Sermon Tone Analysis

Date: 2022-06-05

Audience: Grass Valley Corps ONLINE

Title: The People Want a Non-Prophet World

Text: Matthew 13:53-14:12

Proposition: Selfishness blinds people to God’s reality

Purpose: Don’t let your pride build obstacles to following Jesus

Grace and peace!

Today going to talk about Jesus and some of the people who DIDN’T believe he was anything but a con man and why that was.

But first, a brief introduction.

I’m Captain Roger – The Salvation Army – Currently based in Grass Valley, CA.

This is our online worship in study – If you come to our Sunday morning meeting, this is the topic we’re planning to discuss, but we post the main teaching online each week so everyone will get a chance to hear and participate in God’s Word as we wrestle with what it means and how we can use it in our lives.

Working through Matthew’s biography of Jesus.

Matt was one of the Twelve key disciples of Jesus, the inner circle who was responsible to carry the message to the rest of the disciples and to the world around them.

He believed Jesus was more than a great teacher – He thought Jesus was also the long-promised Messiah God had said he would send to rescue his people.

He also thought that Jesus was, in some way, also God, and not just an agent of God.

And in his biography, he’s done all he can to tell the story in a way which shows us why he believed these things.

He’s also told us about a number of people who absolutely did NOT believe.

Which we will hear more about in just a moment.

We’re up to the end of chapter 13 in the book of Matthew, the first book of the Christian scriptures, also called the New Testament.

Stating today at verse 53, which will transition us from the story of Jesus’ teaching to the skepticism and anger of those who didn’t like what he had to say.

53 And it happened that when Jesus had finished these parables he went away from there.

54 And he came to his hometown and* began to teach them in their synagogue, so that they were amazed and said, “From where did this man getthis wisdom and these miracles?

55 Is not this one the son of the carpenter?

Is not his mother called Mary and his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas?

56 And are not all his sisters with us?

From where then did this man get all these things?”

57 And they were offended by him.[1]

Jesus grew up in Nazareth, backwater town in Northern Israel, in the region of Galilee.

It was the kind of small, nondescript village that other small, nondescript towns made fun of.

Back in the first days of his ministry Jesus called a guy named Philip to come follow him and Philip went to his buddy Nathanael and said, “Bro, we found the guy!

This is the one Moses and the Prophets wrote about!

It’s Jesus, son of Joseph, from Nazareth!”

To which we are told Nathanael replied, “Nazareth?

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?”

But, once he met and listened to Jesus, Nathanael was right there, following him just like Philip and so many others did, even though Jesus seemed to be from nowhere.

Now, Jesus had spent a couple of years traveling around Israel, sharing his amazing teaching about the Kingdom of God and how to live in it, bringing about miraculous healing for people with life changing injuries and chronic diseases, and even bringing the dead back to life.

There were several times where he even seemed to confront people possessed by supernatural entities and free them from that demonic control.

His reputation had grown and spread from being a wilderness preacher to being something more, something that could only have come from God.

The people began to whisper that this was the one they had been waiting for, the Messiah, and they began to match up the things Jesus did with the signs God had promised would herald the arrival of that savior.

This wasn’t universally accepted.

Some among the religious elite found themselves threatened by the things Jesus said and did.

They didn’t care for the way he interpreted some of the scripture passages he taught about.

They didn’t like that he treated everyone as if they were on the same social level.

They didn’t like how his teaching subtly shifted power away from their leadership.

And they tried to fight against Jesus like they did when they argued with each other: they asked questions in a way which they thought could elicit answers which would reinforce their position or lead to them being able to condemn this young upstart as a heretic come to lead them away from the God of their people.

But Jesus had answered their questions and their attacks on him ended up bringing shame on themselves instead.

Frustrated, they began to level wild insults at him, trying to tear him down or start rumors that he was the devil.

Their poison spread to some, and even his own family had felt the need to come and try to bring him home because they were embarrassed that Jesus was causing such an upheaval.

Jesus kept teaching, but he began to use more stories, which the people loved to hear, even when he didn’t always explain them.

