Mark 6:1-13
“What God Can’t Do”
July 8, 2012 - Sixth Sunday after Pentecost

         “Can God make a rock so big He can’t lift it?” Or as Homer Simpson put it to Ned Flanders, “Could Jesus microwave a burrito so hot that He Himself could not eat it?” There’s a serious question here. Is there anything God cannot do?

         Our good Christian instinct is to say, “No.” When the chil­dren came up we used to sing, “My God is so big, so strong and so mighty, there’s nothing my God cannot do.” Jesus Himself will say further on in Mark chapter 10 verse 27 that “all things are possible with God.” So we might be inclined to bite the bullet and say, “Whatever it is, God can do it.”

         Yet here in Nazareth, in Jesus’ own hometown, the Lord appears to be confronted with a difficulty He cannot overcome. In verse 5, Mark tells us very plainly, “He could do no deed of power there…” Lack of faith among His neighbors prevented Jesus from doing the kinds of miracles He did in other towns. There are some things God, God the Son, can’t do.

         Even the first Christians had trouble with this. Mark’s gospel came first. Then when Matthew told this story he toned down the thought to make it more acceptable. In chapter 13 verse 58, Matthew wrote, “And he did not do many miracles there…,” implying not that Jesus couldn’t, but that He chose not to. But Mark puts it baldly: “He could not.”

         Despite our first instincts there are limits on God’s action. The para­doxes I started with are the simple questions. They are logical impossibilities. They are nonsense talk. When C. S. Lewis discusses this question, he tells us “non­sense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”[1] God is omnipo­tent. God is all-powerful. But human beings can put words to­gether in ways that have no possible application to reality. Over 1,600 years ago, a church father said that God can’t be evil or fail to exist. God can’t make reality not exist or make two times two equal fourteen. We can always think up things God cannot do. He can’t make a round square. He can’t kill the Jabberwock with a vorpal sword. That’s all nonsense and no one can do nonsense, not even God.

         The nonsense is easy. The problem is what happened in Nazareth. It’s not nonsense for Jesus to have done more miracles there. Nobody is looking for round squares or a superhot burrito. We just expect Him to cast out demons or change water into wine or raise somebody from the dead. He did those miracles in other towns. They’re all possible for Him. Why not in Nazareth?

         Verse 6 tells us Jesus was “amazed at their unbelief.” Miracles weren’t possible in Nazareth because they lacked faith. The problem in His hometown is that they did not believe in Jesus. Verse 3 tells us, “they took offense at him.” That offense and lack of faith prevented Jesus from doing all that He could do for them.

         The Nazarene attitude is not surprising. Jesus quoted a proverb in verse 4: “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their own people, and in their own house.” “Familiarity breeds contempt,” is our modern way of putting it. The better you know someone, the less inclined you are to recognize anything great in him or her.

         Leonard Bernstein’s father discouraged his son’s interest in music and refused to pay for his piano lessons. Years later he was asked why he was not more encouraging to his gifted son. He replied, “I didn’t know he was going to grow up to be Leonard Bernstein.” The people of Nazareth didn’t know Jesus had grown up to be the Son of God. As verse 3 says, they knew Him as the carpenter, as Mary’s boy. They knew His brothers and sisters. Familiarity bred contempt and they refused to believe He was anymore than one of them.

         Familiarity with Jesus may breed contempt for us. If Jesus is your buddy, or as someone told me recently he saw on a T-shirt “Jesus is my homeboy,” then you may be on your way to Nazareth. Treating Jesus with over-familiarity may be a step on the way to an unbelief that limits what He can do.

         Why, though? Why should the townspeople’s unbelief limit Jesus, limit God? Couldn’t He have done miracles anyway? Sure. He did, in fact. Mark goes on in verse 5 to say that “he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them.” But the great things He was doing elsewhere couldn’t happen where there was no faith. Why?

         At least part of the answer lies in our free-will. When God made us He wanted us to be able to truly love Him and truly love each other. Real love isn’t forced. It’s given freely. So it’s possible for us to reject and hurt each other and for us to reject and hurt God.

