Jeremiah 1: 4-10; Ps. 71: 1-6; I Cor. 13: 1-3; Luke 4:21-30
A wise teacher once told a class in which I was a student, “God pays us the intolerable compliment of loving us.” God pays us the intolerable compliment of loving us ... God means to love all of us, every single one of us. And all of each of us, not just parts of us. That’s the intolerable part. Not some of us. Not some part of each of us. All of us, collectively and individually.
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Jesus grew up in the village of Nazareth. I’m sure he was known – if not to everyone – to almost everyone. I’m sure as a small boy he ran in and out of the houses of his friends and of other kindly adults. I’m sure he knew what houses to not go near. The people of the village saw him grow up, and I believe most of the people of the village had a sense that he was special in some at-the-time un-named way. Some of them would have been in the pilgrim group that went to Jerusalem the year Jesus was twelve. That was when he became so absorbed in what the teachers in the temple were discussing that he forgot to go home with the other pilgrims, stayed there with the teachers. No one discovered he wasn’t among them until they had gone a full day’s journey. When his frantic parents returned to the city, it took three days to find him. And when they did, and his mother cried out, “Child, why have you treated us like this?” He replied, “Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” This was a profound response. [But as a parent, I find it an unsatisfactory one.] Anyone to whom his parents had confided that story would sense he was different.
When we meet him today in the text Jesus is an adult returning to his hometown, Nazareth. He left the village some time ago to go to the Jordan River where his cousin, John the Baptist, could be found berating people for rejecting their God, calling them to return to God, to go down into the waters of the Jordan as a sign of their intention to drown their rejection of God and to come back up out of the water, washed clean and ready to return to God. Jesus, himself, submitted to that baptism, as a sign of solidarity with his people and of his intention to follow God.
As he was praying following his baptism, God anointed him with Holy Spirit, commissioning him for his ministry. From there Holy Spirit took him into the wilderness for a time of formation and testing. And now is has come home, armed with the power of the Spirit, Luke tells us. Jesus has emerged from a time of trial in the wilderness about which I’m not sure his neighbors knew. We know, because we have been reading the story from the beginning. Jesus has returned to the region of Galilee, the region in which Nazareth is located. . He has been traveling from town to town, teaching in the synagogues, and everywhere, the news is, he is widely praised. His reputation precedes him now wherever he goes. The inhabitants of Nazareth are eager to hear him in their synagogue assembly. Expectations of him are high. He does not disappoint. Asked to read and to teach, he is handed a scroll on which are written the contents of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah. He searches for the passage he wants. He finds it. He reads:
“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.”
So far. So good. Completing the reading he selected, he sits down, assuming the position for teaching. He says to the folks gathered that in his reading of it, this passage has been fulfilled. “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And that’s where we come into the story this morning.
Well, the people in that synagogue are delighted. Somehow he is God’s instrument in fulfilling the prophecy of Isaiah. God is using him to reward them and the rest of the people of God, but certainly them. Liberate them. Elevate them. Shower them with the Lord’s favor. Local boy makes good.
Jesus continues – he cites some enigmatic sayings about physicians curing them and prophets being without honour in their own country as a way of saying, “You aren’t going to like what I have to say now.” And they don’t.
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The Prayer Book of the Church in the Province of New Zealand is one of the jewels of our Anglican communion. There are many reasons for this: chief among them that it is both inclusive and demanding in a distinctively inspired way and inspiring way. For example in one option for the prayers of the people, we read petitions such as this one:
For the hungry and the overfed
May we have enough.
[somebody’s going to have to share here – someone is going to have to relinquish so that someone else gains from the act of relinquishing]
Or this one:
For the victims and the oppressors
May we share power wisely
[again, somebody’s going to have to relinquish and someone receive – there is enough to go around. We need with God’s help to redistribute.]
One last example:
For the vibrant and the dying
May we all die to live.
[Nothing less than our very lives is expected so that life itself may be transformed.]
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What does this have to do with the Jesus at home in Nazareth centuries ago? Everything. These few prayers and the Gospel passage for today bring home God’s truth that we are all in this together, the hungry and the overfed, the victims and the oppressors, the vibrant and the dying. God comes to us all, not to some of us, but to all of us. Thus, we all belong to each other.
What the folks in Nazareth want is assurance from Jesus that they are safely within the circle of God’s favor. But what they hear is there is no circle of God’s favor. Who God favors is up to God. Both the widow whom Jesus mentions and Naaman were Gentiles. Not God’s chosen people. The people of Jesus’ hometown are enraged. They are a people set apart by God for God. How dare Jesus widen their circle. The compliment God pays them through anointing Jesus to bring home to them the real nature of God’s love is intolerable, because this love is one that extends beyond them. A love that gathers up everyone and demands that those whom God loves do the same.
I try to imagine someone coming into our midst, in our service of worship, and challenging our notions of who is inside the circle of God’s favor and who is outside of it. Imagine Jesus coming into our midst and doing that.
I think we need not imagine. Full of the Spirit he is here … among us. We are the people of his home town now. Can we let him love us into the place he wants us to go? Or is the compliment just intolerable?
Can we let him teach us those things we don’t want to hear as well as the things that delight our hearing? Or must he pass through our midst and go on his way, because the compliment of being loved as he loves, the compliment of being trusted to love ourselves and one another as he loves us is just too much for us, intolerable?
I wonder if we shouldn’t take our bulletin insert, the one on which the lessons for today are printed – fold it to the Gospel passage and read and reflect on it each day in the coming week. Let it speak to us. Let him speak to us let him love us through it.
Amen
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