The Scandal of the Ordinary Text: Matthew 13:53-58
Introduction: When God Gets Too Close
We have a deep-seated desire for God to be glorious, but we want Him to keep a respectable distance. We like our transcendence to be truly transcendent, far off, impressive, and manageable. We are fine with a God who thunders from a remote Sinai, but we grow profoundly uncomfortable with a God who moves in next door. We want a God of stained-glass windows, not a God who worked in a dusty carpenter's shop and had sawdust in His hair. This is the modern evangelical condition, and it is also the ancient Nazarene condition.
After Jesus finishes His masterful discourse on the kingdom through parables, He goes home. And it is there, in His own hometown, that the kingdom He just described collides with the hard pavement of human pride and unbelief. The people of Nazareth are confronted with the ultimate theological crisis, which is the scandal of the particular. God did not send a committee, an abstract philosophy, or a spiritual influence. He sent a Person. And that Person grew up in their town, worked a trade among them, and had a family they all knew. The infinite had become intimate, the eternal had become familiar, and they simply could not stomach it.
This passage is a stark warning against the kind of spiritual snobbery that is endemic to the fallen human heart. It is the temptation to despise the ordinary means of grace. We want a Damascus Road flash of lightning, but God offers us the quiet reading of His Word. We want a dramatic, supernatural intervention, but God gives us the simple preaching of the gospel by a man we know to be fallible. We want a king who looks like a king, but God gives us a carpenter. The offense of Nazareth is the offense of the incarnation itself. It is the offense of a God who refuses to play by our rules of pomp and circumstance. He gets His hands dirty. He becomes one of us. And because of this, those who think they know Him best are often the ones who miss Him entirely.
Their unbelief was not a passive, intellectual skepticism. It was an active, moral offense. They were scandalized. And their unbelief had consequences. It was a spiritual dead zone that, in a very real sense, repelled the mighty works of God. This is a sobering truth for us. Unbelief is not neutral; it is a hostile force that chokes out blessing.
The Text
Now it happened that when Jesus had finished these parables, He departed from there. And He came to His hometown and began teaching them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” And they were taking offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.” And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief.
(Matthew 13:53-58 LSB)
Astonishment Without Faith (v. 53-54)
We begin with Jesus' return to Nazareth and the initial reaction of the townspeople.
"Now it happened that when Jesus had finished these parables, He departed from there. And He came to His hometown and began teaching them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, 'Where did this man get this wisdom and these miraculous powers?'" (Matthew 13:53-54)
Jesus, having laid out the blueprint of His kingdom in parables, now brings the reality of that kingdom to the place He was raised. He goes to the synagogue, the proper place for religious instruction, on the Sabbath, the proper day. He is not a rogue teacher; He is operating within the established structures of His people. And the effect is immediate: they were astonished. The word here is ekplesso, which means to be struck out of one's senses. They were utterly dumbfounded.
They recognized two things about Him that were undeniable: His wisdom and His miraculous powers. They could not dispute the quality of His teaching or the reality of His miracles. They were face to face with a supernatural reality. But notice their question: "Where did this man get this?" This is the question that reveals the posture of their hearts. It is not the humble inquiry of a seeker, "Who are you, Lord?" It is the suspicious question of a critic. It is a question dripping with skepticism. They see the evidence, but they immediately begin looking for a way to explain it away.
This is a crucial lesson for us. You can be astonished by Jesus and still be in rebellion against Him. You can be amazed by the intellectual coherence of the Christian worldview, you can be moved by the beauty of Christian art and music, you can even acknowledge the power of the gospel to change lives, and still refuse to bow the knee. Astonishment is not faith. Awe is not obedience. The demons are thoroughly astonished by God's power, and they tremble, but they do not repent (James 2:19). The Nazarenes are here in the same boat. Their minds are blown, but their hearts are barred and bolted.
The Crippling Power of Familiarity (v. 55-56)
Their astonishment quickly curdles into contempt, and the reason is simple familiarity.
"Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not His mother called Mary, and His brothers, James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man get all these things?" (Matthew 13:55-56 LSB)
Here is the heart of their problem. They cannot see the divine because they are too fixated on the human. They have Him neatly categorized. He is the carpenter's son. They knew Joseph. They had probably hired him to fix a wobbly table or a broken door. They knew His mother, Mary. They knew His brothers and sisters by name. These were not ethereal, angelic beings; they were the folks down the street. They were ordinary.
In their minds, they had a complete file on Jesus, and there was no room in it for "Son of God." They thought they knew Him, but their knowledge was only skin deep. They knew His earthly family, but not His heavenly Father. They knew His trade, but not His identity. Their logic was entirely horizontal. They reasoned that since they knew His ordinary origins, He could not possibly have an extraordinary source of power and wisdom. They were trying to fit an infinite God into their finite, provincial little box, and it was an exercise in futility.
