Commentary - Mark 6:1-6

Bird's-eye view

In this brief but potent account, Jesus returns to His hometown of Nazareth, and the reception He receives is a stark illustration of the old adage that familiarity breeds contempt. Having demonstrated His authority over demons, disease, and nature itself throughout Galilee, He comes home, and the locals are flummoxed. They cannot reconcile the carpenter's son they watched grow up with the miracle-working sage who now teaches in their synagogue. Their astonishment quickly curdles into offense. The very ordinariness of His upbringing, the fact that they know His mother and brothers and sisters, becomes a stumbling block. This passage is a poignant commentary on the nature of unbelief. It is not a lack of evidence that holds them back, but a surfeit of prejudice. Their pride will not allow them to accept that someone so common, so familiar, could be the bearer of such uncommon wisdom and power. Consequently, Jesus's ability to work miracles is hindered by their unbelief, a startling statement that reveals the mysterious interplay between divine sovereignty and human response. The passage concludes with Jesus marveling at their unbelief before moving on, a picture of the rejected prophet who continues His mission despite the hardness of men's hearts.

This is the scandal of the incarnation in miniature. God came down and became one of us, a carpenter from a backwater town. And the very people who should have known Him best were the most offended by Him. They wanted a messiah who fit their glorious expectations, not one who smelled of sawdust and had calloused hands. This is a permanent warning against the kind of spiritual pride that despises the ordinary means of God's grace and refuses to see God's glory in the face of a man we thought we knew.

Outline

Context In Mark

This episode in Nazareth comes on the heels of some of Jesus' most spectacular miracles. In the preceding chapters, He has calmed the storm on the Sea of Galilee (Mark 4:35-41), cast out a legion of demons (Mark 5:1-20), healed the woman with the issue of blood, and raised Jairus's daughter from the dead (Mark 5:21-43). Mark has been systematically building a case for Jesus's absolute authority over every realm: nature, the demonic world, chronic disease, and even death itself. The rejection at Nazareth, therefore, serves as a dramatic counterpoint. The reader, who has just witnessed this crescendo of divine power, is now confronted with the baffling reality of human unbelief. It highlights a central theme in Mark's Gospel: the true identity of Jesus is a mystery that is not grasped by mere observation or prior acquaintance, but only by faith. This rejection also serves as a turning point, propelling Jesus's ministry outward to the surrounding villages and foreshadowing the ultimate rejection He will face in Jerusalem from the nation's leaders.

Key Issues

The Hometown Stumble

There is a peculiar kind of blindness that afflicts those who think they know someone too well. When the Lord Jesus Christ came back to Nazareth, He came back to the place where He had skinned His knees, where He had learned a trade, where He had been an ordinary part of the town's fabric for the better part of thirty years. And when He began to teach with authority and display a wisdom that was clearly not of this world, the townspeople couldn't process it. Their reaction was, in effect, "Who does He think He is?" They had Him neatly filed away in a mental cabinet labeled "local carpenter, son of Mary," and they were not about to refile Him under "Messiah, the Son of God."

Their unbelief was not intellectual; it was personal. It was a form of pride. They were offended that God would choose to work so powerfully through someone so utterly familiar. This is a profound spiritual lesson. We can become so accustomed to the things of God, so familiar with the Bible, with church, with the gospel story, that it loses its power to astonish us. We can domesticate the Lion of Judah and treat Him like a housecat. The people of Nazareth stumbled over the very thing that was their greatest privilege: God had dwelt among them, and they had failed to see Him. Their proximity to the divine bred, not adoration, but offense. It is a terrible thing to be in the presence of glory and only see the boy next door.

Verse by Verse Commentary

1 And Jesus went out from there and came into His hometown; and His disciples followed Him.

Having just raised a dead girl to life, Jesus leaves that scene of astounding power and returns to His patris, His fatherland, the place of His upbringing. He is not traveling alone; His disciples, the nascent form of the New Covenant community, are with Him. This is a deliberate, intentional move. He is bringing the kingdom to His own people first. This is the pattern of the gospel: to the Jew first, and also to the Greek. He is giving His kinsmen according to the flesh the first opportunity to see and believe.

2 And when the Sabbath came, He began to teach in the synagogue; and many listeners were astonished, saying, “Where did this man get these things, and what is this wisdom given to this man, and such miracles as these performed by His hands?

Jesus operates within the established structures of His people. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath, the proper place and time for religious instruction. And His teaching has its intended effect, at least initially. The people are astonished, blown away. They recognize that what they are hearing and hearing about is extraordinary. They ask the right questions. Where did this wisdom come from? How can He do these mighty works? The source is clearly supernatural. They are face to face with a divine reality, and they acknowledge it. But their astonishment is not yet faith; it is a crossroads. It can lead to worship or to offense.

3 Is this man not the carpenter, the son of Mary, and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon? Are not His sisters here with us?” And they were taking offense at Him.

Here is the pivot from astonishment to unbelief. They answer their own questions in the worst possible way. Instead of concluding that God is at work, they fall back on what they know, or what they think they know. "Wait a minute. We know this guy." They identify Him first by His trade, the carpenter. This was likely meant dismissively, a blue-collar worker setting Himself up as a rabbi. They call Him "the son of Mary," which might be an implicit slight, as it was customary to identify a man by his father. And they list His family, His brothers and sisters, who are still living ordinary lives among them. All this data, which should have been a confirmation of the miracle of the incarnation, that God had truly become a man among them, becomes the basis for their rejection. The word for "taking offense" is skandalizō, from which we get our word scandalize. They were scandalized by His commonness. They stumbled over Him.

4 And Jesus was saying to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his hometown and among his own relatives and in his own household.”

Jesus responds with a proverbial saying that captures the essence of their rejection. It is a sad truth of fallen human nature that we often fail to recognize the greatness in our midst. Distance can lend enchantment, but familiarity can breed contempt. The title "prophet" is significant. Jesus accepts that He is a prophet, though He is much more than a prophet. And like the prophets of old, He is rejected by His own people. The circles of rejection tighten: from the hometown, to the extended family, and finally, most painfully, to His own household. This indicates that even His own brothers, at this point in His ministry, did not believe in Him (John 7:5).

5 And He could do no miracle there except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them.

This is one of the most startling verses in the Gospels. Mark says Jesus could do no miracle there. This is not to say that His power was somehow nullified or that He was rendered impotent. The divine power was still present. Rather, the atmosphere of pervasive, corporate unbelief created a context in which it was not fitting for Him to perform mighty works. Miracles in the ministry of Jesus are not magic tricks; they are signs that are meant to be received by faith, to confirm the truth of His word. Where there is a settled refusal to believe, the signs are withheld. To perform great miracles in the face of such hard-hearted contempt would be like casting pearls before swine. He does show grace to a few, healing some sick people, but the widespread display of power seen elsewhere is absent, not because of a lack of ability, but because of a lack of faith on their part.

6 And He was marveling at their unbelief. And He was going around the villages teaching.

Here we see a very human emotion in Jesus. He, who knows what is in man, is still capable of being amazed. He marveled at the faith of the Roman centurion (Matt 8:10), and here He marvels at the unbelief of His own townsfolk. It is a testament to the depth of their stubbornness. Their rejection was so irrational, so contrary to the evidence, that it caused the Son of God to wonder. But their unbelief does not stop Him. The rejection in Nazareth causes the mission to expand. If the hometown will not have Him, the surrounding villages will. The gospel continues to go forth, seeking receptive hearts. The word of God will not return void, even when it is rejected by those who should have been the first to receive it.

Application

The sin of Nazareth is a constant danger for us. It is the danger of the long-time church member, the person who grew up in a Christian home, the seminary student who has mastered the Greek paradigms. It is the danger of knowing all the right answers about Jesus, but never being floored by the sheer fact of Jesus. We can become so familiar with the flannel-graph stories that we forget we are dealing with the living God who became a man, our kinsman Redeemer.

We must ask ourselves if there are areas where we have put Jesus in a box. Do we say, "Is this not the carpenter?" when we ought to be saying, "My Lord and my God!"? We do this when we assume we have the gospel all figured out, when we are more interested in defending our theological system than we are in adoring the Christ of that system. We do this when we despise the ordinary means of grace, the simple preaching of the Word, the bread and the wine, the fellowship of unremarkable saints, and go looking for a more spectacular or sophisticated spiritual experience. The people of Nazareth wanted a messiah who fit their expectations, and they missed the Messiah who was standing right in front of them.

The remedy for this kind of cynical unbelief is humility. It is the humility to be astonished again. It is the humility to look at the carpenter and see the Creator. It is the humility to look at our own families, our own church, our own ordinary lives, and believe that God is pleased to work His mighty power in and through such mundane things. We must pray for God to give us fresh eyes, to marvel not at unbelief, but to marvel at Him, the carpenter from Nazareth who holds the entire cosmos together by the word of His power.