Rejecting Jesus in our Hometown

It's been a busy month for me, I accepted a call to two churches and have been preparing for the whole transition. Packing makes for little blogging. But I really did want to get a Sunday reflection in. So time to reflect on the upcoming text.

This Sunday will be continuing from last Sunday's reading on Christ's trip to synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. The text comes from Luke 4:

21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." 22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?" 23 He 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.' "24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. 25 But 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; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian." 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 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. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

For all those preachers who have had angered parishioners over your sermon, just remember that Christ preached a sermon that made his next door neighbors want to chuck him off the cliff! Maybe a few complaints, critiques, or even hard hearts ain't as bad as we some times feel when we encounter it.

What seems so interesting about this text is that it is not some unbearable law that Christ is speaking. We could imagine the reaction were it some unwanted message. Like Savonius' pietistic outcries in Hammer of God which enraged those he particularly targeted with his preaching, we could maybe make sense of this if Christ were pointing fingers. But this is no series of woes sermon like in another part of the Gospel. There is no mention of broods of vipers or hypocrites. Instead, as we heard this last week, Jesus tells the people that Isaiah's prophecy of good news, captives set free, has been fulfilled. This is what started it all. However amazed they were, they couldn't imagine little Jesus from around the corner as the fulfillment. While in John's gospel Nathaniel from outside of Nazareth asks "what good could come from Nazareth?" (John 1.46) perhaps the folks from Nazareth were saying the same thing. Luke and Matthew both impress the fact that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, Matthew says the scribes all told Herod that was where the Messiah was to come from (Matthew 2.4-5), and the inclusion in the Gospels likely also meant others expected this too, so much so that it was important to tell how a man called Jesus of Nazareth could have come out of Bethlehem. Maybe those people in Nazareth too simply could not then imagine how the Messiah could come from their town.

Maybe it was because he was so ordinary. The fullness of Christ's humanity is obvious here, in that those who grew up with him (or watched him grow up) could see nothing more than a mere man. They did not even see him as a prophet of God. Those who quest for the "historical Jesus" or see him as nothing more than a great teacher, but seek to remove the supernatural, miraculous, and salvific from the portrayal of who this Jesus "really was" - even they to some extent saw him as a prophet of justice or radical rabbi that led to a political death. But yet the people who saw him grow up could not perceive him as even a prophet, much less liberator. Here we can see how human Christ was, so human they could not see him as special enough to possibly have done that which he said the Spirit of God anointed him to do.

But this is not merely about Christ's humanity apart from his deity. Perhaps what Luther was so keen on was understanding how in that which seemed so human of Christ (ultimately his death) was precisely where God was revealed. Here God's work is revealed in a place where no one expects or believes it, here God is in someone who everyone knew and yet no one seemed to know this about him or grasp or in the end believe what his work was about. The very fact that Christ was so ordinary, so human is in fact a revelation of the divine at work, it is the revelation that to the most obscure, ordinary, or more importantly, in the place you'd least expect it - that is where God not only appeared, but did his great work. Like Elijah at Mt. Horeb when God appears not in the fire or quaking but in the gentle wind/stillness/tiny voice - there was God. God can be found in the inglorious.

Yet as surely as the people in Nazareth we can forget that today. Especially when we groom ourselves to see God in the good or the glorious. I'm not saying God is not a source of our blessings, but I am saying that when we can only see God there we can miss him completely, because at times we will not see blessing in our life. When only grief, trouble, or even the mundane and ordinary is all we see - then we start trying to reach for some sort of blessing lest God be absent from our lives altogether. But the word of the cross does not find Jesus in mere blessing, rather in execution for the less than ordinary (crucifixion would never happen on an ordinary Roman citizen). The ordinary people at Nazareth can only see the ordinary Jesus, not the work of God there. Even though they had heard about the things Jesus had done in Galilee they could not see it when he showed up for church that Sabbath. We too week in week out can hear great things but not see it nor believe it when it is preached into our lives. This is especially true when our lives don't feel touched by God but rather forsaken by God. This is when we need the word of the cross - that when Christ takes the curse upon himself, it means no cursedness could mean forsakenness. Instead we know Christ is closer now than ever before, taking upon himself and giving of himself unto us.

The rejection at Nazareth is a difficult text for faith communities to wrestle with because we usually look and say that we see Christ for who he is. We didn't reject him (maybe even some of us go so far as to say we chose him), we praise him, we disagree with what those Nazarenes did. If you want any idea as to how apart we see ourselves from the people of Nazareth just look at our music. Trying to pick hymns for this Sunday that fit with the Gospel is insane. To find one that really hits home this week we are turning to a well known holy week hymn "Ah Holy Jesus" which includes such great lines as "by thine own rejected" and "twas I Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee, I crucified thee!" Most of our music will talk of Jesus dying for us but not acknowledge our part in his death, especially our rejection of Christ. We sing "Stand up, Stand up for Jesus" and "I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light". But this text should show how those who would think they know Jesus best can turn on him, reject him, and not see him. We should not put ourselves up against the people of Nazareth but ask ourselves when in our lives has Christ declared us free and we not believe it and in what places life seemed too ordinary or worse too cursed to believe God had done something amazing for us in Christ. When have we revolted against Christ in our hometown? When do we make a disconnect from the story of scripture, the words of worship, and our daily lives and faith?

If this text causes us to face that question, perhaps we can see the beauty of the Gospel of Christ in it as well. This story shows where rejection drives: To Christ's death. Ever ask or get asked why Jesus had to die? It's because we would have it no other way. It's not because God could not set the prisoners free without Christ's death. We see in this reading: it was fulfilled in their hearing: Christ could set the prisoners free. But what we also see is how prophet after prophet gets marginalized, abused, disbelieved, and even killed. When we don't think we need this message, don't want this message, or ultimately don't believe this message we reject it and the messenger. But in Christ, God took our rejection (the cross) and turned it on us, using our very act of rejecting the one who comes to set the prisoners free as the great act of freedom.

In the season of Epiphany Christ constantly is being revealed. It is nice that in the midst of these texts we are reminded how blind we can be to the revelation. How the one revealed as God's Son was revealed also to be so ordinarily human. It is good to know we need this revelation, and we need it regularly, because even when we know of the great things God has done, days come when we drive Christ out of our hearts, not knowing Who is working before us in this world. It is good that as we are frustrated over the disbelief of others, or the slowness or lapses of belief in ourselves, that we see how regular that struggle was, and hear that the rejection from the people God would turn into the redemption of the people. It is God's persistence not just in revealing himself, but in his work for us. It lets us know that Christ came to set the prisoners free, and would do anything even die to do so. It lets us honestly sing 'twas I Lord Jesus, I it was denied thee. I crucified thee!

And it lets us hear Christ on that cross in response 'Father forgive them, they know not what they are doing.' And know in hearing that, in the Easter resurrection, he set us free indeed.