Back in the early 90s, Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward did a movie together that I’ve always liked, called “Mr. and Mrs. Bridge.” 

They played an old married couple, which, of course, they were in real life and so had no trouble conjuring for a movie.   

But the story was set in the period just before and then during World War II, and the thing about this couple was that they communicated horribly.  

Mrs. Bridge longed for her husband to show a little tenderness or understanding.  

Mr. Bridge would be moved to bring home flowers, only to get irritated by something as soon as he got home and forget the flowers in the backseat of the car.  

Mrs. Bridge never got to see how her husband really felt. 

For a while, you get pretty blamey with Mr. Bridge, who shows love by taking care of things but not in any other way. 

But eventually, you see that there is blame to go around.  

Mrs. Bridge sort of overdoes it with talking and enthusing and keeping things light all the time, in part because her husband never will. 

But this takes its own toll.  

At one point, their son returns after joining the Army, but when he arrives, he’s sporting a sort of horrible little mustache he’s decided to grow and apparently hadn’t mentioned in his letters home.

Mrs. Bridge lives with it for a day or so, then marches up to his room with a big smile, wearing his army garrison cap.  

She salutes and makes a joke out of the mustache. 

Only a talent like Joanne Woodward could really convey this in its complexity, but the joke manages to mock her son’s enlistment, his mustache, and his manhood all at once, none of which she means to do, but which she also can’t undo, having done it.  

What we come to understand is that, much as the Bridges love one another, they cannot find a way say what is truly on their hearts, to speak of their feelings or needs, hopes or fears, what matters and what doesn’t, and so, when life brings its changes, be they large or small, they have no way of bringing them into their life together.  

Change can only make them more isolated and further adrift, turning them into more extreme – more desperate – versions of themselves.  

Scripture has its share of stories like this, too, of course, whether it’s the young Joseph and his brothers, King David and his first wife, Michal, or the two brothers at the end of the parable of the Prodigal Son.   

(The story of Ruth is a notable exception, where a young widow refuses to leave her mother-in-law, finding remarkable words to declare her love and loyalty…but it is an exception.)

Clearly, both testaments acknowledge that when change comes, not everyone has what it takes to rise to the occasion—to live with new uncertainty in the name of new possibilities…or new hope.  

There’s a hymn with the line, “new occasions teach new duties,” but as it turns out, that isn’t necessarily true for everyone.  

It wasn’t for Jesus’ old neighbors in Nazareth, as we’ve heard this morning.  

As Luke indicates, it starts out well.  

We don’t know how long Jesus has been away, or what kind of reputation his family had in the community.  

It seems possible that he arrives home like Mr. and Mrs. Bridge’s son, just out of basic training, proudly wearing his new uniform, carrying himself, shoulders back, with a new-found confidence that everyone in town is glad to see.  

We know they’ve heard something of what Jesus has been up to.  

The city of Capernaum is only about 40 miles from Nazareth: close enough for the headlines to travel in a few days, especially about a local boy preaching and teaching things to draw the attention of a city crowd.  

In any case, when he stands up in the synagogue and takes it on himself to do the reading, and then the preaching, they’re all ears…all smiles. 

They settle in, maybe hoping for something nice and safe and tailored just for a hometown crowd: “Here are 10 Life Lessons I Learned From Little League,” or “What ‘Honor Thy Father and Mother’ Means to Me,” or “Why I Left, Why I’m Back, and Why I’m Staying.”  

But his new mustache should have warned them.

They should have seen that something more was up. 

That they can’t is precisely why they need the message he is trying to offer them, but that’s almost beside the point.  

They aren’t prepared for the transformation he has undergone, and they aren’t able to hear his invitation to live differently, themselves.  

And so the homecoming quickly falls apart. 

The smiling congregation of neighbors and friends instantly transforms, all right, but in the worst possible way.  

They become a howling mob—the first, but certainly not the last that Jesus will encounter.  

They become the only thing that is possible for them to become: a more extreme, more desperate version of themselves.  

Because when it comes to God, there’s no room in their lives for anything unexpected, or beyond their control, or undeserved…no room for anything surprising or puzzling.^[1]

There’s no room for a difficult word, the kind that leaves you looking in the mirror for a while. 

Which means there’s no room for God’s grace, and ultimately, no way for them to bring God into their lives, much less into their life together.  

Mark’s version of the story (6:5) reports that Jesus “could do no miracle there.” 

The closing of their hearts and minds has closed that door.  

For us, of course, it is a cautionary tale.  

Because we all have blind spots and comfort zones. 

We all need the relief and refuge of home, a place to pause from the grind.  

That doesn’t make us bad; it makes us human. 

But Jesus wants us to seek a larger version of ourselves, and to push back against a smaller, meaner one.  

Jesus sees that the path to God is about opening our hearts and resisting the temptation to close them.  

And he knows it’s hard.  But he knows it’s good.  

And he promises that he will be there in the midst of it all, to sustain us.  

In a world that seems determined to drive us into more extreme, more desperate versions of ourselves, Jesus beckons us to seek another way and to find a greater self.  

He calls us to swallow our fear and to swallow our pride, and to reach for his hand. 

Amen.  

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^[1] The “unexpected, beyond our control, underserved” is part of how Dorothee Soelle describes grace. (See her Thinking About God: An Introduction to Theology, 79.)