UNBELIEF BORN OF FAMILIARITY by Dr. Alexander Maclaren

International Tract and Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Apr 22, 1889

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 15, No. 16.

UNBELIEF BORN OF FAMILIARITY.

By Dr. Alexander Maclaren

WE owe to Mark alone the notice that Jesus actually wrought at Joseph's handicraft. Apparently the latter was dead, and, if so, Jesus would be the head of the house, and probably the "bread-winner." One of the Fathers preserves the tradition that he "made plows and yokes, by which he taught the symbols of righteousness and an active life." That good Father seems to think it needful to find symbolical meanings, in order to save Christ's dignity; but the prose fact that he toiled at the carpenter's bench, and handled hammer and saw, needs nothing to heighten its value as a sign of his true participation in man's lot, and as the hallowing of manual toil. How many weary arms have grasped their tools with new vigor and contentment when they thought of him as their pattern in their narrow toils.

The Nazarenes' difficulty was but one case of a universal tendency. Nobody finds it easy to believe that some village child, who has grown up beside him, and whose undistinguished outside life he knows, has turned out a genius or a great man. The last people to recognize a prophet are always his kindred and his countrymen. "Far-away birds have fine feathers." Men resent it as a kind of slight on themselves that the other, who was one of them but yesterday, should be so far above them to-day. They are mostly too blind to look below the surface, and they conclude that, because they saw so much of the external life, they knew the man that lived it. The elders of Nazareth had seen Jesus grow up, and to them he would be "the carpenter's son" still. The more important people had known the humbleness of his home, and could not adjust themselves to look up to him, instead of down. His equals in age would find their boyish remembrances too strong for accepting him as a prophet.

All of them did just what the most of us would have done, when they took it for certain that the man whom they had known so well, as they fancied, could not be a prophet, to say nothing of the Messiah so long looked for. It is easy to blame them; but it is better to learn the warning in their words, and to take care that we are not blind to some true messenger of God just because we have been blessed with close companionship with him. Many a household has had to wait for death to take away the prophet before they knew him. Some of us entertain angels unawares, and have bitterly to feel, when too late, that our eyes were holden, that we should not know them.—Dr. McLaren, in S. S. Times.