As they puzzled out his meanings they found themselves blessed by the things he said, while those who had decided they would be his enemies just got angrier, not liking what they understood and refusing to understand what they didn’t want to think about.

Through it all, Jesus kept moving, visiting place after place, sharing the news that the Kingdom of God was at hand, and healing those who came to him.

And then, for the first time since he started, he came home.

He went to church that week and he began to teach amazing things and some people came to him and were healed.

And the response of those there, the people who had known him and his family their whole lives, the ones who you would think would have been his proudest followers and supporters, went like this:

Who does he think he is?

This is the carpenter’s kid!

We KNOW Jesus, so whatever this is he’s trying to do here, we’re not buying.

Well, why not?

Hmm… Remember what the Pharisee’s biggest problem with Jesus’ teaching was?

They needed to set aside their own understanding of things to embrace God’s understanding, and they didn’t want to do it.

Their pride built an obstacle that they weren’t willing to get past, even when what was on the other side was a place in the Kingdom of God.

What did the people of Nazareth understand?

Well, look what happened:

57 And they took offense at him.

But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town and in his own home.”

58 And he did not do many miracles there because of their lack of faith.

[2]

What did the Nazarene’s understand?

They understood that Mary was the mother of Jesus, and they remembered that there was a time when she was engaged to Joseph and she turned up pregnant before the final wedding took place.

Joseph stepped up and all, but the people remembered that this is a family in which questionable things have happened in the past.

They understood that Jesus has grown up with four brothers and at least two sisters – we aren’t told how many, but we are told that it is sisters, plural.

And Joseph was a carpenter, which could mean anything and everything from basic woodwork to stonecutting.

He was a construction worker and a small-town craftsman.

He probably spent much of his children’s youth working in the nearby town of Sepphoris as part of the teams working on rebuilding it for King Herod after it had been destroyed in a revolt after he had taken power.

Jesus, the oldest son, would have helped his father and learned the trade from him, as would one or all of the other brothers.

In Mark’s version of this same story, he mentions that the people actually called Jesus “the carpenter”.

That was part of the problem.

To them, he’s “the carpenter” so what kind of spiritual insight are they going to get?

I don’t call on a plumber to make pizza, I don’t ask a zookeeper to explain the human decision-making process, and I don’t call a movie star to explain macroeconomics.

Why would I want to have a carpenter explain the Kingdom of God to me?

So when Jesus gets to town, he teaches amazing things and he performs miracles of healing, but all the people can really see is that this is Jesus, born under a cloud, raised to be a carpenter, and he’s from Nazareth!

Can anything good ever come from Nazareth?

And they say no, it can’t.

They get OFFENDED that he’s even there.

Let me point out that Matthew has told us that the teaching was amazing.

The people were AMAZED at the wisdom of what Jesus said.

He also has told us that miracles were performed there.

I know that at the end it says he didn’t do many, but not only were the people amazed at Jesus’ wisdom, they were astounded by his miraculous powers.

The problem isn’t that they didn’t hear his teaching and it isn’t that they didn’t see the signs!

They heard and they saw, but then they were, like, “Yeah, but this is JESUS,” and they ignored what it meant in favor of getting upset by it.

So, yeah, I guess he didn’t do so many miracles here as in some other towns, because you can’t help those who don’t want help.

You can’t force people to understand when they have decided not to.

Selfishness blinds people to God’s reality.

Look what happened to John.

That’s the next thing Matthew tells us about.

At that time Herod the tetrarch heard the reports about Jesus, 2 and he said to his attendants, “This is John the Baptist; he has risen from the dead!

That is why miraculous powers are at work in him.”

[3]

This might seem like a leap, but Herod has a guilty conscience about John.

Matthew fills those details in for us next.

3 Now Herod had arrested John and bound him and put him in prison because of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, 4 for John had been saying to him: “It is not lawful for you to have her.” 5 Herod wanted to kill John, but he was afraid of the people, because they considered John a prophet.

[4]

We went over some of this story a few weeks ago, when we talked about John being in prison.