The Teacher has come home. He is met with astonishment in some and a desire to bring Him down a peg or two by others. If the astonished can follow their astonishment to its source, they will see that Jesus has His origins in God. Even if they ‘know Him’ at an ordinary level, this knowledge will not prevent them from seeing his nearness to God. They will welcome and walk with Him and they will see great deeds of power: healing, exorcisms and deeper truths. But for some, His words and His works cause His rejection. They know Him. They know His work. They know His family. They know He is overreaching Himself. They ‘put Him in His place’. He is an ordinary bloke who should be doing ordinary things. He should be making tables, not speaking a new Wisdom, curing the sick and casting out demons. In their minds, his ordinariness undercuts and refutes the greatness they have heard about and now have seen for themselves. They cannot explain, or stomach Jesus Wisdom and Grace. His ministry might be big potatoes elsewhere, but in Nazareth it only causes offence. And so, His revelation, not received with faith, lacks the cooperation necessary for mighty deeds to be done.
One of Mark Twain’s memorable lines was, “Familiarity breeds contempt and … children.” Familiarity happens when we get to know people a little better. We tell ourselves that we know them. We know how they look, how they talk, about their health, how old they are, what they like or don’t like etc, etc. We might include knowledge of their work and how they like to chill out. We like to know where they have travelled, what successes they have achieved and what failures they have endured. We gather features of their personalities. Are they shy or outgoing? What are they passionate about etc? What happens next is that we tell ourselves we have them ‘nailed down’, or ‘boxed in’. Either way they cannot move.
It isn’t easy to hold what we think we know about other people lightly, especially when it is confirmed time and again by the things they say and do. That is why it is very good to be blessed by the experience of overhearing about the box other people have put us in. We will almost certainly be offended by what we hear and reject their categories. All they have done, we will tell ourselves, is lopped away everything about us that didn’t fit into the box they made for us. We know that we are infinitely more than what they have nailed down!
And now we are presented with a challenge. Can it be true that we are always more than other people think but other people are exactly as we describe them? In Nazareth they will not let Jesus out of the box they have put Him in. But you can bet anything you like they think that they themselves are beyond boxes. The way to face this challenge is to stay aware of how comfortably we fit, if we fit at all, into the boxes others have made for us. We must realise that while we are busy analysing and predicting the behaviour of others, not too far away someone is doing the same to us. This creates space for the Golden Rule. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”. The key word is ‘do’. We start a new ball rolling. We grant the others a universe in which to unfold. This is the right and just thing to do. We can only hope that they do the same for us. When this happens, we are always given the gift of surprise. We have to accept the fact that any box we make will be too small, or we have to reject the one who had the courage to break free.
I like to think that we all break the boxes other people put us in. They did not think we had it in us – but we did! But as a wise person once said, there are no enlightened people, only enlightened behaviours. They look at us as if we are strangers, while in reality we are just being ourselves. Familiarity has been overcome. Or to put it another way. When we love someone, we find that we have very little to say about them. It is the ones we do not love that we speak about mostly, and therein lies the key to our freedom. And to our silence!
