're going to see the warning that this text offers.

How is it that we can be not that we can not be like Jesus' family and miss him even when he's the closest to us?

Because pro tip, that's where we miss him.

We miss him when he's the closest to us.

That may sound strange, but we'll understand it more as the text goes on.

Okay, first, the inoculation.

Doesn't remind you of anything in the news, does it?

I didn't want to like, you know, to bring up anything.

I was gonna name it the mRNA.

But that didn't sound like an Eric Church album.

Mark 6:1, he went away from there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him.

Mark 6:1

Okay, so where are we?

He's been traveling around, we saw him go across the Sea of Galilee to Garassa, we've seen him preach along the coast of Galilee for a while now in the text, but now he's moving about 20 miles inland to the home that he grew up in, which is Nazareth.

Now remember, he was born in Bethlehem, so he's really a Bethlehemite.

But we don't say Jesus of Bethlehem, do we?

We say Jesus of Nazareth, because that's where he grew up.

My wife uh was born in Texas, but ten days later she moved to Colorado.

Which means she's not a native.

But we still consider her a Coloradan, especially when I'm skiing with her and can't keep up.

Uh so we call her, it's the same sort of thing for Jesus.

He's born in Bethlehem, but he grew up in Nazareth, and so he's called a Nazarene.

But he spent most of his working life in Capernaum.

And Capernaum is where he worked as a carpenter, um, which was likely a stonemason, actually.

We hear carpenter and think woodworking, but he liked to be worked with stone.

Um, so he was a pretty strong dude.

And uh he worked there, but now he's he's started his ministry.

He's not working in uh he's not a stonemason anymore, and he's going back to where he grew up, his junior high environment.

That is where Jesus is going back to.

And Jesus grew up in Nazareth.

In the Gospel of John, in the first chapter, there's this interaction uh with uh Nathaniel and Philip.

Philip is Nathaniel's brother, and Philip meets Jesus and says, You've got to go, you he's like, I gotta tell Nathaniel about this.

And he goes and tells Nathaniel.

And uh he says, I've met the Messiah, he's he's a Nazarene.

And Nathaniel says, this is in the Bible, Nathaniel said to him, Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

That's Nazareth's reputation.

It's 20 miles inland, it's a town, probably of about 500 people.

Nothing good can come out of Nazareth.

It's it's a backwood, it it does it doesn't matter, it's not a real part of any sort of cultural framework at all.

Uh and yet this is Jesus' hometown.

Now, what's relevant for us is to see that this is a place that Jesus has been and is now returning to.

Now, there's an analogy here that we can see with our own culture.

Our culture in much of Western Europe is referred to as post-Christian.

Now, post-Christian means that Christianity is the folk religion of the West.

It is the religion that informs most of our culture.

And yet, we view ourselves in our modern at our modern stage as having transcended Christianity.

And so we're able to step beyond this regressive position of Christianity, stand from where we are now, and sort of pick and choose, say those were good parts of Christianity that we'll bring forward with us.

And these were the repressive, regressive parts of Christianity that we need to cast off.

And so we'll do that in certain ways where you can feel, sense, or understand in our culture an inherent desire to advocate for the weak and the poor.

Now, that's not common across all cultures and all times.

If you were to say we need to advocate for the weak and the poor in the Roman Empire, there wouldn't even have been language for that.

We would have said, why?

There's no need for that type of action.

But in a culture like ours, that is so deeply informed by Christianity, we just intuitively think an advocacy for the weak and the poor is proper and right.

But our culture now stands and says, well, take the advocacy for the weak and the poor part, but the sexual ethic, that's repressive and regressive.

And it actually leads to all sorts of mental disorders and dysfunctions in our society.

And so we need to shake that off and get rid of that.

It's like the definition of a post-Christian environment, one where we say we're able to stand back from Christianity and we've received enough of it to say we understand it completely.

And because we understand Jesus completely, we're able to assess him.

And by our assessment of him, we're going to arrive at something that includes all the good we can get from him and eliminates all the bad.

So that's why I like this term, and I heard it from Tim Keller of our culture has been inoculated by Jesus.

If you were to go and witness to a coworker or to a friend, you're not going to bring up Jesus and they'll be like, What, who?

I don't know anything about that.

That's not the environment that we live in.

Instead, it will be like, Jesus, yeah, I know about that.

I know, I know all that I need to know.

He's the he's the books that we've all heard about so much that we don't need to read them.

Like, I'm not gonna read War and Peace.

Figure I'll just probably pick it up along the way.

