The Home of a Prophet
Proper 9 Year B; Mark 6:1-13
Jesus now proceeds to his home territory.1 Mark has mentioned Nazareth before this, but does not name any place now, perhaps because of how community and “home” are being reinvented in this passage. People’s names will feature more than place names. The disciples are with him; they have been consistently, since their call in chapter 3, and they are now a sort of mobile community whose importance for Jesus becomes clearer in what follows.
Mark’s accounts of Jesus’ synagogue outings are strikingly bare. As for the earlier and broadly similar story at Capernaum (1: 21-2), the response to Jesus is based not on what he says (which is not reported) but on who he is. Of course for Mark these are one and the same, but not for the first time we are reminded to set aside some notion that a “teaching” of Jesus is conceivable independently of his person.
While the locals note both Jesus’ wisdom and deeds of power, their response seems to be a commentary on his reputation, given that he—remarkably—cannot actually perform any such deeds there “except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them” (6:5). This is a fairly impressive kind of failure, but a failure nonetheless.
There have already been signs that Jesus’ power is more complex than (say) the “superpowers” of modern mythology, and does not work in spite of people’s responses. In the recent story of the two women healed, Jesus acknowledged the role of faith for the woman with the flow of blood. Here it is literally the “unfaith” (6:6a) of the locals that is a barrier. His power does come from God, but it is not automatic; it depends on a community that responds to the reign of God which he proclaims and has come to establish. Faith means the willingness to receive what he has to offer, and thus to be part of a community of trust.
The significance of apparent failure will only grow as Mark’s narrative continues, with the Cross as its high or low point, depending precisely on faith. This Gospel will continue to present Jesus as the center of divine power, yet his story is not successful in the terms the world recognizes. This episode invites the reader, like the Nazarenes here and like the characters in the preceding healing story, to consider our own response to him and therefore what power or success really is. The prophet makes an invitation and it must be taken up. Only when he is received with faith does his own story appear different.
The complaint made against him by the locals includes a textual problem;2 the NRSV (like all other modern translations I know) reads “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?” This is the only NT text that indicates Jesus himself was a carpenter (maybe better “artisan” or “builder”), but the more significant thing may be the omission of any reference to his paternity, which may imply illegitimacy.
Some ancient manuscripts, including the oldest papyrus fragment of these verses (p45) have “is not this the son of the carpenter” etc. instead, which is also how Matthew’s version of the same passage reads. While ours is probably original, the apparent efforts in the tradition to ease this scandalous implication may confirm the point here; Matthew has softened it, and the papyrus (from the 3rd-4th century) may have followed Matthew.
Mark’s sceptical synagogue attendees could be alluding to Jesus’ unusual origins, as recorded in Matthew and Luke, by referring only to his mother (“son of Mary”), but Mark shows no (other) sign of knowledge of or interest in that issue. And both those two later Gospels that provide the stories of Jesus’ parentage do also emphasize Joseph’s social paternity (Matt 1:16; Luke 3:23).
Whatever we should imagine these hostile onlookers thinking, the upshot here is a disrespectful response to Jesus that makes familiarity into contempt. So this is the honor denied the prophet of which Jesus then speaks; the locals think they have him pegged disreputably, but there is profound irony in the fact that the reader knows (since the very first verse of the Gospel) that Jesus is the son of God.
The impact of the slur is not to single out Jesus’s family of origin for shameful treatment, but to isolate him from the whole local social structure. His own commentary makes this clear: “‘Prophets are not without honor, except in their home town, and among their own kin, and in their own house” (6:4). Just as when in chapter 4 Jesus’ family—these same people now named more extensively—come looking for him to draw him away from his mission, they are identified as part of the problem rather than the solution. He is constructing a different community, on a different basis from that of existing family and structures.
As the synagogue episode gives way to the mission of the twelve in the second part of this passage there comes a remarkable contrast: while the community from which he came has not received or honored him, the other community of disciples with him already, by faith—meaning their trust in him and desire to give him the honor he is due— now share in what he offers, even the “wisdom” and deeds of power” (6:2). This was foreshadowed already in chapter 3 at their call (vv. 14-15), where they would proclaim the message and cast out demons. Now this call is fulfilled, with a success perhaps as surprising as Jesus’ lack of it earlier.
The command to take nothing but a staff and sandals, and hence to depend on those who would welcome them for food and everything else, implies an extension of this new community of trust to the unnamed hosts who will receive the disciples. Just as Jesus lacks the comfort of home and family but has the disciples themselves as a new community, they too now will find a different kind of home among strangers through the very fact of their readiness to depend on it.
The “wisdom” they proclaim is now defined as repentance; this was foregrounded in John the Baptist’s heralding of Jesus own proclamation (1:4), and then in Jesus’ account of his call to sinners, not the righteous (2:17; cf. 1:15). “Repentance” is not so much regret for past mistakes or the desire to “do better,” as conventional religiosity has tended to make it. Repentance (metanoia) is the willingness to be changed. In this case, it means to join the community of trust that Jesus and his disciples embody, and to turn away from those relationships and structures which trade heavily on their own forms of honor or greatness but deny the power of God. This of course may be considerably harder than expressing regrets and “making an effort,” but it is infinitely more rewarding. Jesus proclaims, as now the twelve do also, not just a different way of life, but an invitation to come home.
The NRSV translators used the word “hometown” for patris perhaps unaware this is not international English but an Americanism, conceptually as well as verbally. The Anglicized NRSV separates the components “home town” into two which is better at least.
Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark: A Commentary. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007, pp.287-8.