The Nobodies of Nazareth

The world has always despised people from the wrong places and with the wrong credentials. We are always trying to justify ourselves. We need desperately to feel superior to others. And everything about Jesus contradicts and opposes that impulse. In the 1987 movie Wall Street, the young Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, is wide-eyed at the cost of the art on the walls of Gordon Gekko’s home in the Hamptons. When he discovers what one painting is worth, he exclaims, “You could have a whole beach house!” Daryl Hannah, Gekko’s protégée, sneers, “Sure you could. In Wildwood, New Jersey.” She almost could have said, “Of course you can have that, if you are one of the benighted masses, the nobodies, who live in Nazareth.”