Leave Your Home and Hometown

It is ironical but true that our homes and hometowns control and limit us; their control on us span from emotional domain to legal domain. When he had to begin his ministry Jesus left his hometown. If he had continued to remain at his hometown, perhaps he would have had never begun his ministry. After having begun his ministry and doing much Jesus returns to his hometown, he finds himself limited and attacked by hometown dynamics (Luke 4: 22-30). First, his town’s people ridicule Jesus, saying, “Physician, heal yourself.” Then they challenge him, saying, “Do here in your town what they say you did in Capernaum.” Then they attack him, “They rose up and dragged him out of the town to the edge of the hill on which Nazareth was built, intending to throw him down the cliff.”

The hometown people’s behaviour is normal to the people who are afraid of change; changes in one’s social order and hierarchy. Change disrupts family and social systems. It looks like losing everything that a people held as precious to them; though those precious things often remain unexamined and challenged.

Change and Wandering

Home or hometown could also be a metaphor for the doctrinal, moralistic, or psychological space that we live in. We must leave our homes and hometowns. If we examine the lives of great people we would discover that most great people have a wandering phase as a prelude to them coming of age and ministry. Even leaving home for studies help one encounter others and other cultures.

Those who have never wandered would have no chance to know what they have not seen. Jesus confronts them but does not attack or take up an open fight with them, perhaps people at home and hometown need more time to see things beyond their hometown. At the same time Jesus does not get succumbed to their pressures; he passed through their midst and went away.

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