Luke 4:23-27
23 Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.'”

24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed–only Naaman the Syrian.”

Here, Jesus is visiting Nazareth, his “hometown,” where He was raised by Mary and Joseph and is well remembered by neighbors and acquaintances. Many of the townspeople had likely heard of Jesus’ miracles and preaching in the surrounding area, but until now He had never done anything back home.

Jesus, being God in flesh, knows what’s primarily on the Nazarenes’ minds, even as they praise Him for His earlier quotations of Isaiah’s prophecies in the synagogue. He knows they want Him to do a bunch of miracles for them, too, even though most of them don’t believe He’s really the Messiah. (That’s right–they don’t believe the kid who was raised among them is really the Messiah. They actually refer to him as “Joseph’s son” the whole time, and their adoration is more born of condescending affection than awe.)

So, Jesus addresses the issue directly. “All right, you want me to do miracles for you, but you don’t really believe in Me; I’m still just Joseph’s kid to you,” the gist of His reply goes. He tells them that Israel didn’t believe in God’s power in the Old Testament either, so God didn’t bless them–He went to other nations and other peoples instead. By doing this, God proved He was still powerful enough to bless, but He was reminding the Israelites that they had to meet Him halfway by trusting and not repudiating Him.

The Nazarenes were making the same mistake. They stood there and practically told Jesus they didn’t think He was nobody special by calling Him simply “Joseph’s son,” but wanted Him to do miracles anyway. They had already rejected him as Messiah, but wanted the benefits of salvation (blessings).

Modern-Day Nazarenes: Yes, They Still Exist!

There are many people today who want a “non-believer with benefits” relationship to Jesus. They don’t REALLY trust in Him, don’t believe in His power to save, but they want all the blessings that they see other Christians getting. But just like a “friends with benefits” relationship eventually falls apart because there is no real love, a “non-believer with benefits” relationship will weaken and die over time because there is no real faith to support it.

Jesus makes it clear: you can’t be a non-believer with benefits–you have to either believe or not. But many people today want God only on their terms. This doesn’t work, and people who relate to Jesus this way end up without the blessings they expect, leading to an eventual doubt of whether He even exists.

If we want God’s blessings to rain down on us, we have to first accept that we are saved by the grace of Jesus–Jesus, God’s Son, not just Jesus from Nazareth. If we don’t truly believe in that grace (and its power to rescue us from our sin), we can’t expect any blessings. It seems too simple to mess up, and yet a lot of us, even established Christians, completely miss this point.