Jesus Preaches in His Home Town[1] Compare to Matthew 13: 53-58; Mark 6: 1-6a; Luke 4: 16-30; John 7: 15, 6:42, 4:44, 10: 39.
Jesus
went to his hometown, Nazareth. On the Jewish weekly holy day, Jesus went to
the synagogue as he usually did on the Sabbath. He volunteered to be one of
readers of scripture that day and was handed the book of Isaiah. He opened up
the book, found what he was looking for, and this is what he read:
God's spirit has descended upon
me,
And this is what God has told
me to do:
to tell the poor good news,
to announce freedom for
captives,
to proclaim clear sight for the
blinded,
to liberate the oppressed,
and to declare now is the time
God has chosen.
With that
said, he shut the book, gave it back to the one who had given it to him and sat
down. Everybody's eyes were absolutely glued on Jesus. Then he spoke to them.
"What
I just read to you has come true this very day."
After a
brief shocked silence, the whole place was abuzz with talk about the amazing
thing that Jesus had just said. But one refrain kept coming up, "Isn't
this Joseph's kid?"
Jesus heard them, he said, "Some of you will no doubt
tell me something like, 'Well, hot shot, show us. We've heard that you have
performed miracles in other towns, do it here. Why not start with yourself?'
The truth is, it's hard to impress the hometown folk, even a prophet is an
ordinary fellow in his hometown.
"Remember
in Elijah's time there were a lot of widows. There has been a horrible drought
that lasted three and half years and people were starving to death. Elijah,
God's man, went to only one of those widows, one who lived in the town of
Zarephath, near Sidon. And when the prophet Elisha was active, leprosy was
widespread throughout Israel, but the only one he cured was Naaman, an Syrian."
That did
it. The people in the synagogue were absolutely enraged. They got up ready to
throttle Jesus. The grabbed him and dragged him out of town and were going to
toss him off a cliff. They were really angry. But somehow Jesus slipped through
the crowd and got away.
- -
- - - -
Sometime ago I started to collect all the gospel stories and
rewrite them as a modern witness to the life of Jesus, which is what the
original gospel writers did. Even though I am not an eyewitness to these events
I feel the same spirit that moved them moves me and the readers of such
writing. I got about 2/3rds of the way through this project and quit; I’m not
sure why.
I took a look at this passage and thought about in this age of
instant communication and also our more isolation from each other. Our contacts
with each other are not so intimate and lack empathy, or so it seems to me.
Perhaps this has always been true. I grew up in a town of about a
thousand souls (bodies attached) and have served churches in towns very similar
to it. I’ve often described such places as where everybody knows everybody
else, not at all. This means that even when lives are so entwined in small
towns we always seem to hold back our most intimate thoughts and feelings and
don’t share them for a variety of reasons.
Also in small towns it is hard to perceive greatness in each other.
We know each other too well, and we know each other’s shortcomings and a few
skeletons and it limits our ideas of who they are. Jesus certainly found that
to be true when he visited his hometown and made his outrageous claims. They
thought, “Good grief, who does this guy think he is?”
It seems part of human nature to want to drag folk down to our own
level and perhaps a bit below with the mistaken idea that that will make
ourselves seem more important or better. In doing so we miss seeing greatness
and the gifts of each other and fail to celebrate them.
We live in a society that has mastered the degrading of people. The
media reports regularly the missteps, the foibles, and the misdeeds of people
with too much enthusiasm. Political parties members love to demonize their
opponents to justify their own uncaring attitudes and little gets done.
Churches love to point of the shortcomings of other churches as though they had
a monopoly on God’s truth.
None of this is very helpful and doesn’t not solve problems, it just
make new ones and alienates us from each other all the more. So, we bully folk
on the Internet and condemn those we disagree with and fail to see the good and
the gifts in each other.
Jesus, though he would take on those who had such opinions in his
day, primarily lifted up the common people he came into contact with. Those
that society condemned he embraced. Those that felt alienated from others he
included as members of his family. In his life he fulfilled what human
potential can be and thus made the claims he did to his hometown neighbors.
Though rejected in his hometown he could only see his humble
origins, today practically everyone in the world knows who he is and some of
his teachings. It would be good for us to study his teachings more thoroughly, imitate
his life more closely, and embrace each other as he has embraced us.
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