There is only one real barrier between a person and God: distrust. More precisely, there are many barriers, but this alone proves truly insurmountable. Everything else can be overcome - if not by the person, then by God, through...
There is only one real barrier between a person and God: distrust. More precisely, there are many barriers, but this alone proves truly insurmountable. Everything else can be overcome - if not by the person, then by God - through the joint effort of two wills seeking an encounter. Distrust, however, is insurmountable precisely for God: if a person persists in it, the wall between that person and God becomes absolute.
God could enter a person's life and even their heart without asking consent, but such an entry would simply destroy the person as a free being, as the image of God. Not wishing this outcome, God, when a person does not trust Him, simply steps aside and withdraws from the living space of the one who does not want to see Him - or who wants to see Him only as they choose. Of course, no one can see God as He truly is.
There is, however, an essential difference between natural human limitation and restrictions that a person chooses arbitrarily. The God whom a person is capable of seeing is one thing; the god whom that person imagines is another. In the fallen state, it is sometimes difficult to tell the two apart. A convenient picture of a convenient "god" often obstructs communion with God even more than open unwillingness or manifest sin. The same is true of Christ: whoever refuses to see Christ in Christ sees in Him only the kind of person they are accustomed to seeing in life.
This danger is especially great in one's home town: there Jesus is "known" particularly well, and, judging by the evangelist's account, no one intends to reconsider what they know. This is understandable: doing so would require them to reconsider their own lives and their relationship with this Man whom they thought they had long known. It is easier to leave everything as it is and not trouble oneself. This desire to leave everything unchanged is precisely what leaves no room for a miracle - or for the Kingdom.
6
6:1 Matteo 13:54; Luca 4:16.
6:3 Is not this the carpenter? - There can be no doubt, but in his youth he wrought with his supposed father Joseph.
6:5 He could do no miracle there - Not consistently with his wisdom and goodness. It being inconsistent with his wisdom to work them there, where it could not promote his great end; and with his goodness, seeing he well knew his countrymen would reject whatever evidence could be given them. And therefore to have given them more evidence, would only have increased their damnation.
6:6 He marvelled - As man. As he was God, nothing was strange to him.