Leaving Jesus Amazed

In today's gospel Jesus makes his triumphal return to his hometown. He's begun to make it big out in the world, to draw crowds and collect a band of followers, and now he makes a visit back to Nazareth. It seems to go well at first. Folks are "astounded," and they wonder where he got all this. But then it kicks in. Wait a minute. We know Jesus. We know his family. His brothers and sisters still live here. "And they took offense at him." That's what my translation says, but the word translated "took offense" more literally means "to stumble," and it's the root of our word "scandalize." After the hometown crowd stumbles, the gospel story ends with, "And he could do no deed of power there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief."

I am struck by this picture of Jesus, amazed and scratching his head at how people cannot see him because he does not fit into what they already know about him. What is more, his power is constrained by their inability to see him for who he really is. And I can't help but wonder about the ways I box Jesus into a picture that I have of him.

Like Jesus' homies in Nazareth, I grew up with Jesus, too. My parents read my Bible stories and I saw pictures of him and heard more stories about him in Sunday School and in worship. Jesus was also hard to miss in the southern culture of the 1960s where I grew up. And so I "know" Jesus quite well. But what if the Jesus I "know" is, in some ways, like the Jesus those in Nazareth knew, a stumbling block to encountering the real grace and power of God in my midst.

I wonder how often the conventional and, too often, trite images of Jesus we traffic in at the church are as much problem as help. I wonder how often Jesus looks at me and those like me and shakes his head, amazed at how clueless we can be, how oblivious to the power of God seeking to work with and through us, simply because it does not fit into the pictures of Jesus we carry around with us.

It is incredibly difficult to know when we have failed to notice something. If Jesus was there and we missed him, how can we be aware of our having failed to be aware in the first place. If there is a burning bush on the roadside as I drive home tonight but I don't see it, I have no way of knowing I missed it, unless someone tells me about it. And if there is no one to tell me I missed Jesus, how am I to know?

At least today's gospel does alert me to the very real possibility that I might miss Jesus, obscured in the assumptions and preconceived notions of him that I've acquired from church and culture. It warns me that the Sunday School Jesus, or any other number of Jesuses, might become for me a pair of blinders that hide the presence of the living Christ that is right beside me.

I hope that I don't amaze Jesus, at least not in the manner the folks at Nazareth did, too frequently. And if I do, it sure would be nice if someone would tell me.

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