This is the great temptation of what we might call "insider syndrome." Those who are closest to the instruments God uses are often the most tempted to despise them. They see the humanity, the ordinariness, the imperfections, and they allow that to blind them to the divine work being done through them. It happens in churches all the time. People become so familiar with their pastor that they forget he is a herald of the King. They know his quirks, they've seen him at the grocery store, and so they discount the authority of the Word he preaches. Familiarity, when it is not sanctified by reverence, breeds contempt.
They ask the question again, "Where then did this man get all these things?" It is a rhetorical question born of unbelief. Their implied answer is that He must have gotten it from a sinister source, or that He is a fraud. They have rejected the only possible right answer: that He got it from God, because He is God.
Offense and the Proverb of the Prophet (v. 57)
The result of this contemptuous familiarity is active offense.
"And they were taking offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, 'A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and in his own household.'" (Matthew 13:57 LSB)
The word for "offense" is skandalizo. It means they were scandalized by Him. He was a stumbling block to them. The very thing that should have been their greatest joy, that the Messiah had grown up in their midst, became the reason for their rejection. The incarnation is the great skandalon. That God would become a man, a specific man, from a specific town, with a specific family, is an offense to all human pride, which wants God to be an abstract principle we can control.
Jesus responds with a sad, proverbial truth. A prophet is honored everywhere except at home. Why? Because outsiders judge a prophet by his message and his works. They have no other data. But the hometown folks judge him by his background. They can't get past the kid they saw grow up. They remember Him with a dirty face and skinned knees. And so they refuse to hear the word of the Lord from His lips. Jesus is acknowledging a painful, consistent pattern in the history of redemption. God's messengers are often despised by those who should know them best.
The Consequence of Unbelief (v. 58)
The passage concludes with a chilling statement about the consequences of this hometown hostility.
"And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief." (Matthew 13:58 LSB)
We must be very careful here. This verse does not mean that Jesus' power was somehow diminished or short-circuited by their unbelief, as though faith were a fuel that His divine engine required. God's power is not contingent on our response. Mark's gospel says He "could not" do many miracles there (Mark 6:5), but this is not a statement about a lack of ability. It is a statement about divine judgment and propriety. He would not do many miracles there.
Why? Because miracles in the ministry of Jesus were never raw displays of power for entertainment. They were signs that pointed to the truth of His identity and message. They were confirmations of the gospel. To perform mighty works in a climate of obstinate, contemptuous unbelief would be to cast pearls before swine (Matthew 7:6). It would be to give that which is holy to dogs. Their hearts were not prepared to receive the sign for what it was. They would have simply added it to their list of things to be suspicious about.
So, Jesus' refusal to do miracles was an act of judgment. Their unbelief did not tie His hands; it sealed their fate. They closed the door to blessing, and He honored their choice. This is a terrifying reality. A community can, through its collective, hardened unbelief, create an atmosphere where God sovereignly withholds His mighty works. When a people consistently despise the ordinary means of grace, God will sometimes withdraw even the extraordinary signs of His presence. Unbelief is not a neutral state of mind; it is a spiritual poison that repels the grace of God.
The Gospel for Insiders
The story of Nazareth is our story. We who have grown up in the church, who know the Bible stories, who can recite the catechism, are in the most danger of becoming Nazarenes. We are the ultimate insiders. We know Jesus's family, as it were. We know the names James and Joseph and Simon and Judas. We are familiar with all of it. And that is the danger.
The gospel call to us is to repent of this casual, contemptuous familiarity. It is to be astonished all over again. It is to look at the carpenter's son and see the Creator of the cosmos. It is to look at the one whose brothers and sisters we know and to confess that He is the only begotten Son of the Father. It is to let our astonishment lead not to skeptical questions but to humble worship.
Faith is the thing that overcomes the scandal of the ordinary. Faith sees the hand of God in the common things. Faith hears the voice of God from the lips of an ordinary preacher. Faith receives the body and blood of Christ in the simple elements of bread and wine. Faith looks at the man from Nazareth, bleeding on a Roman cross, and confesses, "My Lord and my God."
Their unbelief prevented them from seeing mighty works. But what is the mightiest work of all? It is not healing the sick or calming the storm. It is the forgiveness of sins and the raising of a spiritually dead heart to new life. That is the miracle that is on offer to all who will believe. But it requires that we abandon our pride, our skepticism, and our insistence that God operate according to our specifications. It requires that we come to the carpenter's son and ask Him, not where He got His wisdom, but that He would grant us His. For it is only in Him that we find the wisdom and power of God, unto salvation.