What is it about “family”? These are the people who know you, who have your history, who remember who you once were and who, therefore, have the hardest time believing anything you might say about changes you’ve made in your life. This can be true about personal improvements in your diet, your habits, or your attitude. I can well remember that, though my friends and associates understood and believed that Jesus had truly changed my life, my family was another matter. They remembered me, “B.C.”, as it were. They were the ones who were the most worried that I’d gone off the deep end and, though they were gracious enough to accept my newfound faith for what they thought it was, an hysterical diversion, it was clear that there was no honor in their eyes for having accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior.
And so it was for Jesus. Though John here describes Jesus heading home from the “foreign” country of Samaria to his home turf of Galilee, a story which normally would evoke pictures of hometown fans welcoming the hometown boy, the welcome would be far from warm. It was in Nazareth, his birthplace, that people got so offended at Him that they attempted to throw Him off a cliff (Matthew 13:57; Luke 4:29). Jesus got a warmer reception on the whole in Samaria than He did in Galilee, or most anywhere else in Israel. Wherever people seemed to have a concept in their minds as to who He or the Messiah should or should not be, the lack of honor was palpable and, as Matthew notes, he did not do many deeds of power there, because of their unbelief (Matthew 13:58).
So, on the one hand, if you feel as if the people closest to you don’t understand or appreciate the new life that you have found in Jesus, understand that these are the ones who have the most to get over in your past. They’re the ones who have seen your crooked ways in the past, and who are the least likely to embrace your vision of going straight. And perhaps God can use their unbelief in you to encourage you to go deeper with Him, not necessarily to convince them that your life with Jesus is real, but rather to ensure that your life with Jesus actually is real, and that you come to rely on Him and live for Him no matter how it plays back home.
And, a final lesson might be that you and I mustn’t become too familiar with Jesus, in terms of our thinking we know with certitude what He’s up to. For the minute we put Jesus in a box we become like those “hometown” people who tell Jesus what He can or cannot do, just as Peter once told Jesus that He would never go to the cross (Matthew 16:22) or would never wash his feet (John 13:8). In such a case, Jesus’ response to us, as to them, could well be, Get behind Me, satan! (Matthew 16:23).
