From what we know of families everywhere, relatives always seek to benefit from the fame and fortune of one of their members. If this is so today, it was even more so in the ancient world, where kinship was the prime value, and where survival without familial connections was virtually impossible.

Jesus returns to his hometown Nazareth as a famous person. He is invited to speak in the local synagogue, and the large audience was amazed at his eloquence and authority. But while there was admiration for this ‘home boy’, but there was also envy and resentment: “Where does he get it all from? How has given him this wisdom? How does he work these miracles? Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?”

Apart from the envy and resentment, there was also a sense of entitlement: “We’ve heard of all your doings in Capernaum; do the same things here in your hometown.”

But Jesus looked at things differently. His healings and exorcisms were always to draw people to a closer relationship with him – what the Gospels call ‘faith’. He wants people to place their trust in him, not to boast about the sensational cure, or to demand it by right. This lack of trust on the part of his own countrymen saddened him. “He could work no miracle there because of their lack of faith.” And again, he says: “A prophet is not without honour except in his own country, and among his own people.” While eager that Jesus be seen as “one of us”, his own countrymen were resentful and angry that he appeared to be “different from us.”

This is a theme which will recur in the Gospels. We all like to claim kinship with the great and mighty, and blood and clan relationship is prized above all. It is not so in God’s kingdom: what is important here is the life of faith, our response to God’s grace. Jesus’s mother Mary was the first in the kingdom, not because she was his natural mother, but because she was “the first to hear the word of God and treasure it in her heart.”