Campaign Stop (Luke 4:14 - 21)

You ever notice how politicians return to their home towns to announce their candidacies?  It makes for great photo-ops, there against the backdrop of their childhood … with spouse and kiddies and mama and daddy there, smiling adoringly up at their loved one, little suspecting what a chore it’s going to be in just a few short months: smiling adoringly, smiling adoringly, smiling adoringly . . .  and they never quite see it coming, when the unending pressure of press scrutiny scrapes up something embarrassing from the past.  We’ve got a very bad habit of lynching our politicians and other luminaries for having feet of clay, for being human beings which, last time I checked, most of them are.

But at the start of their campaigns, there on their own home turf, where the press will throw them softballs, where there are loving crowds of friends and family looking on, wanting a President or a Senator or Congressman from their own town, maybe thinking of all the pork that’s gonna come their way, all the public works projects or no-bid contracts at the local defense plant . . . I remember Bill and Hillary and Chelsea, beaming for the cameras in Hope, Arkansas—he was the man from Hope!  But that was before Monica and Gennifer and the disillusion of millions . . . I remember W and Laura and the girls there in Crawford, all optimism and confidence, looking young and fresh and ready.  Of course, that was before the press savaged the girls for sowing some wild oats, and before some airplanes hit some towers in New York.

But there on that day, in that place, it was a sweetheart deal for each of the future first families, and it must have felt good to them . . . That’s not exactly how it was for Jesus . . .though it’s outside our reading, it’s important to remember that not too long after his reading in the synagogue, they run him out of town on a rail, or more accurately, try to throw him off a cliff.  So much for the hometown crowd.

He quotes from Isaiah, from one of the “messianic passages,” then very deliberately rolls up the scroll, hands it to the attendant, and sits down.  And Luke says all eyes were upon him, and then he begins to say to them “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  And most of the time, we read that and say: “There.  He’s announced who he is, revealed his messianic-ness,” and maybe—though he says some other things too—maybe that has something to do with why they get mad. I know I’ve preached something like that in the past.  But scholar Gil Bailie points out that a careful reading shows differently:  Luke tells us he begins to say “Today this scripture has been fulfilled . . .” not that he says it.   He sees that all eyes are upon him, all are attentive—after all, he is well-spoken and gracious, and a local boy to boot—and he starts to tell them who he is, but he doesn’t.

And it begs the question: why?  Why didn’t he tell them he was the fulfillment of the scripture he’d just read from Isaiah?  All eyes were upon him, it was the perfect time, there couldn’t have been any better to announce his ministry . . . it would have been as if Clinton or Bush had gotten this big ol’ crowd together, talked about their presidential heritage, maybe evoking the ghost of Lincoln like they all do, but instead of going ahead and announcing their candidacies, they wave at the crowd, get into their limos and drive off.  All eyes are on Jesus, and he starts to take advantage of it, starts to announce his candidacy for Messiah, but he doesn’t.

 And to understand why not, we need to invoke the “C-word.”  That’s the context-word, in case you were wondering.. Stories like this were never meant to be read in isolation, by themselves.  On the contrary, they always relate to what comes before and after.  And in this case, the relevant passage is the one right before, when the Holy Spirit drives him into the wilderness, and Ol’ Scratch presents him with three temptations.  And without going into detail—we’ll likely do that in a few weeks—all three in some way tempt him to grasp for power, to take authority over the world and all that’s in it, to exercise his power as Son of God to become rich and famous and drink Latte’s all the time.  And here, in the very next passage, is yet another temptation: messianic fever is vibrating throughout the land, he’s just read from one of passages responsible, and all eyes are glued on him.  There will never be a better time to tell them who he is, to declare his Messiah-hood, but he doesn’t.

At the end of the wilderness story, Luke says that the devil left him until an opportune moment, and I always assumed it’s meant to be at the end, when they crucify him, but maybe not.  Maybe the reason Luke puts this story where he does, right after the wilderness episode, is that he wants to subtly remind us that temptation lurks everywhere.  In the synagogue that day, all eyes were upon him, they were his homies, his people, and they would have followed him anywhere.  He could have led them off, to a glorious revolution or the beginning of a new movement, but no.  He begins to tell them who he is, that he has come to do all of that, but he doesn’t.

