2 Cor 12, Mark 6:1-13
Grace All Sufficient
We begin with Jesus’ return home. The irony is already set. A place that should be characterized by comfort and familiarity, would not be a place of welcome for His ministry, but a place of rejection and coldness towards Him. See, it was precisely their familiarity with Jesus that bred their contempt for Him. They knew His parents, siblings, and extended family, they knew what he did for work, they watched him grow up, some of them grew up along side him. They said, isn’t that the guy that we bought our coffee table from? Didn’t I babysit that guy when he was younger? It’s these experiences that make it hard to respect those who speak or wield authority over us. Not even Nazareth thinks that good can come from Nazareth. Prophets aren’t given honour in their hometown, because in their hometown are the people who lived with them. They either know that they can’t do what they command themselves, or they have been too soft, a voice of comfort, forgiveness, and compassion. Think of a parent, giving commands or restrictions to their child. If you are the “nice.” or “fun” parent, you’re going to have a hard time enforcing anything. Because the child thinks that you wont actually punish them. You simply don’t have it within you to go and do that. Think also of when a friend has told you to do this or that as a helpful tip either for health, finances, or even some kind of truth about the faith, and you reject it out of hand. But then later you stumble upon it in a book or an article, and you say, ooh hey i read this thing, and you tell them about it, and then they say hey WAIT, that’s what I told you and you didn’t believe me. When we perhaps once had authority over another person, or were once their equal, or saw them once in a place of weakness or development, it can be very hard to respect them when they take on a greater role, such as teaching, or preaching. But it was not merely that Jesus got up without being asked and started preaching like a know-it-all, people do that all the time. The authority of preaching and teaching paled in comparison to what Jesus was claiming for Himself. It was who He claimed He was, and what He claimed He was there to do, and what He claimed, was already done that drove these people nuts.
He stood up there, and said,
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
He is the prophet, the Christ, the anointed one sent to preach good news to the poor. He is sent to preach the gospel. But the people were not content. They demanded that the thorn be removed. The Roman oppression, sinfulness, sickness, disease, death. But those who receive this gospel of grace as sufficient do not look for it to be removed in this life, but to receive grace for it – Christians are not ex-sinners, but forgiven sinners. Forgiven sinners are not those who once suffered, but those who grieve and suffer with hope. We so often think that what God wants in “repentance” is for us to do less sin and more good. To “be better.” But not even St. Paul, the author of most of the New Testament, could claim this image of salvation and repentance. Paul was sent a thorn in the flesh, by Satan. This not a physical ailment, not that flesh. But it was sin, it was unbelief. And He prayed to God 3 times that He would remove that thorn for Him. He “surrendered all” as the hymn goes. And said, God, I have this one besetting sin that i cannot stop doing please take this from me, make me holier. Make me more righteous, for your glory. But God said, no. I wont do that. Rather, let my grace be sufficient for you. We so often greatly misunderstand this word. Grace. We think that grace, the grace of God, is the thing that removes the thorn in the flesh. Perhaps we say, God, will without reason, mercifully remove my sin, that I may be holier, and be more like Jesus. But God says… no… Let my grace be sufficient. The problem is, we want to dictate what grace looks like. We want to say, God, graciously make me a better person. But God says, no. You will remain who and what you are, a sinner, and my grace will be sufficient for you. We say, God, graciously, heal my physical sickness and diseases. But God says, no. My grace will be sufficient for you. On this Sunday, known I suppose as Patriotism Sunday, it is the 4th of July for the Americans, and the Sunday after our own Canada day. And on this day, I am reminded of how many of us in the church still think like the Jew’s in Jesus’ time. We seem to act as if the church is unhealthy, because the institutions that we set up are not. This is the same as those who demanded that salvation look like becoming a better person, or a more healthy person. They say God, graciously, make the government a better and healthier one, transform this or that, here and now. And God says, yes. That day, that I sent Jesus Christ to preach that Sermon in that synagogue, and He proclaimed that all of that was fulfilled there and then, it was so. Yet we still, like those Jews take offense to this. If grace, looked like your transformation into a better person by God’s grace, then that thorn would have been removed from Paul. If grace, looked like your transformation from disease and sickness, into health, then Christians would not die. If grace, looked like the transformation of the government, from unjust tyranny, to liberty and freedom and the protection of the helpless, then Jesus would have been a political military Messiah, and overthrown the Roman Oppression of the Jews. But please, hear me carefully. I am saying, if it looked like. Because in Jesus’ Words, the Words which create all things form nothing, He says; all of this, is fulfilled in your hearing.
