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: January 28, 2001


TEXT: Luke 4:21-32 – Then he (Jesus) began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth . . . . . . When they heard 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.

ISSUE: - God is often not welcomed among his own people, when the world’s culture prevails. This event appears to be an acted out parable provided by Luke. Jesus is the Word that has come to the world, but the world is not always ready to receive him. His own people are caught up in their cultural way of thinking that prevents Jesus from being seen for what he is, Honorable Lord, in spite of his humble background. Neither can they appreciate his broadened mission to all people. Our fixed cultural thinking of caring for ourselves first, and our sense of scarcity may prevent us today from a broadened sense and call to wider mission and compassionate concern for God’ world and Kingdom.
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Today’s story of Jesus returning to his hometown is a continuation of the Gospel reading from last Sunday. And today’s part of the story is a sharp contrast to last week. Some review is important to our overall understanding of this passage. Jesus had visited his hometown of Nazareth, and had been invited to do a reading in the Sabbath synagogue worship. He selects a passage from Isaiah and reads: “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.” In this quote, Jesus is defined as both prophet and healer, one with messianic character. He is proclaiming a new dignity, a profound forgiveness and love from God, and will open the minds eye to new enlightenment and ways of seeing things as God sees. At first, you get the distinct impression that the people are amazed and wonder at him. They pay close attention to him.
In the second part of the reading for today, there is a complete turn around on the part of the crowd. They go from amazement at his “gracious words,” or another translation amazement over his “words of grace,” to a slur “Is not this Joseph’s son?” Then Jesus turns to them and says, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you well say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’
In the culture of this time, so very unlike our own, it was not appropriate for Jesus who was the son of the carpenter Joseph to be anything else but a carpenter. It was totally inappropriate to become more than you father. It was inappropriate to leave your family. This action was dishonorable. And if you were a folk healer, your powers were to be kept for your own local family. Most people in a small town of this period were likely all to be inter-related in some way. So the assumption that Jesus should cure himself is an indication that he should shape up himself and remain in Nazareth, and be an honorable carpenter, and if he is a healer to heal his own in Nazareth.
It is likely that Jesus saw himself as a healer and a prophet in the likeness of say John the Baptist. He had a religious calling. (However, I do believe that it is very unlikely that Jesus saw himself as Son of God, or even the Messiah for that matter.) Obviously his prophetic role was rejected in and among his own people in Nazareth. Jesus goes on to answer his critics in terms of the wide spectrum of his ministry. Even the prophet Elijah had been sent to the non-Jewish Widow of Sidon and performed the restoration of her dead son. While there were many lepers in Israel during the time of the prophet Elisha, God sent him to heal Naaman the Gentile of his leprosy. Jesus is making the point that God does not just work among his own people but the ministry is to all people.
In response to Jesus, the community is filled with rage, and they lead him to the brow of the hill outside the town, and are going to push him off the cliff. Somehow, he slips away from them and goes on to Capernaum, and again the people there are astounded because he speaks with such authority. How Jesus just slips away from this angry raging crowd is curious. I believe this is a clue that the story is probably not a literal story, but rather an acted out parable of Luke and the early church. Jesus is perceived by Luke, and his community as the presence of God come among his people. The spirit of God is upon him. He has come to forgive, to change and enlighten, to give new sight to the world. People both want and need that hope, but at the same time are often trapped, paralyzed, by the way the world thinks. It is not just that “A prophet is not welcomed in his own hometown,” but that God himself in the person of Jesus Christ is not welcomed among his own people.”
Jesus relatives and hometown folk of Nazareth are locked into a culture that has trouble being liberated. It can’t see or doesn’t want to see God acting in and through Jesus. They are locked into his being a carpenter. They resent that he is healer in Capernaum and has not healed his own and stayed with his own. They resist the enlightenment that God is at work in the world beyond Nazareth, that the mission of Jesus and the mission of the church is intended to be a broad worldwide mission. The Israelite nation had great difficult with the call it had to be a light to the nations of the world, and maintained its self-centeredness, and the broader sense of mission gets hurled off the cliff.
There are churches today that see mission or extension of God’s grace beyond them selves like an adjunct to the church’s overall program. First, we are all often inclined to say is that we must take care of our own first. First we have to take care of the children in our Sunday school, before we can do something for many of the other suffering and homeless children around the world. Many churches see their pastor as a person they possess and pay as an internal chaplain to the inner circle of members. Some churches even go so far as to limit what their clergy can preach about concerning controversial issues. It is not uncommon for congregations to avoid any kind of controversial issues to be faced so as not to create turmoil or dissention within the ranks. One of the familiar phrases people use to describe their congregations in recent years is the term “family.” We are a “family church.” That sounds nice and it’s a quite popular description, but does it imply. ‘Family’ implies mother, father, and children. How do single people, divorced people, widows, and widowers fit into the ‘family church?’ We have to be extraordinarily careful about what we mean when we say a church is a ‘family church,’ or attempt to define a church by title. It may give the impression that we are exclusive, ingrown, self-centered, and isolated from the greater and larger community. Is the church community merely a community that takes care of its own?
In the world today we need to be careful that we are not becoming trapped into the world’s own logic and way of thinking. We all learned that we have to learn how to take care of ourselves. We have to grow up to take care of ourselves, our own, and be self-made, men and women. After all, “God takes care of those who take care of themselves.” Incidentally, there is no such passage in the Scriptures either Hebrew or Christian that says that. It’s a worldly way of thinking. The facts are that we are all desperately in need of God, and of one another. No one can survive ultimately alone. We live in an interconnected world.
We have also come to live in a scientific world. We are all so impressed with our technology and our need to be able to see it, feel it, hear it, touch it, prove it mentality. Needless to say the accomplishments of the scientific world are incredible. What we can do with computers, the Internet; what the medical profession has been able to accomplish is just miraculous in it’s genius. But if we function in a world of science alone, we once again become isolated from other states of altered consciousness. A poet, a dancer, the music of an orchestra or choir, a painter and works of art supply still other dimensions of feeling, emotion, beauty, and presence of the holy, of the other, of transcendent things beyond ourselves. Did you ever think that maybe all the wonders that the world of science and technology bring to us came out of prayer, longing for healing, longing for God, for love, healing, hope, out of creative imaginations and the arts. People who had the ability to dream dreams and have visions and sought the ways of God, the mercy, the compassion of God, who broke out of the molds of the past to reach for a grander more wonderful world, like what Jesus himself did, give new hope, enlightenment, a breaking away from old worldly molds that are stifling, superstitious, self-centered entrapments of the past.
The world traps many of us middle class Americans into thinking that in order to have honor and status in the community we need to have a lot of things, material things. We have to have big houses, and good educations, money for paying for those educations, and several cars in the garage. Security is the name of the game. Yet we forget so easily that many of our parents, or grandparents went through periods of depression when material things became quite limited. Material possessions were not what gave success, and success was in fact lost. Rather it was relationships, friends, family, God and faith in God that brought them spiritually through difficult times. These relationships were what was the stuff that gave them meaning and hope. We fear scarcity and not having enough in the presence of a God of great grace and bounty.
Jesus was impressive and many people marveled at him. But they did not like it when he tried to crack open their isolation and their thinking the way the world thought. Then they sought to dump him off the cliff, according to Luke. Perhaps today, the inclusiveness of God of love who reaches out to all people may still face being dumped by the traditions, ways and the way the world measures success, importance, honor and status. But just like the mustard seed, that annoying obnoxious plant, that weed, it keeps cropping up here and there calling us all to the possibility of thinking differently, to think as God thinks, and not as the world thinks, and for the church to be nothing less than a mission to all.