“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. – Luke 4:24

Today’s Scripture Reading (September 16, 2017): Luke 4

I am convinced that we exist in snapshots of time.

My mom’s father was a big, powerful man. For a number of years, he and my grandmother (who is much smaller but still a formidable woman) built houses together. They would buy up several lots in an area and then build the house that they would live in and then fill in the other lots with homes to be sold. I remember summers spent in some of the places where they were building and deciding that they were perfect for the job. Grandpa wrestled the big pieces of lumber with ease while my grandmother hammered them into place. The system simply worked.

As I said, my grandfather was a powerful man. But that one fact notwithstanding, my grandfather was called “Little Murray” until the day his mother died. To me, he was a giant; but to my great-grandmother, he was still her little boy. It is a phenomenon that I have experienced over and over in my life – and it is a phenomenon that is not restricted to family. For people who knew me as a child, or connected with me during my teenage years, that is often still who I am. Time has stopped and I, or we, often never outgrown those persistent snapshots of our lives.

The effect of these snapshots on our development is devastating. We never become because the more these snapshots are used to describe us, the more we are stuck at that place, and even if there have been great changes in our lives as we have matured, those changes are largely ignored. We will always be our own versions of “Little Murray.”

Jesus was well aware of the phenomenon. For the people of Nazareth, Jesus existed within their little personal snapshots. He would always be “little Jesus, you know, Joseph and Mary’s boy. The older brother of James and Jude and those other kids who seemed to terrorize Nazareth’s streets (as most little children do) in year’s past. And as long as that was the snapshot that the people had of Jesus, then there was absolutely nothing that he was going to be able to do in their midst. His hometown needed the prophet and Messiah that Jesus had become, but all that they would receive was the little boy that they believed him to be.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Luke 5