Unremarkable

What extraordinary thing to do you see in this picture?

Jesus left there and went to his hometown, accompanied by his disciples. 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, that he even does miracles! 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 offense at him. 

Jesus said to them, “Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor.” He could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them. And he was amazed at their lack of faith. 

Mark 6:1-6

I wonder about Jesus's family and townspeople. Jesus had lived in Nazareth for thirty-ish years. His siblings and neighbors had watched him grow up, interacted with him, seen how he related to people. Did nothing at all pop out to them? Is it possible that he actually came across during those years as a very ordinary person, with the usual plausible idiosyncrasies? Is it possible that he was an unremarkable carpenter until the age of 30, when he suddenly packed up shop and left for the Jordan River where John was preaching, and started doing all kinds of out-of-character things? One scholar comments that “his normalcy was their biggest obstacle.” Could he have gone overnight from being “normal” to being very unusual?

It is hard for me to believe that a person—let alone Almighty God, for that matter—would be unremarkable for thirty years and then suddenly become a completely different person. I could imagine that something new could start happening, that he could have begun healing and teaching when he hadn't been doing that before. But I can’t imagine someone completely changing character at the age of thirty unless they got a really hard knock on the head. We have no record of such a thing happening to Jesus … which leads me to believe that someone quite remarkable lived there among them for thirty years, and they simply didn’t see it.

I once watched a ridiculous movie [sorry, but that’s what it was—quite thoroughly nutty] with my husband. The movie-makers claimed that when the Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria arrived on the horizon in sight of the Americas—the islands of the Caribbean, actually—the native people couldn’t see the ships coming, and thus were surprised by their conquerors. The narrator of the documentary reasoned that the local people had never seen a ship before, and therefore had no mental construct by which to understand what they were seeing. Therefore, they just couldn’t physically perceive it with their eyes and brain. The horizon, for them, was empty.

While the idea of the natives not being able to see the Spanish ships right in front of them doesn’t sail straight with me, I do think there are times when we don’t “see” remarkable things right in front of us:

Sometimes you’re looking for something that’s missing, and in the familiar, cluttered context of everything else around it, you can be looking straight at it and not see it.

Sometimes a person leaves their family behind, only to deeply regret it later as they have some insightful experience and come to understand their family in a different context.

Sometimes a parent doesn’t realize they have a gifted child until someone else makes an observation about their child’s unusual, shiny talent.

Sometimes we let days pass while attending to unimportant things, only to wish later, from a different perspective, that we had those days back so that we could live them better.

Could the brothers and sisters of Jesus, and the townspeople around him, not see him as unusual, displaying in their midst a character that was truly remarkable? Could it be that Jesus discussed fear and faith—two of his oft-repeated themes—in conversations with them and they never heard the significance of it, never understood how divinely important those themes were? Could it be that they were so accustomed to him that they had no mental construct to interpret the beauty and divinity in his perspective? How is it that they thought him unremarkable?

Because “unremarkable,” even unbelievers would likely agree, would not have been the right adjective to describe Jesus. Not then, and not now.