         Not even God can have it both ways. If He wants us to freely love and believe in Him, then He can’t force us to do it. He can’t give us free-will and then guarantee we will use it the right way. If we are really free, then not even God can make sure we will exercise our freedom well. If we ask “Why couldn’t God make a world where everyone freely believes in Him and does what’s good?” we are back in the territory of nonsense, in the vicinity of rocks too big for Him to lift and burritos too hot for Him to eat.

         So the people of Nazareth were free not to believe in Jesus. And He would not force them to believe. He didn’t do miracles there for the same reason God doesn’t rearrange the stars to spell out, “Hey, I’m here!” He will not force faith on anyone. A coerced faith doesn’t produce genuine love. Coercion only breeds resentment and rebellion.

         Miracles appear where there is faith, but God won’t work miracles in order to slam faith down our throats. Familiarity breeds contempt and our Lord knows that if miracles become everyday events, then we will lose our respect and awe for them. Too many miracles and there won’t be faith. We’ll just take the miracles and the Lord for granted. That’s one reason in our epistle lesson from II Corinthians 12 that Paul didn’t receive a miracle of healing when he asked the Lord three times to remove his “thorn in the flesh.”

         Miracles need faith. If you don’t have faith, then you won’t see miracles. That’s what the Nazarenes teach us. That’s what happened to them. But please don’t turn the “if, then” around and say that “If you don’t see miracles, then you don’t have faith.” That’s both a spiritual error and a logical mistake. If you don’t get enough vitamin C, you will get sick. But if you get sick it’s not always because you didn’t get enough vitamin C. Not experiencing miracles doesn’t always mean you don’t have faith. Paul’s thorn teaches us that. All we know for sure is that without faith, there are no miracles. And faith depends in part on a free choice to believe.

         That free-will to believe or not shows up in the second part of our text. Jesus sent out His disciples, “two by two” in verse 7, giving them authority over unclean spirits. He sent them out to do miracles for people, to drive out demons and heal people. But verse 11 acknowledges that not everyone is going to believe. “If any place will not welcome you and they refuse to hear you…” He says. He’s just been rejected in Nazareth. He knew that His disciples would experience rejection in turn.

         Just like in Nazareth, God would not make every town the disciples visited welcome them. He couldn’t force everyone to believe the good news about Jesus. So He gave them a way to deal with it at the end of verse 11, a way to show themselves and anyone else that not everyone would believe. “As you leave, shake the dust off your feet.”

         Our reading from Ezekiel 2 is about the same thing. God tells Ezekiel that the people he’s being sent to are stubborn. Some of them will refuse to hear, refuse to believe. That’s free-will at work. That’s God’s desire to be freely loved, freely received. He will not force anyone to believe and love Him. He cannot help those who do not want to be helped.

         That’s the message of Norman Maclean’s beautiful autobiographical novel A River Runs Through It. You may have seen the Robert Redford film with a young Brad Pitt, who plays Norman’s younger brother Paul. Everyone in the family wants to help Paul escape his tragic course. But Paul is a hard-drinking brawler and gambler who won’t be helped. He refuses any advice or support his friends or family offer. And he finally dies beaten to death in the street over a gambling debt, while his father and brother wonder what more they could have done to help. The answer they are forced to accept is that they could do nothing, because Paul would not ac­cept anything from them.

         Nazareth teaches us that God can do nothing for us if we will not accept what He so very much wants to give us. Hebrews 11:6 says “without faith it is impossible to please God.” It’s impossible, because without faith God can’t help us. Our disbelief limits His ability to operate in our lives. He can’t help us because we don’t want to be helped.

        I’ve occasionally had someone come to me for Christian moral advice. “What should I do, pastor?” I sit down and open the Bible. I talk to them about Christian character, about being like Jesus. But sometimes I’ve seen a person look at me and say something like, “I won’t do it. I won’t live like that.” And they walk out the door and close it behind them.

         Jesus in Nazareth seems like that. It’s about a closed door. But the good part of this story of missing faith is that it doesn’t take much. God can work with very little. Even there, being scorned as a local boy with big pretensions, Jesus found a few sick people with enough faith to accept His hands laid on them to be healed. Even with the majority rejecting Him, there was a bit of faith through which Jesus could bring His blessing.