It's like watching, oh, I don't know, Sound of Music or uh what's the Civil War sound of music?

Gone with the Wind, thanks.

See?

Perfect example.

I'll just pick it up along the way.

I'll just I'll just shout it out into the crowd.

It Jesus is like that for our culture.

He's such a part of the fabric that we think we know it.

I even reference it in front of all of you when it's not even in my mind.

That's how much I think I know Gone with the Wind.

But we're it Jesus is like that in our culture, and so we've been inoculated to him.

Do you see the analogy?

You get a little dose, you think you have it all, and you don't need any other introduction.

When Jesus comes up, you don't need to learn anymore.

So we see this same pattern taking place at a micro scale early in Jesus' ministry.

He grew up here.

They saw him come of age, they saw him apprentice under his father and learn the skills of being a stonemason.

And just like all the good stonemasons moved to Cobernum.

And I don't really know if that's a thing.

Um but there's a uh this same pattern is demonstrated in this story today, and so it can be really informative to show us what is the flavor of our culture's rejection, and how do we experience that as Christians, but also how do we participate that, it participate in that as Christians or as just members of our culture.

We see that unfold.

And so this is a it's important to capture the shape of this type of rejection.

It's not that they see him and are confronted with something that's so unknown that they reject it.

In fact, it's the opposite.

It's they see him and assume that they know all that they need to know already and have already moved past it.

Do you see that?

It's a different type of shape.

It's a different type of offense.

And that's our type of offense.

It's our culture's type of offense.

So let's see what happens.

Mark 6, 2, and on the Sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished, saying, Where did this man get these things?

What is the wisdom given to him?

How are such mighty works done by his hands?

This is a typical response to Jesus' teaching, although the questions have their own unique flavor, being in Nazareth.

The typical response is astonishment.

We saw this in chapter one, when he opened his ministry in Capernaum, teaching in the synagogue, and everyone was astonished.

When Jesus taught, you were hearing the very words of God, and they were captivating and riveting, life-changing, astonishing to hear.

And so this group hears Jesus speaking, and consider this is a culture in which they meet every week and another rabbi uh shares and teaches and expounds the scriptures.

You know, this is an a place where they've they've got a lot of people coming through who they hear that are good speakers.

Jesus was astonishing.

But look at the shape of questions that they ask.

Where did this man get these things?

Notice even that they say this man, so they don't know him.

What is the wisdom given to him?

How are such mighty works done by his hands?

Now these questions, in a sense, are necessary to ask.

Where is he getting this astonishing teaching?

But there's also questions that are absent, which is what if what he's saying is true?

How would that relate to me?

What if what he's saying, the content of what he's saying, is actually instructing me about his identity?

Instead, they thought, I I need to just piece together this gap because there's this astonishing teaching, but also he's just this kid from Nazareth who we haven't seen apprentice or disciple under any particular rabbis, and yet he has this astonishing teaching.

If I can just bridge that gap, then I'll know all I need to know, and I'll be able to put Jesus of Nazareth back into the category of this guy I already know everything about.

That's the desire.

And so they are underestimating the transcendence of what they're encountering.

They're hearing the word of God, but because they're seeing it come through a Nazarene, they're thinking, I need to get this, cram this back down into the Nazarene category.

Because the transcendence doesn't match that.

So they aren't listening as people who could receive from Jesus.

They're listening from a posture of assessing Jesus.

Since I know all that I need to know about him, or the most important features, I can just assess him.

Now this leads us to the scandal.

This is experienced scandalously.

And I get that word because well, I'll show you.

Mark 6, 3 says, Is not this the carpenter?

They continue their line of questioning.

Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph, and Judas and Simon?

And are not his sisters here with us?

And they took offense at him.

Look, it moves from the practical.

If I can just bridge this gap, then I'll be able to put him back into this category to let's just force it back into that category of the Nazarene.

You know what?

Hey, yeah, that was astonishing teaching, but isn't this guy just the Nazarene who grew up here?

Don't we know his mother?

He was the carpenter.

His sisters are right here.

Sisters wave.

That's the way I picture the scene unfolding.

And they took offense at him.

This word means they they scandalized him.

The Greek word is where we get the word, our word for scandal.

It's also where we get our where the Bible gets its term stumbling block.

They stumbled over him.

They were caused to stumble by who he is.

So why?

Why is it that their own proximity to Jesus, their knowing him as a Nazarene and being Nazarenes themselves, caused them to stumble over who Jesus is?

