No Longer a Good Ol’ Boy from Nazareth

By The Rev. Ted Thornton

​From the Gospel of Mark Chapter 6: verses three and four: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us? And they took offense at him.”

How do you respond when someone close to you abruptly changes course and you either aren’t sure or you just plain don’t like what you see? When your son or daughter says to you one day, “Mom or Dad, I want to spend my life working at vocation A,” when what you’ve wished for in that person you gave birth to and raised all those years is that they will work at vocation B, how do you respond?  When your grown son or daughter chooses a life partner very different from the one you were expecting and invites him or her to dinner, how do you respond? When your son or daughter says one day, “Mom or Dad, I’m gay,” or, ”I don’t identify with my birth gender,” how do you respond?

It*s easy to assume we’re living through an era when identities of all kinds are in flux. Advertisers call it “rebranding.” More and more companies and individuals are “rebranding” themselves: leaving behind old identities and putting on new ones.  

But, has it ever been otherwise? I grew up in a small town in Delaware. When I was ordained, some people who remembered me from my college summers working as a carpenter’s helper building homes throughout town shook their heads in astonishment. I had been a full partner in a rough bunch of guys on that construction crew. Some of my buddies on that crew remembered me cussing with the best of them when I made mistakes or when I hit my thumb with my hammer. And, some fellow sailors in the Navy who knew me well and with whom I shared some questionable off-base escapades were struck dumb when at the end of my four year enlistment they watched me head off to divinity school (“Divinity school? You? Really?”).

Some years later in Jerusalem, I studied with Hebrew University Professor Shmuel Safrai, considered by many the world’s leading expert on Jerusalem’s Second Temple period during which Jesus lived. He argued that Jesus wasn’t just a carpenter. He was also a very highly trained rabbi who worked closely with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek (the language of the Greek Bible, the Septuagint, composed in the third century BCE). In fact, he had memorized huge portions of the Bible: his Bible, the Hebrew Bible, the “Old Testament.” He either studied in person with prominent rabbis such as Hillel or was  deeply influenced by them. He was trained to adjudicate Jewish law in civil disputes. Expertise in that alone was and still is among orthodox Jews a skill that requires years of training. 

So, how do we square Jesus the rough and ready carpenter with Jesus the rabbi? This is the problem confounding the Nazarenes, the folks who watched Jesus grow up. The general fact is that rabbis in Jesus time often did work in more than one vocation, so apart from how he’s received in his hometown of Nazareth, it wasn’t a big deal. Saint Paul, also a rabbi and an expert in rabbinical scholarship and reasoning, earned his living making tents. 

There are only two passages in the New Testament that explicitly refer to the Jesus’ his neighbors thought they knew as Jesus the carpenter: today’s (Mark 6:3) and Matthew 13:55. The Greek word in both cases is τέκτων (tektone), a word better translated as “master builder,” not just a carpenter, but a person skilled in many of the building trades, especially limestone, of which there has always been an abundance in Palestine compared to wood which has been quite scarce since Greco-Roman times when whole forests were cut down to build Greek and Roman mercantile and naval vessels. In Jesus’ case, his hands were rough and calloused with labor and his mind was quick with Jewish law and philosophy.   

But, our problem today begins and ends with the fact that Jesus is no longer a “good ol’ boy” from Nazareth. His neighbors don’t like what they’re now seeing and hearing. And so, we are drawn into the vehemence and the violence with which Jesus’ Nazaene neighbors respond to his new life as a rabbi. 

Vehemence and violence! There are two passages that shed a poor light on Jesus’ Nazarene neighbors: Luke 4:14-30, where in verse 29, the townspeople drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff. And, John 1:46, where we hear Nathanael saying to Philip, “Can there any good thing come out of Nazareth?” Nazareth was a tough town in a hardscrabble region. 

The problem of how we should respond to radical change in the personal life of someone we have known and loved cuts to the heart of one of the most vexing aspects of our human nature. 

Aristotle said human beings are political animals. He regarded politics as even more important than ethics, the realm of individual behavior and standards.  His focus was on society, especially the rules by which communities govern themselves. 

Contemporary historian Keith Michael Baker defines politics more broadly as  “making claims...the activity through which individuals and groups in any society articulate, negotiate, implement, and enforce competing claims they make upon one another and upon the whole.”  

