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Epiphany 4, 01/31/2016
Sermon on Luke 4:21-30, by Paula L. Murray
21Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” 23He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” 24And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. 25But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” 28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.29They 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. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way. Luke 4:21-30 (NRSV)
So, Jesus is preaching in the hometown synagogue. Born in Bethlehem, raised in Nazareth, filled with the spirit of God, he’s come back home after making something of a name for himself in short order in neighboring localities. Even in so short a time since his baptism and his testing in the wilderness he has become a phenom, and this is not his first preaching gig. He has healed and taught and freed people from their demons and preached the coming kingdom of God, and now he has returned home, and his onetime neighbors can see and hear for themselves what has got the buzz going about this young man they thought they knew. I mean, who knew he was a preacher? Yet there he was, up on the chancel, reading from the prophet Isaiah’s scroll, and now, there he is, sitting down in the spot reserved for the preacher, the commentator on Scripture, looking like maybe he does belong there after all. He preaches the shortest sermon possibly on record, ever, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” a single sentence. What follows after that is less sermon and more commentary on his neighbors responses to God’s work among them. And almost immediately after that the townspeople are on the warpath, hauling this Jesus of theirs who has gotten too big for his small town britches up a hilly path to the cliff, so they can throw him off it, and be done with him and his preaching.
I don’t know about you, but I’m not feeling the love here. I’m not feeling it at all. And we have been set up to feel the love. Not only are these homicidal maniacs onetime neighbors, but they’re also the same people who taught him to read Scripture, rejoiced with his family when he made became a man, grieved with him after Joseph’s death and burial, and ordered the occasional stool or bread box from his carpentry shop. Now, after a period of time away, during which he was baptized by another religious celebrity, John the Baptist, in the Jordon River and claimed as Son by God the Father, picked up disciples in towns and villages around the Galilee, attended a wedding made glad not only by his presence but his impromptu wine making miracle, preached and taught in synagogues and market places, he comes back home, to visit family and to preach the Good News of the coming Kingdom of God to the people who should, above all others, welcome him the most. A bit like God the Father, these people have known Jesus since he was knit together in Mary’s womb, yet they are the first, but not the last, to lose the love, and find the hate. If the road to the cross doesn’t exactly begin in Nazareth, it at least gains impetuous from that place and its people.
We don’t feel the love of neighbor here, and we have been set up for it. “Love is patient;” says the Apostle Paul in the reading from Corinthians, “love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” It is clear. Love does not seek to throw its subject off a cliff to his death. If that be love, it be the most perverse form of it.
But, of course, it is not love. Love does not seek to destroy the other, but to raise him, or her, up. Jesus reads from the prophet Isaiah, and this, I remind you, is what he read. “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.” Each of these sets of people were not given the respect due them as creatures made in the image of God; the people of the day assumed their disabilities, their captivity, their oppression to be a consequence of their own sin. Yet God declares that the Messiah is characterized as one who frees the captive, gives sight to the blind, and liberates the oppressed. Now, this was not what offended to the men assembled in synagogue that day. They would have heard it before and not only in Isaiah’s book. God repeatedly calls in his Word for the people of God to care for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the gate, the helpless and dependent in other words. No, it is what happened next had that gave them pause, and may have laid the tinder for the conflagration to follow, though it didn’t light the match.
Last week I suggested to you that one reason the neighbors of Jesus responded to him as they did is because Scripture had become dead narrative for them. They heard it, respected it, but they had long ceased thinking that it meant anything for them or had any power to change the world. It seemed beyond all reason that the neighbor boy all grown up could be the Messiah, and frankly, they might not have been looking for the Messiah at all because they had lost any expectation of his actually coming. There were any number of crackpots in that day claiming to be the Messiah, and in most cases they were clearly crackpots, but the promise of a Savior who would liberate them from Rome and even themselves was greatly diminished in its power to move people by the many years that had passed since the prophet’s announcement of his coming. Now, this isn’t just a problem for first century Jews. Christians as well can lose or never even acquire the understanding that God’s Word as revealed in Christ himself or the Scriptures can remake the world. This is a constant danger for all of God’s people, including those sitting in this sanctuary this morning.
Even so, the local boy’s announcement that he is the Messiah, the fulfillment of all Scripture, is not what makes murderous mavens of past neighbors. It is his quoting of Scripture in which God favors people who are not Israelites, but are instead the enemies of Israel or are despised by Israelites that lights the match.
First, Jesus noted their bemusement concerning his reputation and acknowledges that prophets are not acknowledged in their own hometowns. This acknowledgement is no light apology. Jesus has tied himself explicitly to two of Israel’s most revered prophets, Elisha and Elijah, who had the same problem. They were not respected by their own, and for that and for reasons of God’s command, ended up ministering to Gentiles like ourselves, the Great Unwashed.