I want to look at this question from three different levels.

The first level is the theological, philosophical level, where I will have the most fun.

The second level is the level of the family.

None of us are gonna have fun.

And the third level is you individually.

Why is this scandalous for you individually?

So, first of all, it why is the proximity of Jesus scandalous at a theological or philosophical level?

Well, this is an issue that theologians have described from this passage as the scandal of particularity.

And it's the this reality that the person of Jesus, the historical person of Jesus, raises this question in our minds of why was he born to Mary and Joseph and not born to John and or Zechariah and Elizabeth?

Why was he born in Nazareth and not Capernaum?

Or closer to the sea?

Why was it at that particular time in history and why wasn't it now when we could have, you know, videotaped the crucifixion and the resurrection?

It seems like it would save some time.

Because we all believe videos when we see them.

Just kidding.

This particularity is offensive because at a simpler level or at a more personal level, the question is think.

Of all the people, Jesus just being one man leaves out.

Isn't this a rather exclusive claim to say that God became one man, Jesus, and this one man is the only way to God?

Do you see how it's scandalous when you put it that way?

That's probably one of the most offensive things about our faith is the particularity of Jesus.

Also, the particularity of Jesus is absolutely category destroying.

It means that you know how they were trying to the Nazareth, the people in Nazareth were trying to bridge the gap, saying, we get the Nazarene and there's astonishing teaching.

Just tell me how we got it, and I can fill in that middle space, and then I'll be able to collapse him back into just being a Nazarene.

Well, we're always trying to bridge that gap between the particular and the universal.

I've shared this image before, and it's uh from a painting called the School of Athens.

I don't have it, so I'm gonna describe it to you.

Paintings are best when described.

A thousand words is worth one picture.

So at in this painting, it's a picture of uh a bunch of philosophers from the School of Athens.

They're from all over the place, but they put them all in Athens.

And it's actually uh painted by Raphael of Ninja Turtle Fame.

Uh and it's in the Vatican.

And in the middle of the picture are Plato and Aristotle.

Plato, they're both walking right next to each other, and Plato is pointing up, and Aristotle is pointing down.

Now, why does that matter?

This shows the diversion in their own schools of thought.

And they matter because this is about our inability to bridge the universal and the particular.

Plato thought that all truth was located in the universals.

What does that mean?

It means he was interested in not goodness, but the good itself.

Goodness we see manifested in all sorts of ways.

But what is it that all of those qualities have that universally comes together to where we can say there's something like the good, the real, the true, the beautiful.

How do I show you the beautiful?

I can show you something that is beautiful or something that is pretty, but Plato said the real truth is to be found in this idea of the beautiful itself.

And so we see in Plato's thinking that all truth was to really be found in the universals.

And insofar as we can arc our lives towards understanding the universals and becoming detached from the particulars of the world, then we would find meaning in life.

That's why, you know, Plato, he was not interested in physicality.

So when you have a Platonic relationship, that's why we say that.

So there's a Plato ultimately thought that the best type of relationship would be a Platonic one.

The best marriage would be like a Platonic marriage.

Now, I don't think I have to point out the flaws to you in that reasoning.

Aristotle, on the other hand, he points down.

He reasons in precisely the opposite direction.

He says, the universal's ultimately unknowable.

You can't ever really grasp love.

You can experience instances of being loved and of loving something and loving someone, but love, just writ large, the thing itself, you're not that type of creature.

You can't reach out and touch that.

You know, you can you can experience a man or a woman, but you can't experience mankind.

It's impossible.

There is, you can't touch the category.

So these universals, it's a they're they're unreal.

They may be ideal, but in their being ideal, they're unreal.

So Aristotle reasons in precisely the opposite direction.

He doesn't write a symposium on love or these myths to give us ideals that we can then arc towards.

Instead, Aristotle writes books like ethics.

What are we gonna do to make things work here in this life?

He writes books like physics.

Let's look at what happens when I throw a ball.

And then we can reason from there up to some things, some useful tools to crack to arc ourselves towards not the good, not goodness itself, but towards the good life.

That's what Aristotle is aiming at, the good life.

And so there's this diversion in ways that you can almost interpret our culture or even yourself as just going through swings between these things.

It's like you leave a worship service and it's like, man, I feel so committed to these ideals of Christianity.

And then you get back in your car and it's like, but I have to love my spouse.

I don't know about that.

You know, the that's where the the universal, the ideal, and the the real, the the particular, rather, they're always at odds with each other.

