As
you probably know, the Patriots won the Super Bowl last week. And as is often the case, the team returned
to the home town crowd and was treated to a ticker-tape parade. Boston is no stranger to throwing such
parades. They know how to do it. This is the 6th for the
Patriots. The Red Sox have racked up a
couple World Series too, including just last fall. Fortunately the fans did not throw cans of
beer to the Patriots the way they did to the Red Socks. It was an affectionate gesture, but they tend
to hurt more than confetti when they hit you!
And
speaking of parades and throwing things to heroes. How about our hero Jesus when he returns to
his hometown of Nazareth? Last week
you’ll remember that we read about his great testing, or battle with the devil
in the wilderness. That takes place
right after his baptism and it is the prelude to his public ministry. Fresh from his triumph he begins traveling to
the surrounding towns and villages proclaiming the good news. But when he gets to Nazareth they don’t throw
him a ticker tape parade. They try to
throw him off a cliff!
Since
we just read the story you know that it starts off well. He shows up in the synagogue for Sabbath
worship. He’s gotten known well enough
that this is probably a very anticipated event.
The place was probably packed. He
gets up to read and is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah was a hugely significant prophet for
them. In Jesus’ day he was key to
understanding God’s promises for the future.
Jesus reads from two of the later chapters, Isaiah 58 and Isaiah
61. They talk about the year of the
Lord’s favor, which was seen to be the arrival of the long-promised
Messiah. When he sits down, which doesn’t
mean he returned to his seat, he sits down to teach. In those days you taught or preached from a
chair, not standing behind a pulpit. He
proclaims that the year of the Lord’s favor had come.
This
was a bold and amazing proclamation to make!
And the hometown crowd is ecstatic.
Jews believed that they were God’s chosen people. They believed that God would indeed save the
whole world, but God would work through them to do it. They were special. They were essential to God’s plans of
salvation. While they may not have been
cocky or arrogant about it, they still believed they had a status before God
that was above other nations. Ultimately
all the peoples of the earth would come to recognize their special place in
God’s heart.
Let’s
not beat around the bush here. America
today often considers itself to be a holy nation. Even in a very humble form, it is part of
being an American to think we have to be an example to the world - of
goodness. We push ourselves to live by
fairness, justice, and democratic rule. We
want our military to be above reproach when working in foreign lands. We want to be a special nation. We want to be godly.
Jesus is doing great with the people
of Nazareth until he challenges their specialness. Not only will the people of Nazareth not be
special for raising him, the whole national way of thinking is wrong too.
Jesus reminds them of two scriptural
accounts they don’t want to here. One is
1st Kings 17:1-16. That is
when there is a great famine in the land.
Surely many Jews were praying to God for relief. But God sent the great prophet Elijah to the
foreign territory of Sidon to help a foreign woman in her distress. This would be as if in the midst of American
struggles we hear that God is doing miracles just on the Mexican side of the
border for the refugee families fleeting persecution in their home territories.
The other passage is 2 Kings
5:1-14. There we also have the account
of a great prophet – Elisha, successor to Elijah. Though many Israelites were suffering from
disease God sends Elisha to Naaman, a military official for the Syrians. This would be as if a great contagious and
deadly disease started breaking out among American soldiers in Afghanistan, but
then reports start coming of Taliban officials and their soldiers being
miraculously healed of the same afflictions.
God helping the Taliban!?! No way!
Aren’t they bad people? Don’t
they do bad things, hurting, exploiting, not allowing education or equality or
any of our values? Why would God prefer
them to us? Do you see how insulting it
would be to our national sense of rightness?
Yet those are two stories of Jewish
history. It turns out that before God
they weren’t special at all. Being the ancestors
of Abraham and God’s chosen people wasn’t a status they could use to their
benefit. They could make no special
claims on God.
There’s little wonder they got mad
at Jesus! They run him out of town, and
if they can, they plan to throw him off a cliff. But the gospel tells us that Jesus escapes
from them and goes on his way.
What does Jesus mean by what he
teaches?
God’s plans of salvation are far
bigger than they want to accept. They
don’t like not being special. They don’t
like it when the burden of being a righteous example to the world is removed
from them. Or said differently, they
don’t like hearing that they’re just as bad as every other nation and in just
as great a need of grace.
They become so enraged at this loss
of feeling special that they act out.
They want to kill the messenger. Unfortunately
that costs them.
Luke’s gospel is the only gospel
that gives any real details about Jesus returning to Nazareth. Matthew and Mark both include it in their
gospels, but they do so briefly. They
mention that the people of Nazareth just refused to believe Jesus. They don’t include anything about wanting to
throw him off a cliff. But they do put
in one note not in Luke. Matthew says,
“And he did not do many deeds of power there because of their unbelief.” (Matthew 13:38)
In their refusal to accept what
Jesus taught they denied themselves the ability to receive his goodness too.
It is good and right and commendable
that we as individuals, and we as a community, and we as a nation want to
embody God’s will in our lives. It is
good if we keep the words, “Thy kingdom come,” at the front of our minds and
seek to use that as a guiding principle.
But it is always a mistake to think
that such an agenda makes us better before God, or somehow less in need of
God’s unmerited favor. We still need it fully and completely.
Every time we draw a line – whether
it be a gender boundary, or a racial boundary, or a national boundary, or a
church boundary – and we conclude that we are more righteous than others and
therefore God must somehow be more fully or strongly present on our side of the
line rather than the other side of the line, we have made a big mistake. Actually we’ve made more than a mistake. By saying we deserve more than others we
actually preclude ourselves from getting at all. Ultimately we end up with less.
The people of Nazareth had a
wonderful opportunity. But they couldn’t
handle the truth. Because of that they
got even less. Jesus did not use
Nazareth as his home during his public ministry. He moved to Capernaum and lived there. Jesus did not do the deeds of power in
Nazareth that he did elsewhere. He
didn’t do it to punish them. It was
simply a consequence of their rejection.
It was their loss.
Let me end with these words from
theologian R. Alan Culpepper, “The paradox of the gospel, therefore, is that
the unlimited grace that it offers so scandalizes us that we are unable to
receive it. Jesus could not do more for
his hometown because they were not open to him.
How much more might God be able to do with us if we were ready to
transcend the boundaries of community and limits of love that we ourselves have
erected?” (New Interpreter’s Bible
Commentary, Volume 9, Pg. 108)
May you be open to God giving to
others as well as yourself, so that you can receive as fully as God wants to
give you.
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