There are only two reasons in the Bible for which it records that Jesus marveled. One was the faith of the centurion, whose servant was sick (Matt 8:10). The other was the unbelief of His own relatives in His home town (Mk 6:6). Whatever would make Jesus marvel should be noteworthy—whether as commendable or as evil—and, therefore, deserve meticulous scrutiny for our instruction. However, this article specifically deals with the latter concept of unbelief.
    Apistia, which is the Greek word for unbelief, means faithlessness. Mark chapter 6:1-6 records an occasion in the course of His ministry when Jesus faced a frustrating situation. Can you imagine that, “… He could do no mighty work there [His own country], except that He laid His hands on a few sick people and healed them.” (Mk 6:5). Though Jesus had visited His own people to help them, most of them failed to receive His help because of their unbelief. Unbelief can hinder or even destroy the possibilities of the present and the future.
    Unbelief is something we should never let into our hearts, because it is deadly. The Bible calls a heart that accommodates unbelief an evil heart, because it departs from the living God (Heb 3:12). That was exactly what the Israelites did when they turned back to Egypt in their hearts. “whom our fathers would not obey, but rejected. And in their hearts they turned back to Egypt,” (Acts 7:39). Unbelief is a rejection of God in preference to the world, which Egypt represents in the scriptural text above. Unbelief hears God but refuses to accept His word as the truth. Therefore, the Bible admonishes us: ““Today when you hear his voice, don’t harden your hearts as Israel did when they rebelled, when they tested me in the wilderness. There your ancestors tested and tried my patience, even though they saw my miracles for forty years” (Heb 3:7-9 NLT).
    The familiarity of the relatives of Jesus with His early upbringing became a distraction that locked them in the past, and, consequently, deprived them of the mighty works God had sent Him to do among them. Familiarity, if not handled well, breeds contempt. The community was no doubt in need of mighty works for its betterment. Think of how many terminally ill people were there, of how many people were oppressed and harassed by demons there and of how many had died prematurely. The solution to all those problems was right there in person with them, but unbelief denied them access to it. Shalom.