Now Jesus is standing in front of Nazarenes, and he's speaking the words of God.

God is the ultimate universal.

God isn't God God isn't, he doesn't have good, he's goodness.

God isn't powerful, he's power.

Do you see this?

God is not loving, he's love.

He is the ultimate and universal, he's the highest ideal that the human mind can possibly conceive of.

And all of these qualities that we participate in, where we are loving one another, where we're loving our spouse, we're loving our children, we're loving our friends, when we are participating in that, we are participating in something that to God is his very identity.

A way that theologians phrase this is to say, all that is in God is God.

Love is in God.

God is love.

He is the ultimate, the highest, the most complete, universal, the one true whole.

So he is Jesus is speaking those words, the word of God.

And yet, he is the Nazarene here, you know, at Nazareth today, on this particular Saturday.

That's impossible.

Jesus is is when he's standing there, he is loving people, but he's love.

It can't be both.

You can't be the particular and the universal.

Jesus himself is absolutely category destroying.

And the offense of this is that what we would expect to see is something like God would become mankind somehow.

And we would think something like, God it God inhabits the mankindness, something invisible or something, the mankindness of us all.

And then through that, in some interaction with that, we can we can then participate in who God is.

No, God doesn't inhabit the mankindness, God became a man.

God became Jesus, God incarnated as a man, Jesus of Nazareth, a birth date, a history, relatives, people that know him.

And why is that offensive?

Because consider saying this: the only way to know God is through that man.

That's offensive.

That's scandalous.

That's a stumbling block.

That man?

He's not that different.

He's from the same place we are.

Not that man.

If I'm gonna know God, if I'm gonna be connected to the glory and wonder of the essence of from what the fount of all creation, you're gonna tell me that that's one man who I can connect with through that.

We're always offended by the joining of the universal with a particular because we want to keep the universals universal in access.

All roads lead to very different mountaintops.

No, that's not what we say.

All roads lead to the same mountaintop.

What's at the top of the mountain?

Love itself, joy itself, goodness itself.

And so, what's the way there?

That one man, Jesus.

The universal and the particular joined in one, it is always scandalous.

It's always offensive, in the simplest terms.

It is radically exclusive, and therefore it is offensive.

But the strangeness of Christ is that at the same time as we say, only through this man, this Nazarene, can you know the Lord, can you know God, we also say, anyone who comes to this man, this Nazarene, anyone of race, nationality, of the sin that's so easily entangling you, of any moral character or fiber, the weak, the strong, anyone who comes to this man will know God.

It's radically exclusive and radically inclusive.

It is both.

It can only be both.

Okay, so do you see how it's scandalous and destructive at like the philosophical theological level?

We've had our fun.

Let's talk about our families.

Now Jesus says this in response to them.

Jesus said to them, A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household.

Jesus borrows this phrase.

It's in other writings, and he just takes it in and basically affirms it, says, Yep, that's true.

A prophet isn't without honor, except for, and he draws these concentric circles, you know, prophet is not without honor except for when he's in his hometown and among his relatives, and then even in his own household, that's where he experiences the strongest resistance.

Now, if you've become a Christian in a family that isn't, or work as a Christian in a place where it's not, if your close relationships are with non-Christians, then this is something that you know.

Jesus knows it.

You may be able to develop a closeness with the Lord and perhaps even share that with friends and acquaintances and desire to share it with friends and acquaintances.

But then to share it with with your spouse, it's it can't be shared there.

It's too sensitive.

To share it with your children or your parents, it's too sensitive there.

These are the places that it can't come up because those are the places in which Christ is most disruptive.

Because he's most disruptive to our closest relationships.

Now we can interpret this, and it's I think it's practically helpful to the scandal of particularity at this level of the family in a simple sort of like family systems understanding.

What is it that keeps families together?

It's families maintain their identity through consistency, consistent patterns of operation.

Now, those don't need to be good patterns of operation.

They can be bad, negative patterns of operation.

But what's important is the consistency.

Because if it works over time, then our family is able to maintain its unity and identity.

The way that we see ourselves is able to be shown and reflected back to us in the consistency.

And so what happens is when somebody starts to change in a family system, be it positive change or negative change, then you see the flare-up in the family system that puts that person back in place.

Anybody ever experienced something like that?

So the flare-up uh puts that person back in place.

And it can often mean restoring consistency by returning to the ordinary negative pattern that we're all used to experiencing here.

This is why often you'll see Edwin Friedman uses this term as the identified patient in a family.

