Mark 6:1-6: Rejection, and not the dating kind

There is a poster on the wall in a hallway of the school where a substitute teach a lot.  It says, "if at first you fail, you're in good company" and on the poster are pictures of some of our nations most famous leaders including Lincoln, FDR, and Harry Truman.  It's odd to think of Abraham Lincoln as a failure, but the New York Herald would say this about him after his nomination to be the Republican candidate for president in 1860:
“The conduct of the Republican party in this nomination is a remarkable indication of small intellect, growing smaller.  They pass over…statesmen and able men, and they take up a fourth rate lecturer, who cannot speak good grammar.”
It shows the quality of the Herald's judgment that Lincoln, whom they criticized as a fourth-rate lecturer incapable of speaking good grammar, wrote one of the greatest speeches in American history in the Gettysburg Address.  No doubt the New York Herald's opinion was driven in large part by geographical and educational bias.  Being from the "frontier" and not having attended an elite Ivy-League school in the east, how could Lincoln possibly possess what is necessary to lead a country?!  When it speaks of the people being "offended" by Jesus in verse 3 of Mark 6, the word used in the Greek is the same word that gives us our word "scandal".  It was scandalous to them that Jesus would assume the authority of a teacher in the synagogue, especially in light of His humble background.  They knew Jesus, the reference to Him being the "son of Mary" was more than likely an indirect insult referring to the questionable circumstances of His birth, as at that time men were almost always referred to as the son of their father rather than their mother.  Celsus, a 2nd century critic of Christianity would deride it for having a common laborer, Jesus the carpenter, as its founder.  We learn from the life of Christ that rejection often has as much to do with other people's inability to move beyond their preconceptions, as it has to do with our own inabilities.  It's worth asking the question, do our preconceptions ever prevent us from seeing Jesus for who He truly is?
It's encouraging to see that even when we misjudge Jesus, even when we fail to properly understand Him, we can always correct our mistakes.  We have seen that Jesus family didn't start out as huge fans of His ministry, and yet at least a few of those family members changed their tune.  Jesus' mother Mary is seen at the foot of His cross in John 19, and gathered with the apostles in Acts 1:14.  Similarly, Jesus' brother James is referred to as a leader of, perhaps even THE leader of the Jerusalem church in both Acts and Galatians.  If Jesus' own family, which in the beginning was so critical of His ministry, can change their minds and eventually take on leading roles in spreading Christ's kingdom, why can't we move past our past inabilities and short-comings to become better followers of Jesus?  After all, when it comes to discipleship past failure is no barrier to future success.