This is what drove the people of Nazareth mad, Jesus’ reminder that Elijah saved the widow and son of Sidon, neither of whom was a Jew, and Elisha healed Namon of Sryria of leprosy. To a people who had come to believe that somehow the Bible belonged only to them, was their heritage, that it was, in fact, about them, not God’s intent, but them, to hear those words applied to the unwashed, the impure, the non-Jew made them burn with an unholy and consuming anger. Hence the march to the cliff.
Their anger did not touch Jesus, not physically, anyway. He walked with them along the cliff path until such time as he decided to leave them, of a sudden. We cannot say if it hurt him, the killing anger of onetime friends, because the Scriptures do not say. But we know from other parts of God’s Word that especially towards the end of his ministry, as he came close to Calvary and the cross, Jesus was lonely, wanting understanding from those whom he came to save, or at least companionship, compassion and friendship. He did not get it, at least not this day. But he did not react with anger or bitterness, for he came to earth for one reason and one reason alone, to save. And he came to save God’s people for reason of love, divine love.
The love the Bible describes is not love as most people understand it, not fully. The love of God is focused with absolute intensity on one thing, on the well-being of that which he made and sustains. When we love, we love because another loves us, because he or she makes us feel good, because we are attracted for reasons of biology or character. In the end, the reasons we love come down too often to what the other does for us. When St. Paul talks about love, he says, first, that love is patient and kind, and it is hard to disagree with him although we all know we have trouble being patient and kind when our loved ones are making our lives difficult. But St. Paul also says what love is not, and what it is not is envious, boastful, arrogant rude, insistent on its own way, irritable, resentful. All right, he has racheted up the ante a bit. Then Paul says it “does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.” Well, yeah, we think, ten commandments and all that. But now, now things become really, really difficult, in fact, outright impossible. For Paul goes on to say love, “bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Did you get that word, all, panta in the Greek for kicks and grins? Can you do all? Can I? No indeed not, all is beyond us, who are trapped in our own wants and needs, our own spirits and psyches, but it is not beyond God.
The classic definition of sin is incurvatus se, or curved in upon ourselves. Truly dreadful things happen when we are curved in on ourselves, and we cannot see others and we cannot see God. These are the things that make us cringe when we turn on the tv in the evening or the computer in the morning or for the old fashioned sorts among us, open a newspaper. If we don’t make the news, still we know that the echoes of the sins that do resonate within us. We have not murdered, yet we wanted murder done. We have not tossed a child in a dumpster, yet we have wished them less inconvenient. We have not stolen, yet we have envied what a neighbor possesses. We may not think we have lied, but, come on, we have certainly bent the truth more than once. We may not have committed adultery, but we have lusted after a co-worker. We may not have slandered a family member, yet we hid anger and even hatred behind our smiles. At our best we restrain the tendency to make it all about us; we never overcome it. Only God can do that, and it is only with God’s help that we can even think about love, true love, not the stuff in novels and television dramas, but the very love that St. Paul describes, and proscribes.
St. Paul writes to that troublesome congregation in Corinth and he tells them that it doesn’t matter how powerful they are, how rich they are, how talented they are, how spiritual they are, if they have not love, love like God’s love, they have nothing.
For loves sake Jesus became man, putting aside immortality and divine glory to share in our lives. For love’s sake Jesus trampled the roads and mountains and fields of the Holy Land, to bring the Good News of the coming kingdom of God and their salvation to a people worn down by poverty, oppression, and sin. For love’s sake he allowed someone who should have loved him like a brother to betray him. For love’s sake he was beaten, humiliated, and murdered, that God’s glory might be made visible to all in the resurrection, and life everlasting given to all who believe. For love’s sake he takes hold of each and every one of us in baptism, in his Word, in the holy Supper, in prayer, in fellowship, and in service, and he clings to us, abides with us, and sustains us, even when we don’t see him or hear him.
He loves us, and because he loves us, we can share the love of Jesus, with one another, with our families, with the disabled, the sick, and the lonely, the soldier far from home, the old woman with a bad heart, the poor, the imprisoned, the dying. It is only because he loves us, that we can let go of ourselves enough to love, really love others, to love them for their own sake, not because they do something for us.
It is an act of will, this divinely given love, a will that wants what is best for the beloved, no matter how much we think we will need to sacrifice to see it happen. Jesus did not go to the cross and suffocate there for reason of mushy sentiment, but because it was his intent to fulfill the Father’s will and his plan for our salvation. So also when we love, love as Jesus loves, we intend, to the best of our poor ability, to do what is best for the beloved, even if there must be a sacrifice on our part to do what we intend.
No matter what the name of our congregation, large or small, city or rural, we are the Church, and it is our stated intent as Jesus’ beloved people to share his love. We understand that this will mean sacrifice on our part, but we understand also that it will mean life and salvation for others like ourselves. St. Paul says, when I was a child I thought like a child, but when I became an adult I put away childish things. God’s Holy Spirit calls us to mature in faith, hope, and love, but most especially love, that the light of Christ may be seen, and men and women are drawn to the source of that love.