<p>1:46 <em>And Nathanael said to him: Can anything good come out of Nazareth? Philip said to him: Come and see</em>- Like many primitive people, there was the sense that all people from a particular town or area are &quot;not good&quot;. We have here an insight into the Lord's utter humanity; He was known as one &quot;out of&quot; Nazareth, He spoke and acted like a man from Nazareth. We can also reflect that His earlier history of having been born in Bethlehem was presumably unknown to people. Mary and Joseph had kept all that to themselves, and the Lord Himself had not spoken of it.</p><p>The teaching of both Old and New Testaments concerning the ultimate value and meaning of the individual person was radical stuff, so radical that it was rarely fully understood even amongst the people of God. For example, it was important to know where a person was from- because people from certain areas were understood as being a certain person. Hence the Jewish refusal to accept that Jesus could be Messiah, because He was from Galilee, and &quot;out of Galilee arises no prophet&quot; (Jn. 7:52), indeed nothing good could come out of Nazareth (Jn. 1:46). This led to what we would call today stereotyping and racism. People didn't travel very far, and so this of itself reinforced some of the stereotypes. Horizons were extremely limited for the average person. Vergil could say that &quot;to know one Greek is to know them all&quot;; and Philo likewise made total generalizations about Egyptians in his writings. Paul refers to the common maxim that &quot;Cretans are <em>always</em> liars... lazy drunkards&quot; (Tit. 1:12)- but goes on to appeal to the Cretan believers to <em>not</em> be like that, to challenge and break the stereotype It's the same with the Corinthians- the very term &quot;Corinthian&quot; meant a drunkard, shameless man. And yet it was in this very city that so many were called to the Lord, and He attempted to turn them away from that very stereotype they had been born into. And the very fact that the Son of God was from &quot;that despised Nazareth&quot; was the ultimate deconstruction of this understanding- that leaders, kings etc. could only come from some areas and not others. We need to ask ourselves whether we don't follow the same kind of stereotypes when we assume things about people- he's from <em>that</em> family, she's from <em>that</em> country, they're from <em>that </em>church / ecclesia... These attitudes deny the wonderful meaning and value of the individual of which our Lord showed us in His teaching, life, death and current work amongst us.</p><p>He was &ldquo;despised and rejected of men&rdquo;, as Isaiah had foretold so long before. It&rsquo;s perhaps hard to feel from our distance the extent to which Galilee was despised by the Jerusalem Jews. Although Jerusalem to Galilee is only around 100 km., &ldquo;only in exceptional circumstances will someone living in Jerusalem have travelled to the distant province of Galilee, as the <em>Life</em> of Josephus shows&hellip; a journey to Rome would be more likely for a better class Jerusalem dweller than one to provincial Galilee, which was the back of beyond&hellip; the people of Judaea despised the uneducated Galileans and were not particularly interested in this remote province&rdquo;. Yet it was exactly from <em>here</em> that the Son of God came It was from the parochial, the ordinary, from the nothing special, that God&rsquo;s holy child came forth to change this world. So if you too feel a nobody, a cut below the rest, held back by your background&hellip; this is the very wonder of God manifestation. It&rsquo;s through you and me, the kids from the backstreets, the uneducated, the duffers, the dumbers&hellip; that God Almighty reveals Himself to this world.</p>