That's like the black sheep in a family, the person who always bears the negative symptoms of the family system.

And often the most disruptive thing that that person can do is to get better.

It's one of the most disruptive things they can do for the family because the family's energy has been focused on they're the problem.

And if we just get them to work it out, if we just get them to uh uh get better, then all of these other things will be solved.

But what they don't realize is that person is part of a pattern.

And you are also part of the pattern.

If I were to define growing up, it would sound something like this.

You mean uh those toxic relationships I was a victim of, I was also a part of.

This is what family systems are like.

We reinforce them.

Now consider Jesus.

He is he is he is so certain of who he is in the Lord, so clear on his calling, so driven towards not just the the health of his family, but the establishment of the kingdom of God on earth, all of our human dysfunction that we that we actually like, all of our human dysfunction that we participate in as a means of justifying ourselves and justifying one another, all of a sudden Jesus enters and says, There is a way of wholeness, you know.

And so what does the the human family do?

We attack him, we seek to write him off as quickly as we can.

We see the strength of him, and it's a different type of strength.

It's a it's a humble strength, and we see it taking place in him, and so we attack it because we realize it condemns us in the ways that we've been living.

Because we realize that we we haven't been living at all in accord with the i with these ideals that we say are true.

And instead, we've been living in patterns of sin, patterns of dysfunction that we actually relish.

We don't want them to be disrupted.

Our whole identity is couched in them.

Jesus is incredibly disruptive.

And so that takes place between him and his own family.

And you see it at the family level most intensely here.

But it it happens at the level of just the incarnation, God becoming a man, God becoming a man, entering into our family story, the family of humanity, causes this intense disruption as it exposes us.

And finally, individually.

Look at how Jesus interacts with the people in Nazareth.

Mark 6, 5, it says, and he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.

So we saw Jesus with the the you know this intense example of the Garrison demoniac who was a demon-possessed man, uh, Jesus just heals.

When he's preaching in Capernaum, he casts out the demon, people are astonished.

He heals the woman walking in the crowd.

Jesus just when he's outside of his hometown, it's just like people are just getting constantly healed.

There's all these mighty works done that are attesting to him and to his identity.

But here in his hometown, there's there's not the faith to support an action like that.

And I think part of it is even if he, even if they would have seen him heal someone, they would have bridged the gap somehow between the universal and the particular.

Sure, that guy was healed, but it wasn't he kind of getting better anyway.

I mean, it's just the carpenter.

They wouldn't have had eyes to have even been able to see it or receive it.

And so Jesus does no mighty work there.

Why is it that Jesus does no mighty work there?

Why is it that so often we experience Jesus doing no mighty work in our own lives?

Here's part of the warning of this text.

Perhaps it is because you think you know him already, and you know all that you need to know about him, and you don't know him.

This is one of my greatest concerns for the church in our current moment.

It's that we are being hawked and peddled, these caricatures of Jesus, and there is so little viewing of him in all his particulars as he shows us to himself in his word.

Instead, we're just interacting with this caricature, this imagined Jesus.

And and what would you expect of a culture that's been inoculated to him?

What is a caricature of something?

You know, when you when you get a caricature drawn of yourself, they take some of your features and they just amplify them.

So you can recognize it, yeah, that's, I don't know, some Elvis.

But but also like it doesn't really look like him.

His features are are uh his his lip is pouty, but it's not, you know, that's absurd.

And that's a caricature.

You take one feature and you make it absurd.

And that's what our culture does with Jesus.

We take one feature of him and then we make it absurd.

You know, we say, well, take a future.

Wow, look at how radically inclusive Jesus is.

And then we build a whole morality around just inclusivity.

It's like, well, I I think we're actually starting to include patterns of life that are deeply harmful for people to participate in.

Perhaps inclusivity is good, but it's it's even better when it's paired with something like holiness.

And then inclusivity finds its proper proportion.

But we aren't dealing with the real Jesus, the one who has these angles and this particularity, the one who is king but also lays down his life for us, the one who offers a completely free grace and then calls us to lives of absolute holiness.

In him.

You know, that's a dynamic Jesus.

That's one who's who's paradoxical and doesn't easily fit the categories that our culture lays out for us.

But we miss him because we think we know him.

It would be better to have not thought you knew him at all.

And so, what is it individually?

How can we not be like that?

How can we not be people who are offended by who particularly he is in all his nuance and all his detail, not just these uh certain ideals that we sort of pick and choose ad hoc and say, that's the whole thing.

Well, look at who he heals.

Except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.

