AP

Mark 6:2-6a  When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were amazed.  “Where did this man get these things?” they asked.  “What’s this wisdom that has been given him?  What are these remarkable miracles he is performing?  Isn’t this the carpenter?  Isn’t this Mary’s son and the brother of James, Joseph, Judas and Simon?  Aren’t his sisters here with us?”  And they took offence at him.  Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honour except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home.”  He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.  He was amazed at their lack of faith. 

They took offence at him!  What was their problem?  The problem is that, in Jesus, they were faced with two irreconcilable realities: on the one hand, the super-human wisdom and the supernatural miracles clearly identified him as divine – a kind of God-in-human-form; but on the other hand they had watched him grow up in a family they knew well – ordinary humble Jews like Mary the housewife, Joseph the carpenter, and their own childhood friends: James, Joseph, Judas, Simon and their sisters – there was nothing really other-worldly about that family.

The whole Bible is the story of God’s redeeming love.  It demonstrates in human history how the only way for sinful man to be reconciled to his Creator is for God himself to take the initiative and actually become one of us – and this is what the majority of people to this day find offensive.  The evidence before those people gathered in the synagogue that Sabbath day was incontrovertible: before them stood a person who was both God and Man.  Impossible as this might have seemed to them, their own Scriptures should have convinced them of its reality.  Isaiah had expressed God’s mind on the matter of redemption: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and will call him Imm-anu-el [With-us-God].” (Isaiah 7:14).  To rescue them, God himself would come among them.  This miracle would, of necessity, require a ‘virgin’ birth – involving a union of both God and Man.

Is it our pride, our unwillingness to admit that we cannot save ourselves requiring God to come the whole distance that separates us from the One in whose image we are created, that blinds us to the clear historical evidence that Jesus is both God and Man?  Failure of the ‘locals’ to accept this evidence prevented them from having true faith in him.

This passage also creates a problem for those who hold to the doctrine of the ‘Perpetual Virginity of Mary’, as does the Roman Catholic Church.  This doctrine first appeared in writing in the late 2nd Century (around 150 AD) within the Protoevangelium of James, an apocryphal infancy gospel.  It later became formalized church dogma at the Second Council of Constantinople in 553 AD.  It requires that Mark’s reference to Jesus’ ‘brothers and sisters’ be understood as a reference to children born to Joseph in a previous marriage, for which there is no evidence.

– Bruce Christian