         It doesn’t take much faith for Jesus to begin with us. He said even faith as tiny as a mustard seed would do it. It’s like the little purple flower I once saw growing in the rock by Salt Creek Falls. It had sprung up in a tiny crack in a field of rock, a single opening in a hard, volcanic surface. Through that little crevice, life forced its way in and grew up in beauty. That’s how Christ will enter into us if we give Him the least opportunity.

         The need for that opening is why Jesus ordered His own disciples in verse 8 “to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts…” No extra coat or shoes He went on in verse 9. He sent them out without all the provisions they would need for a long bit of traveling. It was so they could exercise their faith in what God would provide. He wanted them to discover the miracles of God’s care for them that would happen when they didn’t have everything they needed.

         You and I may miss some of what Jesus wants to do for us by always trying to provide for ourselves. If we always try to make sure we’ve got what we need for the future, then we make it impossible for Jesus to give us what we need. Here’s another thing God can’t do. He can’t give us what we’ve already got. If we hold tight to our money and our time, if we always make sure we’ve got enough for tomorrow, then there’s no room for Him to bless us with what He has for us.

         It’s when we leave some of our stuff behind, when we give away that bit of cash which might have bought a new television or a fresh outfit, that God finds room in our lives to give us something good in its place. He can’t give us anything until we start trusting Him for something. It’s when we relinquish a few hours we might have spent shopping or playing a video game to instead pray or serve Him that God has the time in our lives to show us a miracle. Sacrifice of time or money creates an opening for Jesus, shows our faith in Him. In the same way, leaving our pride behind and doing something humble or forgiving makes room for Jesus to enter, to reward our faith.

         Don’t close the door. When we got married, my wife’s family lived in the al­most rural outlying South County area of St. Louis. The television reception was terrible. and there was no cable TV available. A couple broadcast channels came in fine, but most were filled with snow and interference. Her father and two brothers would fiddle with the rabbit ear antenna and adjust strategically placed pieces of aluminum foil. Once I saw her father sit and watch a baseball game while holding onto the antenna because the reception was better while he touched it.

         Then one evening as they sat down to dinner, Beth’s mother remarked: “You know, somebody knocked on the door today. He said he was from the cable television company and wanted to sign us up.” All three male heads lifted from their plates, their eyes lighting up with joy and expectation. But she con­tinued, “I said to him, ‘We don’t need that!’ I told him to go on and I closed the door.”

         Their mouths dropped open. For a moment they were dumbfounded, they couldn’t say a thing. Then one after the other they began to exclaim, “You did what?!” “You told him what?” “You made him go away?” “We’ve been waiting for this moment all our lives and you closed the door in his face?” “What in the world were you thinking?”

         As you might imagine, Mom’s initial rejection of the cable man was soon cor­rected. The closed door was opened and 37 channels of crystal clear television program­ming finally entered the Tichacek household. For a long time, however, shaking their heads, the three men told the story of the day Mom chased the cable man away.

         All Jesus needs is a little opening to bring us much more abundance and joy than 37 or even a hundred channels of television can offer. But we cannot shut the door in His face. We cannot live as we so often do as theoretical believers, but practical atheists, saying we have faith but not really expecting anything from Him. We cannot close Him out of all the different parts of our life and still see His grace at work. With our God and Savior Jesus Christ all things are possible. But not if we refuse Him an opening, not if we stop believing in His power.

         Jesus will amaze us with what He can do. But if we shut out Jesus, then the only amazement there will be is His own amazement, like He had in Nazareth, where verse 6 tells us, “And he was amazed at their unbelief.”

         Let’s not amaze our Lord like that. Let us not strike Him dumbfounded and power­less to help us with our failure to believe and trust Him. Let us find ways to crack our hearts and minds and lives open for what He would like to do there. Let’s get rid of the stuff and the attitudes that block the door for His miracles. Let us welcome Him into our community, into our own homes, believing and trusting that He will work wonders among us.

         And as odd as it sounds, let’s not close our church doors on Jesus. Let us trust Him together for what we need. We have to. We can’t guarantee the future. We can’t guarantee that everyone will believe our message. We can’t provide for every contingency. But that means there is room here, room for Jesus to come and help us, to heal us, to give us all that He wants to give. Let’s be ready to receive it.

         Amen.

         Valley Covenant Church
         Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
         Copyright © 2012 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj