A Prophet in His Own Town

Mark For Everyone

MARK 6.1–6
A Prophet in His Own Town...

...Most preachers can remember the first time they stood up to preach in front of their own parents. It’s not the same as with other things people do. If you’re a musician, they probably heard you practising when you were little; if you’re a footballer, they saw you playing in the garden. But preaching is something dangerously public that emerges from something intensely private. Parents, and others who have known you when you were growing up, are inclined to be embarrassed both at the revelation of something so deeply personal and at its being waved around in front of the neighbours. Everybody is vulnerable at a moment like that.

Multiply that up a bit to allow for the fact that Jesus’ message was different. He wasn’t just another synagogue preacher, telling people how to obey God’s law, offering God’s hope for the future, explaining from the prophets something about when the kingdom might come. He was saying, apparently on his own authority, that the kingdom was coming, then and there. Where he was, the kingdom was. And if there was any doubt on the matter, he was doing things that demonstrated it...

Taken from Mark for Everyone by Tom Wright