<p>13:57&nbsp;<em>And they were offended by him-&nbsp;</em>He was a stumbling block to Israel generally, and particularly to His own neighbours. When He taught terrible judgment for those who make others stumble, He must have spoken with acute awareness that He too would make others stumble.&nbsp;<em>En autos,</em>&nbsp;&quot;in / by Him&quot;, grammatically means that He was the instrumentality of their stumbling.&nbsp; The point is that He did not do this intentionally, and the fault for the stumbling was with the stumbler. In some things we all make some stumble, James comments (James 3:2). When He declared Himself as Messiah, the people who had grown up with Him were scandalized (Mk. 6:3 Gk.). He was&nbsp;<em>so</em>&nbsp;human that even though He never sinned, the people who intimately knew Him for 30 years thought that He was truly one of them. In our making the word flesh, we tend to irritate people by our apparent righteousness, or turn them away from us by our hypocrisy. But the Lord truly made the word flesh, to the extent that the very dregs of society could relate to Him as one of them. There is a wonder in this that requires sustained meditation. In essence, the same is happening to Trinitarians. They just can't hack that Jesus, Son of God, perfect human being... was truly human, with a human brother, mother and relatives. And so they have stumbled off into various wrong theories and theologies about Jesus to try to rationalize and spiritually legitimise their lack of faith in Him as a human person. When He declared Himself as Messiah, the people who had grown up with Him were scandalized (Mk. 6:3 Gk.). He was&nbsp;<em>so</em>&nbsp;human that even though He never sinned, the people who intimately knew Him for 30 years thought that He was truly one of them. In our making the word flesh, we tend to irritate people by our apparent righteousness, or turn them away from us by our hypocrisy. But the Lord truly made the word flesh, to the extent that the very dregs of society could relate to Him as one of them. There is a wonder in this that requires sustained meditation. If He indeed was God, a Divine comet which hit this world for 33 years and sped off again, then the depth of His humanity was nothing less than a cruel deception.&nbsp;</p>
<p><em>But Jesus said to them: A prophet is not without honour-</em>&nbsp;We need to ask&nbsp;<em>why</em>&nbsp;this is so true. In the first century Palestinian world, a person wasn&rsquo;t defined so much by &lsquo;who they were&rsquo; as by &lsquo;whom they belonged to and where they originated from&rsquo;. Hence their problem with seeing that the Lord had access to wisdom and power which they did not have as a group. He didn&rsquo;t get that from them- and this confused them and their lack of understanding it turned to anger with Him. He had become different to them, therefore He was not of them- so they reasoned. And yet He&nbsp;<em>was</em>&nbsp;of them- the record stresses that they were His natural&nbsp;<em>patris</em>(&ldquo;country&rdquo;) and&nbsp;<em>oikos</em>&nbsp;(&ldquo;family&rdquo;). This is the same problem as Trinitarians have- they can&rsquo;t see that the Lord could have what He had, and yet be one of us, of our human nature. And perhaps that partly explains their frequently observed anger with non-Trinitarian Christians. This proverb is quoted again in Jn. 4:44 but in a different sense. The Lord is recorded as leaving Judea and going to Galilee exactly because a prophet has no honour in &ldquo;His own country&rdquo;. Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, not in Galilee. It could be that He went to Galilee from Judea because the &ldquo;country&rdquo; He had in mind here in quoting this proverb was Bethlehem, rather than Nazareth. And yet in Mt. 13:57 He uses this proverb about Nazareth. Perhaps this explains His deep amazement at His rejection now in Nazareth- see on :58.</p>
<p><em>Except in his hometown and in his own house [hold]-</em>&nbsp;We have yet another evidence of the Lord&rsquo;s humanity, in that He talked of His own family of origin, which included His blood brothers and sisters of the previous verses. But He has just spoken of Himself as the &lsquo;householder&rsquo;, the head of the family / house (see on 13:27,52). Clearly enough, He is contrasting His spiritual family with His natural family. That group of mixed up, doubting and misunderstanding men and women who followed Him- had replaced His family of origin as His real family.&nbsp;</p>