Reading Luke Together #17 – Hometown Rejection
Luke 4:16-30 narrates the day Jesus “came out.” He’d been Jesus all his life, of course, Mary and Joseph’s son, working in his dad’s building shop, I’d assume a good neighbor, a friend, a brother, with chores, walks in the evening – just a normal life. I love it that he was (as Christians have come to believe) God in the flesh, but just living a normal life among other normal people, no showboating, not noticed more than anybody else. His nickname was “Immanuel,” God with us. And so he was – as God is today, not flamboyantly or unmissable, but there all the same.
Nazareth was, in those days, a tiny village, population of maybe 100, and very poor, a hardscrabble life, eking out a living, grateful for survival, and their small fellowship – and for worship. They gathered on Sabbath to hear Scripture read, week by week, year after year. But then there was the day Jesus was the reader. “He opened the book of Isaiah” – but it wasn’t a book, but a heavy scroll, made of parchment (the skin of goats or sheep), 25 feet long, and heavy. Did someone help him unroll the thing to get all the way to chapter 61 (out of 66)? How long did that dramatic pause while he found the place last?
Then the reading, familiar to them all: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and the recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord.” They all assumed God would do such things in some distant, hazy future – maybe. But Jesus surprises them, maybe even his parents, by looking up at declaring “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.”
They seem pleased, but a bit quizzical: “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” And truth be told, captives were still in captivity, the blind still couldn’t see, the oppressed were still miserable. We get accustomed to the dissonance between the cheerful dreams of Scripture and reality. Of course, in a matter of days, he cured a few who were blind, and gave hope to the miserable, the mentally ill, those shackled by the cruelties of society.
I feel sure all that, startled as they might have been (as we would be if such things started happening!), all would have been well, until Jesus failed to zip it, and kept talking – a little sermonette on the way foreigners and lepers were ostracized back in the days of Elijah and Elisha. His jab at them was that God was as or more interested in the others than in the chosen ones, and that God in fact was judging the chosen ones for their failures to include and share with the others – and in every place and era in history, there are “others,” aren’t there?
Enraged, they rose up and “led him” (dragged him, hauled him more likely) to the precipice, the stone cliff with the thousand foot drop-off down into the Jezreel valley. Today we visit the spot and snap photos of the fabulous views. Jesus wasn’t soaking up the view, but trying to avoid getting killed – and by his kinsmen and neighbors, those he’d lived around for 30 years! What makes people so hysterical, so insecure, so touchy that they can get enraged as those they know and love over a differing viewpoint about God and values? Don’t we see this today in spades?
But they hesitated, and then let him go. Did they think they’d frightened him sufficiently to shut him up? Did they remember he’d been a helpful neighbor? Did they sense something holy, something divine was in the thick of it all and they’d be wise not to harm him?
When our friend Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove was a pastor in eastern NC, he and his congregation, realizing Isaiah’s words read that day were pretty important to Jesus, words we might lift up as his mission statement for himself and for us, got a map and drew a 3 mile radius circle around their church and asked, “In this place where God has placed us, Who are the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed, and how will we set them free, help them recover, and become good news for them?”
What if every church took Jesus’ words this seriously, and practically? Who’s upset by the possibilities of healing and release? How can the church today not get upset and shove Jesus out of the way, but instead live into his mission, Isaiah’s mission, God’s mission?