Epiphany 4

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Epiphany 4
PROPER: C
PLACE: St. John's Parish Kingsville
DATE: February 1, 1998

TEXT: Luke 4:21-32 - Continuation of Jesus' Addressing His Home Village of Nazareth

"When they hard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way."

ISSUE: The people in Jesus' town are at first astonished at his teaching and wisdom. However, that astonishment changes to rage when they become aware of how he intends to proclaim the message of God's healing and love to all people beyond the comfortable borders of the townsfolk. The point is that people in our time are satisfied and at ease with a comfortable Gospel, but the Gospel calls people to change, repentance, and an energetic mission in order that God in Christ might be proclaimed to all the world.
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The passage from Luke's Gospel account today really stresses the profound tension of the early church, and of the great stress that Jesus' ministry caused. This passage today reveals the absolute rage and tension that Jesus creates in his home community. The passage is a continuation of last week's account of Jesus' returning to his hometown of Nazareth. In the synagogue on the sabbath, he chose to read the passage from Isaiah that revealed his messiahship and ministry: "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (Isa. 61) This pr4ophetic reading was his Inaugural Address. It was a great message of hope and healing in terms of enlightment. People were amazed at his teaching. But in his own hometown, the message and the preaching created tension, anxiety, and ultimately rage strong enough to want to send him hurling off of a cliff.
To understand the culture of the time is helpful to a better understanding of the passage. At the time a son was expected to follow in his father's footsteps and occupation. Sons were not expected to surpass their fathers. Unlike today, when we want our children to get ahead, in the first century Mediterranean culture it was dishonorable to surpass your father. Furthermore, it was expected that you would remain with your family. The fact that Jesus left his family to go preaching all over Palestine was considered dishonorable. Next thing you knew other sons would be wanting to do the same. It created tension in the community. This Jesus is Joseph's son, the son of the Nazarean carpenter. As interesting and wise as he may seem, who does he think he is, as others in other towns seem him changing his social standing? "Doctor heal yourself." they might well be saying to him. If you have healing powers do them here at home. Keep what you are doing in the family among your kin. "Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum." The community wants Jesus brought under control of the local community and local standards of what is considered honorable. They want his ministry confined to local turf. His teaching is appropriate for them only in the confines of the local community.
Jesus answers their demands with the proverb: "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown." (This statement by the Jesus seminar is considered to be a legitimate statement of Jesus.) He then provides them with examples of the two of Israel's greatest prophets, Elijah and Elisha. In the one case, Elijah went to foreign territory at a time of great famine and brought salvation to the Gentile widow at Zarephath in Sidon. Likewise, Elijah's successor, the prophet Elisha healed Naaman a Gentile Syrian army commander of the dreaded disease of Leprosy. Both the widow and the Namaan turn in faith to accept the powerful God of Israel. Jesus confronts the people of his own time to the understanding that his ministry is dedicated to the revelation of the Glory of God to both Jew and Gentile alike. That exclusive attitude of Jesus' people must be changed. Challenging the customs and calling for a more inclusive faith and way of seeing things enrages Jesus' community, as it ultimately did for all of his people of the time causes them to run him out of town. Luke is making it very clear in the telling of this story, that Jesus met with tension and hostility very early on in his ministry from his own people, as he would later by the Romans. Just as he is hailed on his Palm Sunday procession, "Hosanna, blessed is he that comes in the name of the Lord," and then crucified, he is hailed as one of Nazareth's own and received with amazement and then run out of town.
Luke goes on to say that in the fracas, Jesus slips away from them and moves on to the next town. It is not likely that there is any magical event going on here. It is merely Luke's way of making the point that hostility against Jesus was indeed significant. But God was with him and he is that non-anxious presence that carries on the message with faithfulness in the midst of tremendous anxiety and tension. His own confident faithfulness enable him to carry on.
Beyond a shadow of a doubt, the ministry, the teaching, the prevailing presence of Christ was disturbing to the world from the beginning. Yet his truth, his message that God's grace is to be extended to all people carries on with authority. He goes forth to baptize, to dip, to immerse all people in the Divine Love and healing of God. His epiphany, his manifestation continues to confront and challenge the world. It was hard for people in Jesus' time to accept his challenges and become invested into his mission. The people were comfortable with his great message of hope. They loved to hear him read passages of hope in the synagogue, but it was very different when he challenged them to a much wider and broader appreciation of God's grace to be extended to the wider community and not to have an exclusive grace.
Even in the church today there is an inclination to keep ourselves safe and secure as opposed to the risk of entering into significant mission and inclusivesness. Our parish budgets are often a significant reflection of all the things we do to take care of ourselves as opposed to significant line-item of intentional mission. We believe we have to take care of our own, before we can take care of others. For instance we will say that we have to have enough resources to raise up our own children and provide a good Sunday School for them, before we can provide for others. Yet, the other side of that is that if there is not an intentional commitment to mission and the sharing of Christ for others that our children can see happening, their Sunday School experience however grand is little more than an academic exercise in the status-quo. It is the telling of the story and the carrying on of the lore of the church that may be interesting but that is not being acted upon. "Faith without works is dead," someone said. While it is indeed honorable for us to take care of our own, ought we not keep in mind that Jesus himself transgressed the honor of his time to proclaim hope and good news of God to those beyond?
Think of the things in recent history that has cause tension and anxiety in the church. When I first came to St. John's in the very earliest of days, I received phone calls imploring me and thanking me for not daring to become involved in the change of the Prayer Book liturgy. The 1928 rituals had a sanctity that were heartwarming to so many of the old folks (and a lot of the younger ones too in those days.) It was a sign of human need to keep things the way they were inspite of the growing awareness that the church needed to be seen as a change agent in the world to proclaim the Gospel in terms other than victorian, or Elizabethan for that matter.
Another great upheaval came in the church when it became involved in the Civil Rights Movement. When the church began to give support to various black organizations, many people withdrew from the church. In my first parish, I had one person who would sight verses of Holy Scripture to prove that blacks were inferior. There are in fact those today who can quote Holy Scripture to prove that women have no place in either the government or the ministry of the church.
Another of the issues before us today is that of the place of gay and lesbian people in the church. Shall they be seen as immoral and perverse, or people of a different sexual orientation that is inborn? Obviously this is another one of the tensions and the anxieties of the church. Again, there are passages from Holy Scripture that can be used to condemn. We are inclined by our very human nature to keep things the way they are, to hold Jesus as our own, with our own notions of how he and his ministry should be.
As long as we are human there will be tension and anxieties. There will be uncertainties and feelings of rage. Yet the Gospel, as viewed today, sees Christ challenging his own to movement and change, to an inclusiveness that extends the healing grace and love beyond familiar borders to embrace others and all those who were thought to be unworthy of God's redeeming grace. We must always be cautious when we are comfortable and certain and assured that we have the world by the tail. God intervenes and calls us to new challenges and to new ways of thinking. Sometimes they are enraging. But, God is God, and if we cannot participate in the Epiphany, then He slips away from us to the next town where God's Will is done. In Jesus' time it was honorable to keep things as they were, yet Jesus challenged that very premise and faced the furor with the confident hope that God would redeem and be with all people.