[Note: In this inaugural set of Theology Thursday offerings, I’ve embarked on a series of reflections on how children shape the character and spiritual life of the adults around them. These posts invite the reader to consider how children are inescapably central to our ‘growing up’ into the image of Christ. They also preview A.J.’s future book, The Teachable Spirit (Zondervan, 2025). You can read the previous posts in this series here and here.]
In Mark’s New Testament biography of Jesus, one event is colored with more detail than in any other gospel account: the return of Jesus to his childhood town of Nazareth in Mark 6.1-6. Jesus, Matthew recounts, had been born down south in the city of Bethlehem of the region known as Judah. It was up north, however, in the quiet town of Nazareth in Galilee, where Jesus had spent the formative years of his childhood. Around his 30th year, Jesus had been catapulted into his public ministry following his baptism in the river Jordan. He would soon gather a team of disciples, begin enacting miraculous signs and wonders, and take on a heavy itinerant preaching regimen. For the first time since these inaugural events, Jesus returns to the place and people who had known him as a child.
The response in Nazareth was tepid. Matthew similarly records this story. But he omits one of Mark’s details: that those in Jesus’ hometown synagogue were “amazed” (v. 2) at his teaching. Mark is the only one who includes this detail. Mark’s inclusion of the “amazement” of Nazareth is anything short of excited commitment. Seeking to “amaze” people wasn’t ever part of Jesus’ agenda. Throughout the gospels, for example, people are repeatedly “amazed” by Jesus, his work, and his teaching.1 But these same people would soon reject him just as quickly. They had been awed. But not enough to go with him on the path to the cross. Even more, Luke records that the crowds in Samaria were “amazed” by one Simon, who could do miraculous signs under the power of an evil spirit in the book of Acts.2 In these early Christian writings, it seems that being amazed is unrelated to the journey of discipleship. Sure, Nazareth was “amazed,” but this translates into nothing substantive or long-lasting. They may be “wowed” that Jesus had become who he had become. But they keep this one they’d known growing up at arm’s length.
The result is a paltry reception in Nazareth. What should have been a parade around the homecoming Son turns out to be a charade of disdain and disbelief. This no doubt parallels John’s insistence that God—coming in the flesh to his own creation—is not received “by his own.” (Jn 1.11) Just as Jesus is rejected in his hometown, God is rejected by his very creation. The very place where Jesus should have been received is the one place he’s not. Their lack of faith translates more or less into a hostile and unwelcome rejection that limits their ability to experience Christ’s miraculous power. Mark’s words capture the underwhelming scenario: “[Jesus] could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them.” (v. 5) Using a literary device I call in my classes ‘divine hyperbole,’ Mark pairs a universal statement (“he could not do any miracles there”) with the naming a few miracles (“except heal” a few). I’m convinced that this literary structure is Mark’s way of underscoring that Jesus could have done so much in Nazareth. Jesus, in turn, is ironically said to be “amazed at their lack of faith.” (v. 6)
Mark’s narrative provokes us to reflect on the child’s place in our lives. Children have always faced a unique set of challenges in the world of adults. As in any time in history, children played a vital role in the agrarian life of the first-century Jewish world. Farming and shepherding would be impossible without the young. To say nothing of the fact that children were, for all intents and purposes, the social safety net of the family in antiquity. There were no 401(k)s or retirement plans. One had children. This is why many ancient pagan religions spent as much time and energy as they did seeking to arouse the blessing of their many gods so that they might be assured of offspring. Pagan fertility cults, as we call them, offered deceptive hopes to navigate the scary intersection of childbearing, subsistence living, and a relentlessly tumultuous economy. Children were needed. They were integral to life. Without children, existence was virtually impossible.
Still, despite their importance, the child lived in a terrifying world. Even in the first century, up to half of all children would not survive to their fifth birthday due to illness or unforeseen complications. For this very reason, it was common in many cultures not even to name a child until the first week had passed. Why give someone a name, it was thought, if they would not live to be known? This was only made worse by the fact that the Roman Empire permitted (and even encouraged) an unthinkable practice known as “exposure.” In exposure, unwanted children (primarily girls and babies with birth defects) would be laid outside the city gate in the wilderness, exposed, as it were, for the animals to devour. Some estimates suggest that approximately two out of three children succumbed to death utilizing this grotesque practice.
In other words, it was a tough go for a child in the first century. And so they occupied a very marginal space in the minds of most people and cultures. When they were thought of, it wasn’t often good. Children were perceived to be at the bottom of the ever-descending hierarchy of importance. Jesus—whom Nazareth had intimately known as a child—has understandably become frozen in their imaginations and memories as merely a child. They couldn’t appreciate him as a Messiah because they couldn’t see him as anything more than a kid. Which shouldn’t be a problem—were it not for the fact that people had such low perceptions of children. Given the abysmal place children occupied in society, the paltry and malformed imagination and thinking of around the children wouldn’t allow them to see Jesus for who he was. Let alone worship him. A diminished view of children kept them from seeing the God who had become a child. Indeed, that God would descend to becoming a child would be the greatest “stumbling block” for any Jew.3
We’ve all experienced this reality on a practical level. I remember going to one of my first high school reunions. Upon entering that nervous room of old and aged classmates, I was surprised to bump into an old friend from elementary school named Alex. Since our graduation two decades earlier, he has gone on to become quite a successful businessman. Still, the many accolades and successes he’d acquired as an adult could mean little to me. I could only see Alex as that guy I’d play tag with during recess. When we’ve known someone as a child, our minds resist seeing them for who they truly have become. “I know where you are from,” we think, “don’t think you are better than me.”