And at first, he gets away with it, at first his fellow Nazarenes say “Wow, he speaks very well for a carpenter’s son,” but as he continues to teach—and it’s only after pointing out that God sent two of their most famous prophets, Elijah and Elisha, to their enemies from Sidon and Syria, do they get mad and try to throw him off a cliff.

But if they had listened carefully—and maybe it sat there in the back of their minds and they didn’t notice until he got more specific—they could have inferred it from what he read in Isaiah.  Or rather: what he didn’t read.   Here’s the passage that he was reading, from Isaiah’s 61^st chapter:

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,

And what I just read was Isaiah chapter 61, the entirety of verse 1 and the first part of verse 2, verse 2a as we would list it in a bible lesson.  What Jesus didn’t read was 2b, the part that comes right after.  If he’d continued, he’d have read “the Spirit has anointed me . . . to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, and the day of vengeance of our God.”

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he leaves that off, do you?  Isaiah—like many other ancient prophets and theologians—thought that right along with doing good for God’s people, God would wreak vengeance upon their enemies.  Revenge.   Retaliation.  But Jesus—whom we believe is the incarnation of the divine—spent his entire life embodying just the opposite.  His whole life as the Son of Man was spent forgiving and even healing those who were the enemies of his people.  He spent his whole time on earth demonstrating—through his example as Son of the most high—that there was nothing of vengeance in God.

And so in a sense, the Good News that he talks about is not just freeing the oppressed, not just recovery of sight to the blind—though it surely includes all these things—but what he leaves unsaid as well, and what he demonstrates just a few lines later by refusing to give in to the temptation of declaring his Messiah-hood and becoming a tool of human vengeance.  God, whom Jesus called his Abba, is not a God of vengeance, not a deity of retaliation, not a God of revenge.  The year of God’s favor is a year of favor to everyone, Jews and gentiles alike, friends of Israel and those who oppose it as well.

When Katrina hit New Orleans, some of our more, how shall we say it,  fundamental  brothers and sisters said that God was punishing the city for its tolerance of gays.  Overlooking, apparently, the fact that God must’ve had a bad aim, because God spared the French Quarter where they all hang out. Three years and change after that, an earthquake that killed upwards of 100,000 people in Haiti brought ‘em all back out of the woodwork, the most famous being Pat Robertson, God bless him, who opined that the earthquake was, and I quote, “God’s vengeance upon the Haitians for making a deal with the devil to rid themselves of the French.”  He was apparently referring to a folk tale—that even most of Haiti’s Christians considered mythological—that the country’s founders did a deal with the Devil, Robert-Johnson style, to get the French off their backs.  And although I think it’s an insult to Isaiah to compare him to Robertson, there is definitely some of the old vengeance-thinking to these remarks by founder of The 700 Club.  Rather than their poverty being due to a sinful and corrupt government, and the ‘quake to shifting tectonic plates, God is actually bringing God’s vengeful wrath upon those poor people.

But here’s the problem: we’re on the other side of the Old Testament.  The whole point of the incarnation is that God becomes one of us, and showed us what it means to live as the perfect human, as one perfectly in tune with the spirit of God who dwells within.  Jesus is like a filter: he filters out all the human-borne ideas of the divine, all the historically-conditioned notions that God is like us in desiring vengeance, in wreaking bloody retribution.   Jesus showed—in this passage and in his whole life—that God is not a God of vengeance, not  a God of revenge.  The Lord God Almighty is a God of forgiveness, of compassion.

And it’s a good thing for Robertson, saying that crazy stuff that God can’t have been too fond, of and it’s a good thing for us.  The God of forgiveness, the God who is love, forgives Robertson for saying those stupid things, just as he forgives us for all the dumb things we do, for all those times when through our acts of rebellion and contrariness we have impeded the work of God.  God forgives us for all the hateful things we might have said, all the things that hurt our fellow Christians, all the times we have not treated our neighbor as ourselves.  The God we worship, the one true God, does not seek vengeance, does not seek retribution, but forgives us just as we are.  Hallelujah!  Amen.