On leaving that place, Jesus, followed by his disciples, went to his own part of the country.
brokenness takes its toll
regardless
if you are the broken
if you are the repairer
both and each
carry residual effectshome has its appeal
comfort food
flowing through the body
carrying caring kisses everywhere
enough and more
releasing free breathshome carries old tapes
scars
injured siblings discounted self
disappointed parent lost best friends
scrapes and scares
reenacted without releasehometown as wilderness
horror multiplied
center of frozen fantasies
forgiveness forever needed
wonder and fear
approached ambiguously
A hometown can be a wilderness place where there is a temptation to fall back into old familial patterns, taking your place in the family pecking order. Home is also a place of retreat and further formation after a most busy time of intense scenes of healing. This is a time of particular tension following 3:21, 31–35 where Jesus redefines family.
Note that the Greek might better be translated as the disciples coming along with Jesus rather than the call language of following.
Here is Swanson on home and coming of age:
European Americans expect that one comes of age by leaving home and journeying off to adventure, hence the drive to “go away” to college. For Lakota young people, they come of age by growing up among their family, their parents and grandparents, to be sure, but even more so their aunties and other relatives who have known them long enough not to be fooled by anything. In the scene in Jesus’ hometown, European Americans hear Jesus pushing against exactly the force they themselves had to fight in order to become a person of integrity, an adult. Native Americans hear something else. They hear Jesus resisting those people who have the right and responsibility to remind him that they know his brothers and sisters, and that they knew his parents when they were his age as well. This string of small scenes in Mark’s story plays better, and more truthfully, if the hometown people are played the way Lakota culture would understand them.