That means that in Nazareth, in Nazareth, there were a few people who weren't offended by his particularity.

And you know what he did with his being, with his being God, but also being a not mankind being a man, he touched these sick people and they were healed.

Mankind can't touch you.

Love can't touch you.

Graciousness can't touch you.

Those are ideals wonderful.

How can we possibly participate in those in a way that's meaningful to us, you, little particular thing with a birth date who hasn't been around in the world that long?

How do you participate in those grand ideals?

What if they came to you and touched you?

That is Jesus.

That is the story of the gospel.

It is the picture of, you see, this very thing that we are offended by, the particulars.

That is also our only hope that we would experience Christ in the particulars of our lives, in your particular home, your particular household.

Think of it like this: your particular church.

Church has it all when you want to experience the particulars of Christ.

We've got all types of people that you won't get along with that will offend you in all different kinds of ways.

And then you know what you get to experience?

The gospel.

Because the gospel isn't just, it's not just forgiveness writ large.

It's not just forgiveness of sin, the category.

It's forgiveness of sins.

The ones we've done.

Your sins that took place in space-time and your thoughts and in the actions that you did.

It forgives those.

Because we don't have a generic sin problem.

We've got real ones.

Things that actual patterns, you know, our issues and our broken relationships, we don't just have broken relationships, there's names of people with whom we need to reconcile.

This is why the very thing that causes us to stumble, the very particularity of Jesus, seeing that He works not generally but in my life.

If you see this and you move past it, if you don't stumble over it, then you are seeing the only way in which we as people can connect with the glory of God in all that we know we were meant to experience.

Because in all of your relationships, what are you looking for?

You're not just looking for an experience of love or of being loved, you're looking for love, the thing itself.

That's why, no matter how great it is, no matter how wonderful or romantic the particular relationship is, or what you hope that it might be, it always ultimately leaves you disappointed.

Because you're a bottomless pit.

You're meant to be satisfied by the universals, by love itself.

You know, you don't get filled up on seeing beautiful paintings.

Oh man, I can't see another beautiful thing.

I can't hear James describe another beautiful painting.

You don't get filled up on those.

You're a bottomless pit.

Because you don't just want to see beautiful things, you want beauty.

But you can't experience beauty.

You're not that type of thing.

You're this little creature.

So we need that beauty to become a man.

Why were the sick healed?

Jesus' particularity was not offensive to them.

It was essential.

It was necessary.

They didn't need sickness generally healed.

They needed this sickness to I need to be touched to be healed from this.

This is the scandal of Jesus.

The most offensive thing about him is the most wonderful thing.

Don't stumble over it.

Don't don't think that just because you planned on coming here this morning that you that you might not hear the word of God itself.

That's what the scripture is.

Don't miss him for his ordinariness.

Don't miss him for the ordinary works that he does in your life.

That's that's right where we experience his love and his goodness and the truth of the gospel.

In Mark 6, 6 it says, He marveled because of their unbelief.

They were astonished at his teaching.

He marvels at their unbelief.

Why?

Because they didn't disbelieve because of what they didn't know.

They disbelieved because they thought they didn't have anything else to learn.

They disbelieve because Jesus, God, he's fine in the universals, but entering my life, no, I won't have that.

Church, don't be fooled by the ordinariness and particularity of God's love towards you in Christ.

Look to him.

All right.

Let's see if there are any questions.

I'll try and move kind of quick.

No questions, great.

We're given this pattern, and we get to participate in this particularity because we don't eat the concept of bread or drink the concept of wine.

We have real bread and real wine.

And that's meant to remind us of this real incarnation, of how God Himself, all that our heart hopes for, incarnated so that we might be able to come to Him.

He comes to us, He saves us.

Paul wrote, For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and said, This is my body which is for you.

Do this in remembrance of me.

In the same way also he took the cup after supper, saying, This cup is the new covenant in my blood.

Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes.

This is the good news that all who come to him will in no wise be cast out, that he is the way towards God Himself.

He is the way for a human to experience that radically exclusive and open and calling all towards him.

Holy Father, I pray as we participate in this meal, that in that experience of how particular you are, Lord, that instead of being offended by it or like it's something we need to gloss over and hide, that we might find this wonder that our God sought us by taking on the likeness of a man even unto death, death on a cross, the pouring out of your blood, that we might be able to come to you freely, the only one who truly satisfies.

Lord, we pray that all glory and honor would be given to you, that they would be shown in Christ.

Lift this up in Jesus' name.

Amen.