SERMON PREACHED BY
THE REVEREND NATHAN A. RUGH, CURATE
CALVARY EPISCOPAL CHURCH,
PITTSBURGH, PENNSYLVANIA
ON THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
28 JANUARY 2007

 

 

Well, this is a fickle crowd, and maybe even a fickle Jesus, that we have in the Gospel reading today. The behavior of all the parties seems bizarre and confusing. Of course, it does have a context. If you had a chance to make it to church last week, you heard about the first part of this story.

 

Jesus has returned to his hometown of Nazareth. He reads from scripture declaring that he has been anointed by God to proclaim good news to the poor, release for captives, sight for the blind, freedom for the oppressed. He also declares it as the year of the Lord's favor, invoking the image of the Jubilee which is a Biblically mandated time of redistributive justice out of faith in God's sovereignty and just dealings.

 

What's more, Jesus declares that this scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing. He has declared the message and the messenger as one in the same.

 

At first, this message is met with great approval. There is genuine amazement and marveling and they start to ask whether this is really the person that they thought they knew. It is important to note that it is not this message that gets him in trouble, instead it is what comes next that causes things to go sour. As it turns out, Jesus starts to receive the requests that he start with the fireworks and wonders that he has worked elsewhere.

 

But then a funny thing happens. Jesus refuses their request. He seems to do so almost as a matter of principle. And in hearing his reasons why the crowd turn surly - real surly. They turn lynch mob surly and they attempt to throw Jesus off of a cliff. This whole scenario seems to have some literary continuity. It seems to me like it foreshadows the events of Holy Week. There is a parallelism between Jesus entering Nazareth and Jesus entering Jerusalem. And so while the events of todays reading makes literary sense, the events do not seem to make logical sense. This whole thing with the lynch mob seems to come out of nowhere.

 

The good folks of Nazareth seem to react completely irrationally and inexplicably. But what also seem inexplicable is what Jesus is up to. After all, whatever he says really gets under their skin.

 

And so we are left with the questions - why are the people of Nazareth so upset? What was that Jesus said that drove them to such an extreme reaction?

 

Well, let's start with what Jesus has said. He tells them that a prophet is not accepted in his hometown. And Jesus then points to a couple of examples in history where two of Israel's greatest prophets ministered to gentiles at times where there was plenty of Israelites in need.

 

We need to be careful in hearing these words, because I think that this is one of those places where the distance to time and culture have a tendency to make it hard to understand the point. I think that is easy for of us hear Jesus and think that God is being stingy. God has something to give, but is giving it to some and not to others. But Jesus is trying to make just the opposite point. Instead of pointing to God only handing out gifts to a few, namely only to God's chosen people, Jesus is pointing to God as being overtly gracious. That is the declaration that Jesus is making is not that God hands out gifts to only a select few chosen people, but rather that God hands out gifts beyond the conventional barriers that divide the chosen people from the gentiles. Jesus is not indicating that the Hebrew people are not favored anymore, but rather that that special status does not mean that they are the only ones who will receive God's gifts and grace.

 

What is more, this is not just about the feeding of a widow and her son or the curing of a leper. Instead this is the fulfillment of the messianic hope. Jesus is saying that this climax of salvation history embodied and enacted in the ministry and person of Jesus, that this culmination of God's plan is not just for a select few, but instead jumps the boundaries erected and includes all peoples and not just a select chosen group. Jesus is pointing to the barrier between the people Israel and the gentiles and Jesus is tearing that wall down.

 

And so, the reaction on the part of the people of Nazareth is really about some old deep wounds. Here are a beleaguered people - a people who have suffered under Roman occupation, and before that the Greek, and before that Persian, and before that, and before that.

 

Here are a people who have had it up to their eyeballs in Gentiles and here comes one who is making messianic claims and proclaiming that the time of God's favor is here except he is claiming that the favor includes the gentiles and includes the alien.

 

Jesus is saying to the people of Nazareth that God's plan includes their enemies too and it is more than they can take. They try to lynch him because they are being asked to do a seemingly impossible thing and include the despised outsider into the realm of God's providential care.

 

They are being asked to bend, to reach a new point of regard for their enemy and instead of resulting in conversion and repentance it results in breaking and violent outburst and scapegoatism.

 

I do not think that the foreshadowing of Jesus entering Jerusalem is an accident. I think that it is very intentional and I think that is important to note that Jesus could have been caught that day and murdered. If you ask why he was not murdered, if you ask why he was able to pass through the midst of them, the pat answer often emerges "it was not his time".

 

Fair enough, it obviously was not, but it does beg the question, why was it not his time? For my part, I think that it is because Jesus needs to call together a community first. I believe that there needs to be a community of witness before his time could come. Jesus needs to create disciples and apostles who could hear his teaching and witness to his resurrection. And the teaching and the resurrection go hand-in-hand. The teachings are bunk without the resurrection. They are a failed project and an idealist's broken dreams. All the messianic claims, the notion of a special relationship with God, are disproved and discredited if the cross is the end of the story.

 

But the resurrection is also the validation of the message. The resurrection means not only that death has been defeated, but that life has been made possible by living out the vision that Jesus has for humanity.

 

Today's Gospel reading points us toward a moment of seeing the world anew just as it pointed for the people of Nazareth. We too are being asked to recognize the expanse of God's abundant love. God's love is so expansive that it not only includes our family and our town folk and our comfortable neighbors but it also includes the neighbors who make us feel uncomfortable and even our enemies.

 

And if this is true, then we need to participate in God's love for the outsider and the enemy. And we need to recognize that the death and resurrection of Jesus has made the love of enemies possible, because hope and NOT death is the final answer. We too were the enemies of God, but Jesus has gathered us to himself to make peace. And we are that gathered community of disciples who are called to listen to Christ's teachings and witness to his resurrection.

 

We are called to be the peace-giving, unifying community that tears down the walls that separate human beings from each other and proclaims God's love and presence in the person of Jesus Christ.

 

Amen