Luke 4:14-21, from the Third Sunday after the Epiphany.
The conflict in Luke 4:14-30 erupts seemingly out of nowhere and escalates, with alarming speed, to attempted murder.
One minute, Jesus is standing in Nazareth’s synagogue and reading aloud from the Book of Isaiah to an appreciative audience. The next, that same audience, infuriated, is driving Jesus toward a cliff outside of town, fully intent on throwing him off of it – a sort of instantaneous, gravity-assisted execution by stoning.
What in the world did he do to set them off like that, especially considering these were the people whom he had grown up with, the people who knew him best?
There’s not much context given, but it seems that Jesus’ hometown crowd was expecting an encore performance in Nazareth of the miracles Jesus had done in Capernaum, which included casting out demons and healing diseases. Jesus informs them that he’s going to do nothing of the sort, and he does it pretty bluntly, pointing out that God had sent Elijah to help a starving widow in Zarephath, north of Israel, despite there having been plenty of starving widows in Israel, and had used Elisha to heal Naaman, a Syrian with leprosy, rather than any of the numerous Israelites infected with leprosy.
Jesus’ point seems to be that he was the Messiah spoken of in the passage Jesus had just read from Isaiah. But God was sending him elsewhere, not to Jesus’ homefolk in Nazareth. Everyone was fine with Jesus’ being the Messiah. They weren’t fine with his being someone else’s Messiah.
In the townspeople’s defense, growing up with Jesus must have been tough. We know next to nothing about what he had been like as a boy. The only story about him then is the one in Luke 2:41-52, in which he disappears during a family trip to Jerusalem, surfaces three days later in the Temple, where he has been all along, and scolds his frantic parents for not surmising that he would be pursuing his father’s business. All true, but pretty cheeky, if you’re expecting the Messiah to follow basic relationship norms. Perhaps he had had similar run-ins with just about everyone in Nazareth as he was growing up, and perhaps his words in the synagogue that morning proved to be the last of many straws.
But let’s not lose sight of the fact that what Jesus told them was true. Elijah and Elisha went elsewhere because the people of Israel had rejected them, and the same was true of Jesus and the people of Nazareth. You don’t just up and decide to throw someone off a cliff. You have to have been itching to do it for a while.
And maybe therein lies the message for you and me all these years later. When you grow up with Jesus, as I did, you develop certain expectations about him and about your relationship with him – expectations that include certain boundaries. The problem with that is that Jesus has no boundaries. He demands total surrender, total obedience. Frankly, it can get on one’s nerves.
Another problem is that when you spend enough time around the gloriously divine, it has a way of fading into the background. Like all Christians – honest, self-aware ones, at least – I have my doubts sometimes about the whole proposition that God is real and that all this stuff I believe about him is anything more than myth and superstition. During one of my more recent episodes, I demanded some kind of sign – just a hint that I was praying to anything beyond my own imagination. The realization hit me like a thunderclap that I was making my demand while walking on a South Carolina beach at sunrise. All around me where things and processes even the world’s foremost scientists could only begin to explain – the tide, the wind, the waves, the life in the sea, the life in the sand, the sun, my own body, the very mind I was using to think my doubts – and yet I had the nerve to ask for a sign. A bush on fire is a sign, as Moses found out. But so is an ordinary bush. If you doubt it, try making a bush from scratch.
Then I got my sign that morning, despite my faithlessness. The surf had reduced every bit of shell on the beach to mere chips. But in short succession, each of a dozen perfectly formed, entirely undamaged, absolutely beautiful giant cockle shells washed up on the beach, practically at my feet. I’ve never seen anything like it happen, before or since. I get that there could be a rational explanation. Maybe some collector had abandoned the shells a short time before I had happened by. It was early, and the beach was deserted and devoid of all footprints except mine, but who knows. Maybe some natural calamity had befallen a bed of cockles somewhere nearby, and a chance current had, by mere coincidence, brought the shells to me. Or maybe God had decided to tell me that if the universe spinning and pulsing and roaring and blazing all around me weren’t enough to convince me, perhaps a dozen shells improbably washed my way would tip the balance in his favor.