The Gospel of Christ Jesus, for those in His hometown, for the Jews, was not good enough, they demanded the thorn be removed. They demanded that their hardships end now. The question that you now are left with, is in your familiarity with Him, are you still able to receive His gospel? You grew up with Jesus, this is the Jesus who made the tree from which your coffee table is made out of, this is the Jesus who’s birthday you celebrate every year, how can He, who’s been with me and with us all who have suffer and died regardless of Him being with us be of any help in our time of need? The Message of Christ was that the Spirit was there, that the captives were freed, that the blind could see, that good news has come to the poor, that this was all happeningnowand being fulfilled before them in that moment. But instead of believing this and repenting of themselves toward Christ who was and is this promise, they instead were offended by it. Not only the concept that these things were fulfilled and happeningnowwithout being able to be seen by the eyes, but also with the source of the promise, the one in whom this promise was fulfilled. If they “needed” to be saved, and they weren’t convinced that this was so, then surely it couldn’t be that guy who would save them. They know Him. He’s nothing special, so they say. Moreover, not only is this man like them, an average guy, but He is in their eyes, less than them. A humble carpenter, the Son of Mary – an insult, mind you. As Mary was known as Josephs wife, who, in public eye, to their understanding had a child while engaged to Joseph, who was not Joseph’s child. And so they said no… no. After 400 years of silence since the last prophet there is no way that this is him, this, spawn of infidelity, this, this CARPENTER. See it from their eyes. A man, born of adulterous sin, uneducated, for the first 30 years of His life, more or less average and under the radar. Jesus was not the greatest carpenter that had ever lived. Please – let this sink in. God, when He took Humanity upon Himself, was not the greatest carpenter that had ever lived. If He was, He would have been famous, not only in His little town of Nazareth, but everywhere in the region and beyond. That is what we would expect, but we never think about it. We never think, oh right, Jesus was not renowned for anything in particular, other than those 3 years of ministry. Yet He did things, surely. He cooked food, perhaps played a few sports here and there, worked as a carpenter. And you know what, never once is it said, either within the N.T., or in the extra Biblical literature of that time, that this Jesus – was particularly good at any of these other things. I’m sure He was competent at them, we heard no complaints, but neither is there any mention that the fish that he was cooking was the best anyone had ever tasted, or that the furniture he built was fit for a king, nothing like this. IN the peoples eyes Jesus was an O.K. Carpenter with a scandalous lineage. As far as they could tell, He had no right or justification to be preaching before the synagogue as if He were somebody great, much less to proclaim that He was the Messiah. When the people became offended, it was not that Jesus was preaching but what He was preaching. He had turned over their entire concept of salvation and authority structures in this sermon. He had said that not only did salvation from sickness, death, oppression, poverty, and sin still look a lot like sickness, death, oppression, and poverty, and sin, but more than this, that it was He who would bring this salvation. That it was He, who was this salvation.
And this, not expecting for them to all repent and believe in Him, as surely, He wanted them to, but as He himself says just one verse over, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’
The people that Jesus was preaching to had their doubts, naturally. For all that they knew, the tales of Jesus’ ministry in Capernaum were just more of those myths or crazy stories that people tell one another. Sure, Jesus claims to have done all these things, just like all the other so-called prophets and false healers who refuse to walk into a hospital, refuse to cure their own diseases. It’s obviously a cop-out, to say that Christ cant heal those without faith, or that in the moment of His own death He did not call the angels to save him because this was His plan, as one of the criminals crucified next to Him said on that fateful day. And how many people will say things just like this. Because they miss the point. They miss the truth of what Christ is saying. Christ did not come to heal, to bring political revolution, or moral reformed, but to die.That is how these things are fulfilled.
And it’s not just those in Nazareth who reject Christ, of who’s unbelief He is amazed about. This text is not given so as to say that Jesus’ hometown may be showed to lack faith and reject Christ, but to portray and foretell of the bigger gospel picture that would take place, the rejection of Christ by the Jews. That, as John 1 says, He came to His own, but His own rejected Him, and as it was long foretold by the prophets of the Old Testament, that God would call those who were not His own His own, that the Jews would widen the gates and that the whole world would enter in and as Paul said, that thorough the rejection of the Jews the Gentiles benefited and were brought into the tree of Christ. This rejection of Christ by all fulfills that which is necessary that He made be handed over to the Romans to be crucified and on the third day rise, in doing so, taking all those who believe this up from the dead with Him, into new life, not only those who had forsaken and abandoned Him, but also those who had not yet even heard of Him.
And in case we think, the more powerful thing that would save so many more would be hearing Christ Himself preach, notice how this text ends. Those who Jesus sent out were “more successful” than He was in His hometown and healed many. I sometimes wonder, how many of us would actually be Christians here today, if we were exposed to the faith by Jesus Himself instead of the pastors and preachers that have shaped us and guided us along the way. Because Biblically, by all accounts, the answer would be not many, if any at all. The Most “successful” prophet ever, on our eyes, but things that can be seen was not Jesus. It was Jonah. It was not God Himself but the one who ran from God. It was not the saviour of sinners but the sinner who wanted to kill himself when he saw that God had mercy on those he hated. Because while Jesus sends us to save sinners by preaching the gospel of His life, death, and resurrection for the forgiveness of sins, Jesus Himself preached that He might be rejected, abandoned, forsaken, that He might die for us, that we could have a gospel to preach. God’s favourite tools to use are broken tools. God’s wisdom is foolishness in our eyes. God’s strength is perfected in weakness. And grace, which leaves us as we are, is sufficient.
The application for us is clear; as you take of what your eyes see as Bread and Wine, not me, but Jesus, is speaking the Word, that it is His body and blood, which were rejected so that they might be offered up and crucified according to God’s promise to you, which is fulfilled your in hearing, eating, and drinking of Christ who is that promise. Your eyes will not see it, I promise you that. But in the dark, in doubt, in the weakness of your faith, God’s grace, remains sufficient.
