When Familiarity Makes Us Miss Jesus
“Is this not the carpenter… So they were offended at Him.” — Mark 6:3
Jesus came home to Nazareth in Mark 6.
He walked into the synagogue where He had grown up, opened the Scriptures, and taught. At first, people were astonished. They had heard about the wisdom. They had heard about the miracles.
But astonishment quickly turned to offense.
Where did He get this? Isn’t this just the carpenter? Isn’t this Mary’s son? Don’t we know His brothers, James, Joses, Judas, and Simon, and His sisters?
Mark says, “So they were offended at Him.”
That word, ‘offended,’ means to stumble. To trip over something until you reject it. Instead of bowing before their Messiah, they stumbled over Him.
They knew Jesus as the carpenter’s son, but they missed Him as the Son of God. They were so familiar with His humanity, they were blind to His divinity.
I wonder how often we do the same thing.
You can know a lot about Jesus and still miss Jesus. You can know the stories, the verses, the culture, and the history and still not have an active sense of wonder.
I’ve read through the Bible cover to cover more than 20 times, and I still have mornings where I read a passage I’ve read before and think, “How have I never seen that?” It’s not that the text changed. It’s that I finally slowed down enough to let Him speak.
It’s the difference between reading my wife’s text messages and actually sitting down to have a conversation with her. One is information. The other is intimacy. God isn’t after my information about Him. He’s after a relationship with me.
That’s the quiet danger of familiarity. We stop expecting God to show us anything new.
Sometimes we also start to decide who Jesus can and can’t use, including ourselves. The people of Nazareth couldn’t reconcile the ordinary with the extraordinary. He’s just a carpenter. We know His family. Because He was ordinary to them, they missed that He was extraordinary.
Do we do that with our own lives? “I’m just a…” – just a parent, just a mechanic, just a student, just someone with a past. Because we feel ordinary, we assume God can’t do anything extraordinary through us.
But Nazareth shows us the real obstacle to faith is rarely a lack of evidence. It’s a lack of surrender.
The same town that was offended by Jesus in Mark 6 included His own brother James. At that point, James didn’t believe. Later, after the resurrection, that same James became a pillar of the early church. What changed? He stopped stumbling over who he thought Jesus was and surrendered to who Jesus really is.
And if you feel like your faith has grown a little stale, a little too familiar, here’s a simple prayer I’ve been praying:
Lord, show me something about You today I’ve never seen before.
He loves to answer that prayer.
Take a moment today:
- Where has familiarity dulled your awe? Is there a story, a verse, or a truth about Jesus you’ve gotten used to?
- Instead of just reading about Him today, ask Him to speak to you. Read Mark 6:1-6 slowly, out loud, and linger on one phrase.
- Is there an area where you’ve said, “I’m just…” and disqualified yourself? What would it look like to offer your ordinary to an extraordinary Jesus?
A prayer:
Jesus, forgive me for the times I’ve let familiarity keep me from wonder. I don’t want to just know about You, I want to know You. Open my eyes again. Show me who You really are today, and help me to not stumble over You, but surrender to You. Amen.