I suspect this is why Nazareth had difficulty seeing Jesus for who he was—the Son of God who had come to seek and save the lost from sin and death. Seeing God as a human child scandalized their ability to believe in him. Does this mean that Jesus wasn’t who he claimed to be? Didn’t the people who knew Jesus the best reject him and his identity? Anything but! The problem with Nazareth wasn’t that they were intimate with Jesus and abandoned him. No. They were merely familiar with Jesus. Which, in the end, is often the most significant obstacle one has to true worship and encounter with God. The sin of familiarity must be guarded against. We aren’t always intimate with God. But we are too often familiar with God. And in so doing, we lock him up tight into our well-controlled expectations. Familiarity with Jesus can often be our greatest enemy of true faith. Loving God means, in part, loving the actual God more than our self-constructed expectations about him.
No. In fact, it must be pointed out that those who were most intimate with Jesus would eventually be the ones who worshiped him most passionately. Lecturing through the New Testament, I like pointing out that those who were closest to Jesus on a family level (his mother Mary, his brothers James and Jude, and his cousin John the Baptist) are each shown to have worshiped Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God. Historically, this matters. I’d never worship my step-brother. Nobody would. The fact that those who actually knew him best—who were not hamstrung by the shackles of familiarity—would be the most willing to exalt him as the King of Kings.
The incarnation, above all, invites us to redeem our human imagination around children by being reminded that God himself was a child. This was one of G.K. Chesterton’s favorite theological points. Pondering why the sun rises time and again, Chesterton suggests that more is going on than just the cold laws of physics. In his Orthodoxy, Chesterton argues that the world spins, the sun rises, and the oceans wave simply because God desires them to:
It might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. They want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again,’ and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.4
For Chesterton, God, like a child, gleefully declares over creation, “Do it again, do it again.”
This is actually very practical. One of the most helpful ways I’ve learned to love and care compassionately for others is to see them as children. Part of my job is serving the intellectual and theological needs of students and parishioners, who, if I’m honest, often frustrate or anger me. Or, worse yet, include people I simply do not like. This is life. And it’s okay. But we all must learn how to navigate our place in the world in such a way that we come to see people as gifts rather than problems. The path toward maturity always winds through those who drive us mad. Still, when I am required as part of my job to serve the needs of someone with whom I have a particular distaste, it is easy to write them off and give up on them.
I’ve learned a trick. When I can discipline myself to see the person in front of me who may be creating difficulty or consternation as an actual child, it shifts my entire perspective around the person. One student of mine has provided me with no shortage of headaches. And when I address them merely as adults who aren’t getting their act together, it creates more problems. But when I stop, pause, and simply remember that this being in front of me was a child—a little, forming, humble, and babbling child—it changes my entire perspective around them.
I have even become convinced that this is why biblical authors such as the apostle John employ language around those he’s writing to as “dear children.” John likes to speak of the Christians in these churches as “my dear children” or “little children.”5 In the early church, this was a term of belovedness used by pastors to speak to their flock.6 This is something John does no less than nine times. What if John—in writing to Christian communities that were frustrating and difficult—chose to write to them in such a way as to remind himself who they were: beautiful, glorious, image-bearers worthy of having at least three letters written to that would make it into the New Testament?
I used to be scared of parties. But someone once told me to enter the room and imagine that you are the only one wearing clothing in the entire room. It’s a weird trick. But I’m able to go to parties now. This little psychological trick has given me the confidence to feel like I’m not the only weird person in the room. In a small way, when I see the people before me as a child, hungry, in need of help, and worthy of my care, it reshapes how I treat them.
The problem with Nazareth wasn’t that Jesus had been a child. The Nazareth pride has somewhere picked up a low view of children. And as a result—to imagine that God went through childhood—is the ultimate scandal. Here’s my suggestion this week for changing the way you think. Choose to (1) have a higher view of children, and (2) see every person in your life as a child. The combination of both exalting the child and lowering the adult in our mind just may change how we live. This combination, I suspect, can help us begin to see people for who they are.
Yes, see them as children.
This is the Greek word ekplēssō, and Mark is distinctively committed to its use. For example, see Mark 1.22, 27; 2.12; 5.20 (to name a few). Mark records some thirteen occasions in which onlookers or crowds are amazed by what they see in Jesus.
See Acts 8.9-13.
1 Corinthians 1.23.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York, NY: John Lane Company, 1908). The text has been shortened for length.
See 1 John 2. John uses the word teknia as a way of speaking of these “little children.”
See also 1 Corinthians 4.14, 17; Galatians 4.19; and 1 Tim 1.2.
Learning to be “child like” and not “childish.”