Watch and Listen:
Read:
Thoughts on The Word:
Luke 4:21-30
Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Today we look to Jesus the outsider. In today’s Gospel account Jesus returns to his home town, he reads to the congregation, from the prophet Isaiah, and declares that the scripture which he read has been fulfilled. A clear implication that He is the fulfillment of the scriptures. Now we may well expect that Jesus would be preaching to the converted, that here in Israel, and especially in his home town the message of the messiah would be understood and welcomed. However Jesus is not well received at all, in fact the crowd looks to him with disbelief. Jesus sees this failure of faith in them and turns the conversation on its head – he says what they are all thinking – ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. You see the congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth figured that they had this God business sorted, they had been coming to synagogue every week for their whole lives, they were a part of the chosen people, it was all good for them! So who is this Jesus character – the carpenter’s son no less – to come in and start preaching to them? What is he declaring about himself – he couldn’t be who they say he is – we know how all this works!
Jesus then rams home a point that the congregation really doesn’t like – he tells them ‘… there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ You see Jesus is letting this congregation know something important – Just because you turn up to church each week, just because you believe in God doesn’t mean that you will recognise Him or his message – even when it is right in front of you! We see in the recounting of stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, that God will work through and give his blessing to whoever he pleases – even to the outsiders, those who aren’t a part of the special group.
When we look at the Church today, I wonder if we have not become a little like the congregants at the synagogue in Nazareth. What I see increasingly around the world in all but a few branches of the church is a level of comfort that has led to arrogance. The church is so confident that it has this God thing sorted that it has even begun to reject the parts of God’s revelation that it doesn’t like – after all, we are exceedingly clever and if we don’t like that God’s word says marriage is between a man and a woman, then we will just ignore that. Likewise that part about Jesus being the ONLY way to salvation doesn’t fly to well with the masses, so we’ll alter that to say he is our way – but you might have another. Then of course there is that word ‘sin’, scripture tells us that we are to reject sin, that we are to turn away from it and seek to live according to the will of God – but that doesn’t seem to go down well with the world… so why don’t we just focus on the ‘love’ parts, God loves us so it doesn’t matter what we do, or how we choose to live. Just forget about Jesus message to the woman caught in adultery – I’m sure he meant to say ‘get up and go back to your adulterous love affair, its OK because I love you’… The bible must be wrong where it records his words as ‘Go your way, and from now on do not sin again.’…
I hope you will forgive my sarcasm. What I also pray though is that you will see that we cannot continue on the path that so much of the church is treading,we must be prepared to see God and accept His revelation to us – We cannot continue to reject it in favour of our own. It might not sit well with the world, and it may not sit well with the Christians around you either, but we must return to a model of Christian faith that is founded upon the revelation of God. Yes it means we will be outcasts, yes it means we will be considered to be fringe dwellers – maybe we might even be tanned with the fundamentalist brush – but the fact is that God has revealed to us the way we are to live in His word, and through the traditions and interpretations of the church, established over two millenia. Some of those will make us the object of ridicule, some will cause us to lose friends, to be rejected by family…
Remember though there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’
There are many who claim allegiance to God today, just as there were many widows and lepers in Israel. How many of us who claim to be followers of Christ are prepared to follow Him fully though? How many are prepared to declare that sin is not OK and that we should not merely accept it but seek to turn away from it, how many of us are prepared to become the object of ridicule, to be considered the fringe dweller – the outsider like the widow at Zarephath, or Namaan the Syrian? Let us not fall into the trap of the congregation at the synagogue in Nazareth, because if we reject the Word of God as they did, if we are determined to throw Jesus from the cliff, He will pass through our midst, and we will be lost.
God bless you this week,
Daryl.