Luke 4:16-30
You may have heard the old adage, “You can’t go home again.” That it’s hard to go back to where you came from and relive your childhood, that sort of thing.
Well, I looked that up the other day and found out that the phrase actually comes from a novel by Thomas Wolf with that as the title. Wolf’s novel tells the story of George Webber, a budding author, who writes a book with frequent references to his home town of Libya Hill. When the residents get their hands on it, they see those references as distortions of their idyllic life, and they begin sending Webber death threats and menacing letters, even though the book gets rave reviews around the rest of the country.
The moral of the story? Don’t mess with the hometown myth!
But take that to a grander scale. Imagine, for example, writing some scathing references about your country and having them published. People here in the USA don’t take kindly to that kind of talk. You either have to love it or leave it.
I was interested to read the other day during the Martin Luther King holiday that the day after he was shot, Dr. King was set to give a speech entitled, “Why America May Go to Hell.” Key line: “If America does not use her vast resources to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to hell.” He was writing this sermon in that hotel room in Memphis on April 4, 1968.
I don’t imagine that would have gone over well. Such talk gets people killed because we generally don’t like critique—especially critique that challenges our view of history.
But critique is what prophets do. It’s not critique designed to insult. It’s critique that’s aimed at change. But people don’t generally like change, particularly those who have been steeped in the same paradigm for years, decades, even centuries.
When Jesus goes back home to Nazareth, he seems to have known, even before he opened the scroll in the synagogue, that the prophetic words he is about to read and speak will be incendiary. He is about to announce to his hometown people the good news that God was about to become king, but the bad news was that it wasn’t in the way they thought. They, as well as many in Israel, thought they had an inside track as God’s chosen people—that God viewed them as insiders and the Gentile Romans and other people as outsiders. This was a long-standing paradigm, and Jesus was about to challenge it.
As we continue in our series on The Meaning of Jesus, one of the things that we need to come to grips with at the outset is that Jesus envisions his mission as God’s mission. As we said last week, Jesus understood himself as God’s messiah, God’s representative, and believed and acted as though he was in charge. But Jesus envisioned the mission of God as being quite different than his people. Indeed, when Jesus talked about God and acted as God, he was in effect redefining who God was for a people who thought they had him all figured out.
And if you think talking about a country is inflammatory, wait til you see what happens when someone talks about God!
Remember that last week we talked about the perfect storm that was brewing in first century Israel–the Roman storm of the empire from the west, the Jewish storm of expectation and that third—the hurricane that heralds the news that God is becoming king. It’s this third storm we want to look at this morning and how Jesus interprets it. This passage in Luke certainly isn’t the only place it appears (Joe will dive into this a little more next week) but it does tell us several things about what God becoming king means and how Jesus embodies that reality.
First, Jesus talks about God’s Mission.
It was customary for a rabbi to stand to read the scroll in the synagogue, and then to sit down to teach. Jesus opens the scroll to Isaiah and reads from Isaiah 61:1 and 58:6 (keep in mind that verse and chapter weren’t added until centuries later). “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.”
In these few verses, borrowed from the prophetic mission of Isaiah, Jesus reveals that he is operating under the power of the Holy Spirit. Now, the Spirit is active in a lot of ways, but Luke wants us to connect that verse back to Jesus’ baptism in chapter 3, when the Spirit descended on Jesus as a dove and the Father spoke those words of commission for Jesus and his mission: “You are my Son, the beloved. In you I am well pleased.” While the people in the synagogue may have been thinking that Jesus was referring to himself as a prophet, Luke wants us to recognize that Jesus is speaking as the son of God.
