There is a saying that familiarity breeds contempt. Whatever about breeding contempt, familiarity can certainly make us blind. When we grow up with people, when we live with people and become accustomed to them we can find it difficult to believe that there is more to them than meets the eye. We can make assumptions that may in fact be wrong.
This certainly was the case with Jesus. His own town’s people, his neighbours, could not accept the fact that a person who went to school with them, who played with them, who attended the synagogue with them, who socialised with them, who worked for them as a tradesman was in fact a prophet, indeed the long awaited prophet promised by God.
Perhaps the issue for the Jesus’ town’s people was ordinariness rather than familiarity. How can God be present in someone who is so ordinary, who is like the rest of us? Can God’s Messiah be someone who comes from a remote village, who lives in relatively poor circumstances, who works as a carpenter, whose life is full of simple, mundane chores? This is the scandal of Christianity; that God has come to us in and through the life of an ordinary human being known as Jesus of Nazareth. Whether we like it or not, whether we are comfortable with it or not, God is to be found in the humanity of Jesus. This is the fundamental truth of Christianity and it is called the Incarnation.
The Incarnation has two important implications for us. The first is that we need to accept that we experience God in and through the humanity of Jesus. The second is a consequence of the first. We also need to accept that we experience God in our own humanity and in the humanity of other people. God is not to be found in some ethereal world outside and beyond our human experience. God is found in the here and now, in the concreteness and ordinariness of everyday life, in all that is human. To deny our humanity in all its forms of expression is to hide from God. To say ‘yes’ to our humanity is to say ‘yes’ to God.