Jesus said this famous line in Mark 6:4, "Only in his hometown, among his relatives and in his own house is a prophet without honor." Living in a small town as I do I think I can understand this. Not that I'm some heavyweight prophet by any stretch ... But the familiarity part.
It was no different with Jesus. I can imagine the townsfolk going, "Anyone from around these parts has got to be a loser!" Or words to that effect. The good citizens of Nazareth must have been saying, "We don't care about the stories of the miracles or the healings and certainly not the fish story - this guy has got to be a fraud!" How can somebody you grew up with, or watch grow up, somebody whose habits, idiosyncrasies that could have flat got on peoples nerves on occasion ... And to have that somebody start acting like, well, He is somebody!!
I think that a major lesson from this passage in Mark is that there is this tendency to be a whole lot more enamored with "impressive" strangers than with the people we know all to well. It's all in the mystery I think. That accounts, at least in part, for sexual affairs, romantic flings and the like. If the person really the goofball you were hangin' with the way their family and pals do, you probably would stay a million miles away! The thing is that the "prophet" or that truly special "somebody" could be right under our noses ... We might think we know to much about them!
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