Baker’s definition tracks closer to the kinds of politics Aristotle advocated for our individual lives. He taught the “golden mean.” The golden mean is the goal we should aim for in our dealings with others, the “happy medium,” many call it. Happy? Sometimes, it’s a pretty unhappy medium, isn’t it? Compromise? How many know the meaning of that word anymore in our society?   

What claims are Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth trying to assert upon him? What claims do you and I make upon others, especially those close to us? Are these claims all fair? Do they aim for Aristotle’s golden mean? What happens when they don’t? In our personal lives? In our lives as a nation? We like to speak of these claims using the softer word: “expectations” when the harder but more truthful word is “claims.”

The golden mean is a value that has been sought for millennia across a variety of world religions. Confucius called it chun yung (“the middle way”). The Buddha also taught the middle way using the Sanskrit term madhyama-pratipad. Muhammad used the Arabic word iqtisad advocating moderation in all things. The ancient Greeks carved the inscription μηδὲν ἄγαν- meden agan - “Nothing in excess” - on the lintel of their Temple of Apollo at Delphi, right next to the more familiar one: “Know thyself!” (Greek: Γνῶθι σεαυτόν, gnōthi seauton)

Striking the golden mean, the middle way is often very hard. Giving one another time to adjust to change is among the best ways to begin. But, ‘fact is, as we all know, relationships can be permanently broken. And, where repair is possible, it can take a long time. 

One way to begin is to examine ourselves for signs of narcissism and nostalgia. Narcissus is the dandy of Greek myth who falls in love with his reflection in a pond and thereby becomes stuck, unable to grow, unable to live in genuine community with others, so self-absorbed he’s unable even to acknowledge the existence of others. 

Narcissism may be an obstacle to our ability to accept change in ourselves and others. Narcissism begins when we become frozen in our attitudes toward ourselves and others, when, like Peter Pan, we think it’s possible to make time stand still, to live in an eternal childish past, stuck in our ways and wishing everyone around us would do the same. 

Paul knew the challenges of people having trouble living together in harmony. In First Corinthians 14:20, he writes to his divisive congregation in Corinth, "Brothers, do not be children in your thinking. Be infants in evil, but in your thinking be mature." Narcissism and its cousin nostalgia are signals that part of us is still locked in childhood, that we are resisting changes somewhere in our lives where change may be necessary and more healthful. William Golding’s novel, Lord of the Flies, is one of the best fictional depictions of Paul’s notion of “infants in evil.” 

A nineteenth century Polish rabbi named Simcha Bunim offered this aid to his followers: write “The world was created for me” on one piece of paper and keep it in one of your pockets. Then, put a different piece of paper in the opposite pocket, with “I am but dust and ashes” written on it. This, he proposed, is a necessary tension. 

There are other guidelines we could put in our pockets. What would you put in yours? For example, I could write on pieces of paper things to remind me of my human condition: “I am capable of kindness” on one piece of paper and put it in one pocket, then I could write, “I am capable of cruelty” on another and put it in the opposite pocket. Muslims like to put it this way: Everyone walks through life accompanied by two angels: one angel sits on the right shoulder and records all good deeds, while the other sits on the left shoulder and records all bad deeds.

In one pocket we might write “Be open to change.” In the other pocket, we might write  “Don’t be too open minded.” That latter saying reminds me of something Arthur McKinstry, Bishop of Delaware in my early childhood used to say, “Don’t be so open minded that your brains fall out.” 

Notice that none of this is about striking a balance. Balance is not the right word here: it’s tension, not balance, isn’t it? We deceive ourselves when we think of the golden mean, the middle way, compromise as a balancing act.  We live our lives in tension most of the time, not balance. That’s why life is hard and faith and prayer are so important. Another way to read Paul in that passage from First Corinthians is that once we grow up and leave our childhood behind, we realize that you and I were made to love the world, sometimes even when it hurts; the world was not made to love us. That’s the meaning of sacrificial love. That’s the meaning of the cross. 

I think in the end, the best way to tolerate the discomfort of tension in our lives is to strive for inclusivity. This doesn’t mean sacrificing our core values, but it does mean giving space where possible for others to live out theirs. In her opening remarks at General Convention in Louisville the other day, House of Deputies President Julia Ayala Harris perhaps said it better than most: 

“Inclusivity,” she said, “is the sacred work of recognizing the image of God in every person. It means honoring the beautiful diversity of the human family.” And, as Bishop Michael has been telling us over and over again, that’s the center of Jesus’ “m.o.”

In which areas of your life will you strive to become more inclusive in the coming weeks and months? 
 
Amen. 

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