Now, notice what that mission is and what it implies:
1) to bring good news to the poor. What would be good news to the poor? That you won the lottery? That there’s a high-paying job available? Perhaps—but the even greater news is that in God’s coming kingdom, the poor will finally see justice. Indeed, the Bible reveals over and over again that the poor are preferred by God. Mary sings about this in the Magnificat that we studied during Advent: You lift up the lowly, she sings to God, and you send the rich away empty. This good news isn’t just the spiritual news that, hey, sure, times are tough for you now, but when you die you’ll have a mansion in heaven. No, instead it is the good news that God, the king, is coming to set things right, to make all people of equal worth and value. The economy of the kingdom will be quite different than the one we have now. In Luke’s version of the Beatitudes in chapter 6, the poor are blessed. Jesus will spend most of his ministry among the poor, and he lifts them up and gives them hope.
2. to proclaim release to the captives. Slavery was a major part of the story of Israel, but the prophets reveal that people can be enslaved in a lot of ways: economic slavery in the form of debt and poverty, physical slavery to illness and disability, political imprisonment (like John the Baptizer), or even demonic possession. Jesus announces that God was taking people who were enslaved in so many ways and proclaiming their release. He did it through his healings, his exorcisms, his miraculous feeding of the five thousand—all of which were signs that the proclamation was actually starting to become reality. Most of all, release to the captives meant the forgiveness of sins—releasing people from its power and from the curse of death. He will demonstrate that freedom when he rises from the dead, which we will discuss in due time.
3. recovery of sight to the blind. This doesn’t just mean those who are physically blind, though the Gospels make clear that Jesus healed many blind people. It’s also about healing spiritual blindess—blindness to the vision of what God was about to do for Israel and the whole world—a vision of being a light to the nations. Jesus heals that blindness through his work, but he also proclaims its presence in people like the Pharisees, who are “blind guides” that lead people off a cliff of despair instead of offering a vision of hope.
4. to release the oppressed and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. In Leviticus 25, God orders the Israelites to proclaim a Jubilee year every fiftieth year (after seven cycles or weeks of seven years). At Jubilee, slaves were to be set free, debts were to be wiped clean, fields were to be left at rest. Imagine, for example, if every 50 years all mortgages were paid off, all debts erased, you wouldn’t owe anybody anything. It’s like a “reboot” year!
There’s no evidence that the Israelites actually did this, but the idea of Jubilee was still strong. Indeed, the people believed that the sign that their exile had ended would be the same as a jubilee year. Remember last year we said that the exiles who were taken off to Babylon were allowed to return after 70 years? Well, everyone knew that wasn’t really the end of exile. The prophet Daniel had written that the exile would actually be over after 70 weeks of years (490 years). Now, depending on how you calendar it, 490 years would have taken them to the time of the Maccabean revolt, when Israel did enjoy about a century free from foreign domination. Some would also have thought that it was a time that was arriving about now, in the first century. Regardless, Jesus is announcing that in his person this Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor, was at hand.
In fact, it would not be a stretch to suggest that the texts that Jesus reads in the synagogue in Nazareth act as a kind of mission statement for what he is about to do over the next three or so years. The wind of God, the hurricane of the kingdom, would come and alter the landscape through his ministry. A new age was dawning.
But that leads us to the second point that Jesus will make. That is, that this kingdom won’t just be for the Jews.
Up until the point that Jesus finishes the scroll, rolls it up and sits down, the people in the synagogue are with him. They’re amazed that this is the same son of a contractor they’d known all these years. Such words of grace! Such excitement! They almost can’t wait to hear what’s next—how God was going to do it. Of course, Jesus had left out that next line that Isaiah wrote after he was talking about proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, which was obviously aimed at them, the faithful. The next line was one they’d also want to hear—about the “day of vengeance of our God.” That vengeance had to be reserved for those wicked Gentiles who were occupying the land. The Roman scum who oppressed them. What was good news for them, they thought, would be bad news for the Gentiles.
But as quickly as Jesus caught their attention, he even more quickly managed to make them furious. First, Jesus speaks what many of them had probably been thinking. Well, if you’re the one appointed by God to make all this happen, do for us those miracles you’ve been doing in Capernaum. They are ready to share in the benefits that they might get from being this prophet’s hometown, and a little ticked that he’s been doing these things elsewhere. They believed they should get a hometown discount—a fulfillment of the blessings they should receive as God’s people.
