Beyond the veil of changelessness
Proper 9B | Mark 6:1-13
“You can’t go home again,” they say. It’s a phrase intended to temper expectations. Because we usually can go home, but it won’t feel like home. Or it may not be home anymore.
Two weeks ago, I drove through Lansing, Michigan and up US-127 like I have hundreds of times before. The sight of Uncle John’s Cider Mill brought waves of nostalgia while the massive windmills around Ithaca brought more recent memories. I yearned for those feelings, that familiarity. But I also didn’t want to relive any of it, either.
This familiar drive along a straight bit of familiar divided highway was only that: familiar. It was never going to be the same.
And that’s the thing about homes. They never stay the same. They age at least, if we don’t change them ourselves. Build or rebuild.
Our returns may be full of such revisits to memories and our own expectations. But this is merely our perspective. When children return home, do we account for any growth in them, for them, or with them?
The psychiatrist Murray Bowen pioneered the study of these and other behavioral tendencies as part of a field we call Family Systems Theory. Bowen found that members of families tend to live into established family dynamics—even when they come back into them. Children come back as children.
Our established patterns and expectations provide order. But this order never allows for change—families often react violently to any perceived change in the dynamic between family members. So loving parents or siblings can become cruel—even when we have gotten help for addiction or made positive life change. These betterments invite introspection. And thoughts of inadequacy.
This is what Jesus walks into when he comes home. A system that will not allow him to change at all, even to grow up.
First awe—then outrage
The people first respond to Jesus with awe and excitement. They seem to get what he’s saying. But then something else starts to invade their thinking.
“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?”
Familiarity, right? They want to put him into this context. It isn’t just that he is one of them. He is someone we know. Someone who can’t really be that wise. It isn’t possible. He is just a carpenter. We know his family. They are so normal.
Does this sound familiar? We might be the one judged by our community for being different, only to find ourselves judging someone else’s difference. That’s the thing about family systems. We all participate and we all enforce them.
I bet few of us are surprised by this reception because the dynamic itself is familiar, isn’t it? What jumps off the page, however, is what happens right after they announce their familiarity with Jesus and his family:
“And they took offense at him.”
A wonderful display of proactive passive aggressiveness.
They took offense.
Jesus didn’t offend, of course. He did nothing but be himself.
They took offense. Where was it when they took it, claimed it for themselves? Whose offense did they steal? Was it something to even possess? Dare they own it now?
They claimed a right to be offended. By what? It doesn’t actually say. But it hardly matters for it isn’t about what he said but that he said it.
And here, I dare say, we ought to entertain the speculative thoughts so we can not only round out the image, but see why Jesus is powerless here. Why none of the people in his hometown are able to receive God’s grace in this particular moment.
Our intuitions lead us to the problem, don’t they? Because Jesus says astonishing things, but they choose to make it personal. They choose to reject the possibility of what Jesus says because of who they believe he is.
Words about God’s dream, about the fulfillment of scripture, and our place in making it all happen. That we repent and forgive and love. That we follow and share and become new. That we, indeed, change. We must change. There is no other course.
And rather than hear this message, they hear it from a carpenter, a son and brother of a humble family in town of little consequence. Why should we listen to him, then? With his talk of change. We’re just fine. Our way is working out for us. He’s offending us; our way of life.
They took offense. It wasn’t theirs. It wasn’t there.
Jesus offered them love and opportunity and they called it threat and violence.
Then departure
He leaves again. There is nothing that can be done here. His isn’t a job to convince the unwilling, but to invite the seeking to choose change.
And like a teacher utilizing an opportunity to learn, he sends his disciples out as apostles—to go out into the world in pairs to serve and share and heal. And if they experience what he experiences here, they are instructed to simply keep moving.
This invites another opportunity for reactive thinking to return, demanding an audience. To take offense. This time, in us.
Is he telling them to give up on these people? the voice might ask. It is the kind of needling thought that frustrates our certainty—and our ability to hear Jesus.
But this isn’t what Jesus says. It reverses it, in fact, turning an invitation into a personal attack. Turning the unwilling, disinterested and obstinate, into the victims of a cruel teacher. Like the parent demanding their child get grades they didn’t earn. And we become the principal, invited to absolve a student’s unwillingness to work and condemn the teacher’s invitation to learn.
The problem isn’t Jesus here. Or his message. It isn’t the way he presents it or his supposed secret political motivations.
It is them. The people who take the offense that isn’t there and claim the victimhood that isn’t theirs.
Now, let’s be clear about this. The problem isn’t in taking offense in the abstract. It is taking the offense to justify a refusal to change, repent, or seek a more just society. Victims of racism, sexism, and other forms of hateful separation don’t take offense because the offense is embedded in the problem. Racism itself is offensive.
It is illustrative that the only community that refuses to be healed by Jesus is in Nazareth. Because they aren’t on board for healing. They let their sense of order get in the way.
Their strange conviction
It is a strange conviction, to expect our home, our community, our neighbors, yes, our families, and even life itself to remain unchanged and to live unchanging lives. For us all to be who we were. It is a delusional expectation of reality.
We shouldn’t expect a tornado to rip up the south end of Terre Haute every day. But we also shouldn’t expect life to not happen around here. That consequences of decisions are only bad or only for the things we don’t want done. Or that, untouched, our lives might persist into infinity with no effort.
To even utter the phrase, “I hate change” is to also say “I hate love.” Or joy. Or grace.
That’s what Jesus’s people reject when he goes home. They reject happiness for a mantle of outrage and victimhood. He invites them to join into a life lived in peace and they opt for war. Because they think they know him. His family. His kind. So they convince themselves that he offers them nothing they could want.
That’s the heart of the delusion, isn’t it? He offers them peace and they want peace, but they can’t believe that he is actually offering them peace, so they convince themselves that they may as well go with what they already know, which is war which longs for peace. What they want is right in front of them, but they refuse to take it, convincing themselves to hate it.
Like a mother who wants her children to grow up…until they do. Then she works to keep them at home, undermining their confidence, maturity, growth. Making them feel like they aren’t good enough. Without her.
Keep offering grace
The point, Jesus offers the disciples, is to keep offering hope and love and grace. Because it is our purpose. These are at the heart of God’s Dream. And our practicing hope and love and grace makes that dream come alive.
And what we see from the people of Nazareth isn’t rationality or political opposition. It isn’t the natural pushback of people destined to oppose God’s Dream. They haven’t always been this way and aren’t fated to always be this way. All these are excuses.
They are scared. Probably of being wrong. Convinced they don’t need to change. And they come up with all sorts of reasons for being the way they are. So they don’t have to follow. Or do. Or become. And they can go to bed feeling good about it all.
But not as followers of Jesus. Lovers of the Dream. People who know that hope is the only thing we have in the face of fear. That love can conquer any evil. And that grace can terreform our very nature.
We know Jesus like we know nature and the cosmos. Like we know life itself. In our aging bodies and evolving priorities. In encountering one another and embracing who we are becoming. And in shaping our lives in ways that make us more generous and grateful.
This is a way of love, an opportunity to live, to truly live in this world, full of change and hope and unbound grace that is always, always there for us, around us, in us. Inviting us to finally choose to live.
The post Choosing to Live first appeared on Drew Downs.