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MacLaren Expositions Of Holy Scripture
Mark 6:1
And he went out from thence, and came into his own country; and his disciples follow him.
Mark
THE MASTER REJECTED: THE SERVANTS SENT FORTH
Mark 6:1 -
Mark 6:13.
An easy day’s journey would carry Jesus and His followers from Capernaum, on the lake-side, to Nazareth, among the hills. What took our Lord back there? When last He taught in the synagogue of Nazareth, His life had been in danger; and now He thrusts Himself into the wolf’s den. Why? Mark seems to wish us to observe the connection between this visit and the great group of miracles which he has just recorded; and possibly the link may be our Lord’s hope that the report of these might have preceded Him and prepared His way. In His patient long-suffering He will give His fellow-villagers another chance; and His heart yearns for ‘His own country,’ and ‘His own kin,’ and ‘His own house,’ of which He speaks so pathetically in the context.
I. We have here unbelief born of familiarity, and its effects on Christ {
Mark 6:1 -
Mark 6:6}.
Observe the characteristic avoidance of display, and the regard for existing means of worship, shown in His waiting till the Sabbath, and then resorting to the synagogue. He and His hearers would both remember His last appearance in it; and He and they would both remember many a time before that, when, as a youth, He had sat there. The rage which had exploded on His first sermon has given place to calmer, but not less bitter, opposition. Mark paints the scene, and represents the hearers as discussing Jesus while He spoke. The decorous silence of the synagogue was broken by a hubbub of mutual questions. ‘Many’ spoke at once, and all had the same thing to say. The state of mind revealed is curious. They own Christ’s wisdom in His teaching, and the reality of His miracles, of which they had evidently heard; but the fact that He was one of themselves made them angry that He should have such gifts, and suspicious of where He had got them. They seem to have had the same opinion as Nathanael-that no ‘good thing’ could ‘come out of Nazareth.’ Their old companion could not be a prophet; that was certain. But He had wisdom and miraculous power; that was as certain. Where had they come from? There was only one other source; and so, with many headshakings, they were preparing to believe that the Jesus whom they had all known, living His quiet life of labour among them, was in league with the devil, rather than believe that He was a messenger from God.
We note in their questions, first, the glimpse of our Lord’s early life. They bring before us the quiet, undistinguished home and the long years of monotonous labour. We owe to Mark alone the notice that Jesus actually wrought at Joseph’s handicraft. Apparently the latter was dead, and, if so, Jesus would be the head of the house, and probably the ‘breadwinner.’ One of the fathers preserves the tradition that He ‘made plows and yokes, by which He taught the symbols of righteousness and an active life.’ That good father seems to think it needful to find symbolical meanings, in order to save Christ’s dignity; but the prose fact that He toiled at the carpenter’s bench, and handled hammer and saw, needs nothing to heighten its value as a sign of His true participation in man’s lot, and as the hallowing of manual toil. How many weary arms have grasped their tools with new vigour and contentment when they thought of Him as their Pattern in their narrow toils! The Nazarenes’ difficulty was but one case of a universal tendency. Nobody finds it easy to believe that some village child, who has grown up beside him, and whose undistinguished outside life he knows, has turned out a genius or a great man. The last people to recognise a prophet are always his kindred and his countrymen. ‘Far-away birds have fine feathers.’ Men resent it as a kind of slight on themselves that the other, who was one of them but yesterday, should be so far above them to-day. They are mostly too blind to look below the surface, and they conclude that, because they saw so much of the external life, they knew the man that lived it. The elders of Nazareth had seen Jesus grow up, and to them He would be ‘the carpenter’s son’ still. The more important people had known the humbleness of His home, and could not adjust themselves to look up to Him, instead of down. His equals in age would find their boyish remembrances too strong for accepting Him as a prophet. All of them did just what the most of us would have done, when they took it for certain that the Man whom they had known so well, as they fancied, could not be a prophet, to say nothing of the Messiah so long looked for. It is easy to blame them; but it is better to learn the warning in their words, and to take care that we are not blind to some true messenger of God just because we have been blessed with close companionship with him. Many a household has had to wait for death to take away the prophet before they discern him. Some of us entertain ‘angels unawares,’ and have bitterly to feel, when too late, that our eyes were holden that we should not know them.
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