Believe It or Not
Scripture Reading: Mark 6:1-13
Growing up in the 1980s, I remember watching Ripley’s Believe It or Not with host Jack Palance, whom earlier generations remember as the villain in the classic Western Shane (one of my father’s favorite movies), and whom a later generation would come to know as Curly from City Slickers, for which he won an Academy Award. But to ten-year-old me, he was the host of Ripley’s Believe It or Not.
Each episode would feature segments profiling strange, bizarre, and unexpected stories from around the world. Through the wonders of the Internet, I was able to find an episode guide for the entire four-year run of the show. These were some of the oddities featured in the first episode, which aired in May 1981: A mummy that attends board meetings at the University of London; a man who survived for 12 years with a metal rod through his head; and a cursed German ship whose crew of 1,800 dwindled to 36 after a string of unfortunate accidents.
Palance, or his co-host, would conclude each segment with an invitation to the viewer to “Believe it or not.” The catchphrase was a kind of nod and wink to the audience. The hosts didn’t insist that you believe every aspect of a story. You were free to believe it or not.
In today’s reading from Mark, those who hear the Gospel preached in word and see it proclaimed in deed, are similarly free to believe it or not. In Jesus’ hometown, surprisingly, many do not. Amazed at the people’s unbelief, Jesus then sends the disciples out into the surrounding towns and villages, even giving them instructions on how to respond if they and their message are not welcomed.
Part of our witness may be a silent one, praying and trusting in the wisdom, and movement, and timing of the Holy Spirit.
After last week’s excursion of Jesus and the disciples into Gentile territory, where Jesus healed a demon-possessed man, today’s reading finds them back on familiar ground. In fact, they’re in Jesus’ hometown, presumably Nazareth, the town in which he grew up. Word of him is spreading. Perhaps the Nazareth Daily News does a feature on him: “Local Man Defeats Demons; Returns From Gentile Lands a Hero.”
He is invited to preach at the local synagogue on the Sabbath. What an honor! Surely he will have lots of friends and family in attendance. No doubt the hometown crowd will be predisposed to liking him and eager to hear what he has to say. I’m sure that everything will go just great!
Well, judging by the congregation’s reaction, the sermon certainly wasn’t boring, which is the greatest sin a preacher can commit. Mark writes that many were astounded. In fact, do you know how you can tell it was a good sermon? It’s not in the number of compliments that Jesus receives but in the questions he provokes. “Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!” (That one’s more of an exclamation.) And finally, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?”
I’m sure you’ve heard the proverb “familiarity breeds contempt.” That’s what we see here. Nazareth is Jesus’ hometown. The people there have known him all his life. They remember him as a boy precocious in his knowledge of the Scriptures, wandering off on his own to the synagogue to converse with the elders and causing his parents to wonder where he had gone. They remember Jesus, the son of Mary, the young man who trained as a carpenter, just like Joseph, the man who had helped raise him.
It wasn’t all that long ago that he was leading a normal life like the rest of the folks in town, that is, until he wandered off into the wilderness and was baptized in the Jordan River by that scary-looking fellow who wore camel’s hair and ate insects. After that he gave up a good job as a carpenter and began roaming the countryside preaching and teaching, gathering disciples, and drawing more and more people to him with his message of mercy for the disinherited and forgiveness for sinners.
Now having heard him preach, the people are trying to wrap their brains around how a message of such otherworldly wisdom and power could come from a messenger so ordinary and familiar. True, they can’t deny the wisdom of his words. Nor can they deny his deeds of power, laying hands on the sick and healing them. But still they’re thinking, “We know his parents. His brothers and sisters still live among us. This isn’t some divine messenger; this is Mary’s son.” “And they took offense at him,” Mark writes.
That line lands heavily, doesn’t it? They took offense at him. It’s not that the people were uninterested in what he had to say. This wasn’t like me, the other day, politely saying “No thank you” to the two Jehovah’s Witnesses who knocked on my door. No, the people were upset. They were angry. “How dare he! Who does he think he is? He’s just a carpenter, a man trained in wood, not God’s Word.
If you’ve ever tried to convert a family member or friend, you’re likely to have met with similar resistance. My two closest friends, whom I’ve known since first grade, are both determined atheists. They’re not as militant about it now in middle age as they were in their youth. And I can’t say that I ever actively tried to convert them, but we would occasionally discuss Christianity, usually at their prompting. Sometimes the discussion became fraught.
I remember one night four of us were sitting in my apartment. We had each had a few beers, and as Jeff often did with a few in him, he wanted to talk about religion. A staunch atheist, he asked the table, “Who here believes in God?” All three of us raised our hands, at which point Jeff slammed his beer on the table and stormed out of the apartment and down the hallway. The three of us were stunned. I ran down the hallway and caught up to him at the elevator. “What are you doing?” I asked. Avoiding eye contact, he shook his head and said, “I just need to get out of here.” Then he left.
Not only did he not want to hear the Gospel, he didn’t want to be in the same room with people who believed it or were even open to it, like it was some sort of virus that he might catch. But I must say, to Jeff’s eternal credit, when I saw him the next day, he raised his right hand as though swearing an oath and said, “I’m a jerk” (only he didn’t say “jerk”). I will leave the exact wording to your imagination.
In the face of active resistance or passive indifference to the Gospel among friends, family members, neighbors, or whomever, there is not much more that we can do than pray. In fact, I believe that others’ rejection of the Gospel is at least in part God’s way of teaching Christians that it’s not about us. Rejection keeps us humble. We’re not meant to count our successes as though we’re competing in a sales contest. Evangelism is not about keeping track of successes and failures, wins and losses, but simply being a faithful witness to Jesus Christ. And part of our witness may be a silent one, praying and trusting in the wisdom, and movement, and timing of the Holy Spirit.
That theme of trusting in the Holy Spirit is evident in the way that Jesus then sends the disciples into the surrounding towns and villages. He tells them to pack lightly. They are to bring nothing more than a staff: no bread, no bag, no money. They are not even to bring an extra tunic. They are to be utterly dependent on the hospitality and good will of the people they encounter and to trust entirely in God’s provision, not their own.
This is a hard lesson for those of us who have grown up in this nation with our ethos of self-reliance. “God helps those who help themselves” we hear in some corners of the church, even though that phrase is not found anywhere in the Bible. That’s not Jesus nor one of the prophets; it’s the Gospel according to Ben Franklin. And although as Americans we just celebrated Independence Day, as Christians we are wholly dependent upon the grace of God, both for the faith that we have received and for that which we hope to share with others.
We see that played out here in this passage. If in Jesus’ hometown the people’s hearts are hardened, then God will make a way for the seed of the Gospel to be sewn in fertile soil further afield. I suspect that’s what’s happening in our time on a global scale. As Christianity continues to recede in the West, it continues to grow in subSaharan Africa and Asia. I remember once surprising my congregation in South Korea by telling them that there are more Christians in China—an atheist country—than there are Koreans in Korea, which is one of the most Christian nations in Asia.
This shows us that even when there is profound resistance to the Gospel, the Holy Spirit is still at work. And this is what we see here in Mark. You would think that, given the resistance Jesus encounters in his hometown, that he would simply wipe his hands of the people there and move on. On one level, that appears to be what he does when he says, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown and among their own kin and in their own house.” But then Mark goes on to write, “And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.”
That’s right. The people’s unbelief, while disappointing, does not keep Jesus from working deeds of power. In the end, the authority of Jesus is stronger than the unbelief of even the most ardent atheist. Believe it or not.