But Jesus, having delivered them the good news, now tells them that the good news isn’t just for them. In fact, God was actually giving that good news to the people they hated! Jesus was announcing that God was about to do a new thing. Change was coming.
Jesus tells two stories: the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarapheth. In that story, Elijah, the Jewish prophet, travels to Sidon during a great famine. There he meets a local widown, a Gentile, and not only eats with her but raises her son from the dead. There were lots of widows in Israel who were suffering during that famine, says Jesus, but God didn’t send Elijah to any of them—only to this widow. This Gentile. She received the grace and care of God.
Oh, and remember Elisha? There were plenty of people in Israel who had leprosy during his days—a debilitating skin disease that made people ritually unclean. But to whom did God send Elisha? Yes, to a Gentile Syrian named Naaman. And not only was Naaman a Gentile, he was the commander of the army of one of Israel’s enemies! As a result, Naaman renounces his pagan god and accepts Israel’s God as his own.
The point? The kingdom that Jesus is announcing is wider than they thought. They thought they were insiders, but Jesus was announcing that the outsiders—the Gentiles, the poor, the lame, the blind, the broken, the sinners, even the Romans—could become insiders by following him. No historical or ethnic boundaries were going to limit what God was about to do. This king was the king of all, and his kingdom was good news for everyone who would hear it!
They didn’t. In fact, they became so enraged at the mere suggestion that they weren’t God’s exclusive people that they drove Jesus out of town to the top of a cliff. In October, we stood on the likely site where they took him. Nazareth is built on a steep hill with a deep drop into the Jezreel Valley. It’s a long way down.
But it wasn’t time yet. Jesus would face more angry crowds later, and eventually one would have him nailed to a cross. Like the people in the synagogue in Nazareth, they didn’t get it.
If we’re going to understand the meaning of Jesus, we have to be willing to admit that very often we don’t get it either. We want a God that blesses us, a God that will save us, a God that fights our battles and who will take vengeance on all our enemies. We want to be set free, healed, forgiven, but we don’t want to free, heal, or forgive others who aren’t like us.
Jesus announces that when God becomes king, everything is going to be turned upside down. All the categories by which we define ourselves will be shattered and only one will matter—did you care for people—all people—the way God cares for people—as people made in the image of God? Did you follow my lead? Did you clothe and feed and encourage the least of people, or did you mock the poor as being lazy and stupid? Did you welcome the stranger and the immigrant who is seeking freedom, or did you build bigger fences and threaten them with deportation? Did you share your wealth with those in need, or did you hoard it up and use it all for yourself? Did you love and pray for your enemies or did you seek their downfall? Did you follow the first commandment and become a steward of God’s creation, or did you exploit it with waste and destruction? Did you speak the truth to power about injustice, or did you just turn the page of the newspaper? Did you deliver the good news that changes the world now, or did you just wait around for heaven?
Jesus gives us a vision of a God who isn’t interested in more religious devotion, but one who cares more about justice, and mercy and peace. It’s the kind of God that the prophet Micah wrote about when he said, “What does the Lord require of you? To do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God!” It’s the God that sends rain on the just and the unjust, the God who eats with sinners and blesses the tears of prostitutes. It’s the God that tells the hometown folks the truth—that they may think they’re in heaven, but they’re headed for hell.
My guess is that if we really listened to Jesus, really understood the meaning of what he said and did, we’d probably want to throw him off a cliff for naming our hypocrisy. As long as he is gentle Jesus, meek and mild, we can confine his teaching to the realm of utopian fantasy.
Jesus embodies a God who is remaking the world, and because he does so he is dangerous to the status quo. He can’t go home again. He is off to fulfill the Scriptures and bring the story of God to its royal climax. His disciples never went home again because they followed him.
We may not be called to change addresses ourselves, but we are all called to change our image of home and church from that of a secure fortress to a launching pad—a home base for fulfilling the kingdom mission in our neighborhoods and workplaces, our schools and our hangouts.
But, be careful. There are cliffs out there!
