The Home-grown Prophet

The Gospel reading for today is one of the keys to understanding Luke’s theology.  In the liturgy, the first part was read last week and the second part this week.  We read Luke 4:14-28

¹⁴ Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. ¹⁵ He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

¹⁶ He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
¹⁹     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

²⁰ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.²¹ He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

²² All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

²³ Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

²⁴ “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. ²⁵ I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. ²⁶ Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. ²⁷ And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”

²⁸ All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this.²⁹ They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff.³⁰ But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.

Luke has Jesus arriving in his home town fresh from his confrontation with the devil and a successful preaching tour of Galilee.  Luke writes that ‘everyone praised him’.

Jesus, the observant Jew (as was his custom) joins the worshippers in Synagogue on the Sabbath.  He is invited to read the haftarah from the Prophets (Nevi’im).

There are a couple of questions here:  Jesus could obviously read.  It has been generally accepted that most people of the time were illiterate.  However, more recent research questions this.  Secondly, was Nazareth affluent enough to have its own separate Synagogue and could afford to own a scroll of Isaiah.  However, these are questions for another time.

Jesus reads from the text of Isaiah 61:1-2 and his commentary on this text proclaims that it is now fulfilled.  At this time there were already messianic interpretations of this text and these deeds were primary tenets of Judaism.  No controversy there.

Note that his hearers were very impressed indeed - All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. ‘Isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ they asked.

Now I must admit that I have taken their question ‘Isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ as a rather cynical version of ‘Who do you think you are?  You grew up here, we know you.  Don’t get above yourself.’  However, in the context of their admiration, this does not work.

So why does their admiration turn to hostility?

First of all, Jesus seems to provoke their hostility with his response.  He immediately sets out to deflate their admiration and throws back the question, do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum? 

Do they want spectacle? Are they asking for the welfare of the town? Do his Nazareth neighbours and relatives believe they are in a privileged position because he is a local boy becoming famous for healing and preaching?  Can Jesus read their faces and their minds as they listen to him?  As a perceptive communicator, he probably could. 

However, more significant than that he knew the demands of social connections which put family, clan, tribe, nation first in all obligations of relationships.

He cites the stories of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath and Elisha healing Naaman the Syrian – both foreigners.  The context Jesus places these stories in is that they received help and healing when Elijah and Elisha could have done the same thing for their own people, Israel but went outside the borders instead. 

It was the preferencing of the foreigner rather than those of the prophets’ own tribe and nation that got Jesus’ listeners angry.  It was not because gentiles received care – the Jews had generally good relations with the Gentiles[i] even to having the Court of the Gentiles in the Temple.  Preferencing strangers would mean that the social ties embedded in Jesus’ culture were being set aside.

At the heart of Jesus’ preaching and that of the early Jesus community was profound inclusiveness and equality.  The Reign of God was the priority and the measure of all things.  All shared an equality of love, compassion, justice. 

I suggest that this is what turned their admiration to blazing, murderous anger.  He placed his townsfolk’s (probably most of Nazareth’s population were related or belonged to the same tribe) assumption of social privileges though family and tribe in the context of the Reign of God in which all people shared in the same privilege.

Consistently in the Gospels, Jesus replaces the priority of social ties with that of the Reign of God.  He promises rewards to those who leave all for the Reign of God, he praises Gentiles for their insights, praises the persistence of the Syrophoenician woman for her love for her child.  The Reign of God demands priority and is the context for all relationships.

This is not to deny the embedded social ties, it is not to reject family, culture or nation.  These ties may be strengthened and transformed. It is to see them all through the astounding and sometimes shocking inclusivity of the Reign of God.  There will be times when social ties with be rejected or questioned, there will be times when we question our culture and nation if we take this inclusivity seriously.

Trouble is, this universal sisterhood and brotherhood is fine if they all look and think like me.

Now, there’s the daily conversion.

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[i] There was a strong missionary aspect to Judaism of the time. 

This is what the Lord Almighty says: “In those days ten people from all languages and nations will take firm hold of one Jew by the hem of his robe and say, ‘Let us go with you, because we have heard that God is with you.’ Zechariah 8:23