So. Last week, we read about Jesus’ inaugural address, the first sermon he gave in his hometown of Nazareth. Taking up the scroll of Isaiah, he read “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And after rolling up the scroll and handing it back to the rabbi, he sat down and began to teach: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all his homies were amazed, just amazed, at all the gracious words that came out of his mouth, even more so because he wasa home-town boy: “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they asked.
He starts up preaching again, and that’s when things start to go South . . . and by the time he’s finished, his hometown buddies, with whom he’d shot hoops in the driveway and horsed around at football games, whom he’d worked side by side in his father’s shop and at whose weddings he was best man, all these so-called “friends and family” are enraged. So much so that they’re not content just to run him out of town, but they grabhim and try to throw him off a cliff.Now that’smad!
And the question is . . . why? Why does the hometown crowd reject him so violently,especiallyafter such an apparently warm reception? To try and understand, let’s burrow down a little bit into the context and what he actually says. First up: he tells them he is the one chosen to proclaim the “Day of the Lord’s Favor.” As we mentioned last week, this was almost certainly the idea that every fiftieth year would be a Jubilee, a kind of “reboot” for society as a whole. Slaves would be freed, debts would be cancelled, and “liberty” would be proclaimed “throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” according to Leviticus. This would have especially benefited many of the most vulnerable in Israel, of course, and accordingly, the Jubilee ideal is often understood to be a time of relief for the poor, a built-in leveler, a bulwark against the development of entrenched inequality.
Well. You can imagine what this might have sounded like to the beneficiariesof entrenched inequality, the oligarchs and princes of the Middle East . . . even the most pious among them were as adept at ignoring scripture they didn’t like as modern-day Christians can be. But in Jesus’ day, there weren’t likely to be many of those living in the agricultural town of Nazareth, the population of which was scarcely 500. Remember: in those times, there were only rich and poor, those who benefitted from inequality and those to whom the Jubilee would indeed be good news. And archeological evidence shows there were none of the former in Nazareth at the time. Jesus’ friends and neighbors, with whom he’d grown up, were almost certainlyas poor as he and hisfamily were, which could be characterized by comparing them to church mice.
So . . . if the folks packing the synagogue that day aren’t enraged by the prospect of being knocked down a peg or two, if indeed they would come out of the Jubilee smelling like a rose, why are they madder then 300 wet hens, so over-the-top angry as to be moved to murder? Can it have something to do with what he actually preachesafter he reads the Scripture? Let’s see . . . “doubtless you will quote to me this proverb,” he begins: “Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you’ll say ‘Do here—in your own hometown,for goodness sakes—the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” He’s assuming—and he always couldsee what’s in peoples’ hearts—that they want the same things out of him that he’s done in other places, that surely here in his hometown they’d get some of the good stuff as well . . . and do they assume they’d actually get more, get the best, get the creme de la creme?Did they hear his message—that he’s been anointed,already . . . Christ-ed! Messiah-ed!—to bring in the Jubilee year, when folks like them would get their due? How cool wasit that the guy slated to bring on the goodies was a home-town boy?
So when Jesus began by quoting that proverb and telling them what’s in their hearts, they all thought “durn tootin” we want to get the same treatment they got in Capernaum. But the next thing he says starts to belie this hope: “Truly I tell you”—and when he says that, we know he’s serious “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” And before they even have time to protest—not us, your messiah-ship, not your home-town buddies—he tells them the unvarnished, harsher-than-harsh truth, and in a way, this is the center-piece of the whole shebang, the truth, the Alethia,as it is in Greek. And this alethiasets the tone for all of Luke’s writing: here in his Gospel, then in Acts, the second volume. And the truth is that although there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s day, Elijah was sent to none of them except the one at Zarephath in Sidon. What’s more, there were many lepers—and that word was used for a number of diseases in the day—there were many lepers in Israel, but Elijah’s successor Elisha only came to one: Naaman, who was a Syrian.
And have you figured out what enraged Jesus’ hometown peeps yet? All those people in trouble in Israel—lepers and poor widows, no less—and God sent the prophets not to them,not to God’s supposedly-chosen people, but to foreigners, to outsiders, to those their religion had marginalized. And this, friends, is a defining theme of Luke’s gospel, a theme we’ll return to again and again as we dip into it over the coming year. The divine seems to have a preferential option not only for the poor, as Catholic doctrine would have it, but for the marginalized, for the outsider as well. But, as we’ll see over the next months, the concept of outsider-ness is a slippery, relativeterm. On the outside of what?On the margins of what?And what about when the situation is reversed, when marginalized suddenly become the insiders, what about then? Often, when that happens, when through some divine or worldly intervention the marginalized come in out of the cold, eventually theybecome the oppressors. It’s happened time and again over the ages, and become almost a cliché when one thinks of South American politics, with the revolutionaries becoming just as bad as those they overthrow.
And the amazing thing about this episode—taking last and this week’s readings to be one, as was Luke’s intention—is that this one story encapsulates all that complexity, the slippery-ness of the notion of insiders versus outsiders. First, Jesus uses that particular passage from Isaiah—one well-associated with Israel’s identity as an underdog community—and encourages them to see themselves as the “lowly,” then pulls the rug out from under them, saying “not so fast . . . are you sureyou’re the ones for whom the prophecy was written?After all, Elijah—arguably Israel’s greatest prophet—came to the foreigner, the outsider. And his successor Elisha: he did the same. And by the way . . . how doyou treat the wandering Samaritan amongst you, or the Syrian or Syrophoenician?
And today, as nationalism is on the rise around the globe, we might well ask a similar question . . . what about the Muslims amongst us, what about immigrants—undocumented or otherwise? Heck, given the precipitous rise of anti-semitism over the past few years—hello Pittsburg!—what about Jews?The fact is, God favors the marginalized, which kind of kicks nationalism right in the pants, doesn’t it?
And is it any wonder his listeners got all ticked off? He comes into their synagogue preaching good news for . . . somebody. . . they’d thought it was them—they were amazed, just amazedby his gracious words—and they reveled in being in the inner circle, the ultimate insiders, because who was more inside, more ground floorthan the anointed-one’s own friends and family? This Day of the Lord’s Favor would certainly favor them.But then came . . . the rest of the story, and as they begin to realize that it ain’t necessarily so, and that realization spread through the congregation—What’d he say? What does he meanGod sends prophets to the unclean first?Take care of your own first,that’s what Isay—as people start to figure out what it means, whispered incredulity becomes downright hostility, and the crowd in the synagogue becomes a mob—a lynchmob, to be precise—and the very one they’d cheered just minutes before becomes its scapegoat.
And it’s not the lasttime Jesus would be a scapegoat, but his time has not been fulfilled, and so he passes, ghost-like, through the midst of them and goes on his way. And of course, this foreshadows the final lynching of Jesus, up on a Jerusalem cross, but it also states anothermajor theme of Luke’s highlighted in this passage: preaching the alethiatruth, is dangerousin a lot of ways. It can be dangerous to one’s bank account, one’s social standing and even one’s bodily integrity, even one’s life.
Preaching truth to power—and in that moment, the good people of Nazareth had the power of a mob—is dangerous, but that’s what we are called to do, brothers and sisters, preach the unvarnished truthof the Day of the Lord’s favor—aka the Kingdom of God—which comes first to the marginalized and powerless, but, of course, also to us. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment