The hometown folks’ response took a surprising turn when Jesus delivered his first message to them. The passage is Luke 4:16-30:
And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written,
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” And he said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.” And he said, “Truly, I say to you, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heavens were shut up three years and six months, and a great famine came over all the land, and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away.
They had been speaking well of him and marveling at his gracious words. Then suddenly they tried to throw him off a cliff. What happened here? The answer hinges on his proverb, not the one he quoted but the one that he coined there,”no prophet is acceptable in his hometown.”
The prophet-unwelcome-in-his-hometown phenomenon is well-known. Recently I did some web communications consulting for a mission agency that’s unconnected to Campus Crusade for Christ. For almost everything I said, the Internet/IT people in the room were nodding their heads in agreement. They knew it already. I wasn’t saying anything they couldn’t have said, if their leaders had asked. but I had an advantage: I had come in from outside. They were prophets in their hometown, and they hadn’t been asked.
In matters of faith and ethics, though, there’s an even stronger factor working against the prophet in his hometown: they know him. They knew him as a child, they know his failings, and quite realistically they’re inclined to say, “You’re just one of us, who are you to tell us what to do?” This explanation doesn’t fit this time, though. Jesus quoted from Isaiah 61, one of the most majestic Old Testament passages of hope and deliverance, and followed it up by saying essentially, “I am the hope-bringer you have been waiting for all these centuries.” And they accepted it!
My hometown friends and family would have thrown me in a ditch (the closest thing to a cliff there) for saying something like that, or they might have locked me up in the loony bin. The Nazarenes didn’t react that way with Jesus—not yet, anyway. They knew he was different. Luke 2 gives us a tantalizingly small taste of his remarkable childhood. Additionally we know that no accusation of sin was ever brought against him successfully. 1 Peter 2:22 (among other sources) tells us “he committed no sin, neither was deceit found in his mouth.” His neighbors must have felt the moral strength of his life among them. “Who would he grow up to be?” they must have wondered. Now they had a new clue: they had heard of his miracles at Capernaum. He had come home now, and it was time for the son of their good friend Joseph to be their hometown boy and do even more for them.
A prophet’s main role is not doing miracles, however. In the Old Testament, only Moses, Elijah, and Elisha were much used by God in performing signs and wonders. Prophets proclaim God’s word, sometimes to comfort (as in the case of the Isaiah prophecy Jesus quoted), but often to confront and correct. Jesus did both that day in Nazareth, and when he got to the latter, his neighbors’ attitude turned sharply. He words of confrontation were no less scriptural than his words of comfort and peace; undoubtedly his listeners knew all of them well.
What bothered them so, then? It was his pointed reminder that Elijah and Elisha did not serve only their own. A widow of Sidon, and a Syrian official, both of them non-Israelites, were beneficiaries of God’s blessings, too. “You don’t have a special claim on me,” he was telling them. “My purpose and my mission are much larger than that.”
They didn’t like his answer very much, did they?
What would we Christians say to Jesus today, especially in America? Do we think we have a special claim on Jesus? Do we see Christianity as a Western, English-speaking society of sorts? Nothing could be further from the truth, either theologically or sociologically. The weight of the Christian world has shifted to the southern hemisphere and Asia. It never really was ours in the first place, but in our historical/cultural myopia we don’t see that. Christianity was once primarily a middle Eastern movement, and its earliest movement was been not only to Europe, but to North Africa (remember St. Augustine?), Ethiopia, India, and even (in some forms) as far east as China.
Jesus’ words in Nazareth worry me, and ought to worry any of his followers, for the mistake they made there is one we are also prone to make.
Does this mean we are wrong, though, to say we know him as the truth? No. He came to present the truth, and he himself was and is the truth. It’s no private arrogance to accept him for who he said he was! But as I have written at the top of every page on this blog, we don’t hold the truth. The truth (the Truth, Jesus himself) holds us.
No, the right conclusion is to honor Jesus and hold our convictions with humility. In him there is something very real, something true, something most marvelous. In him there is good news for the poor, liberty for the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and the coming of the Lord’s favor. As a prophet (the greatest) he spoke God’s truth. It is truth to be received and accepted, and truth to correct us if (as the Nazarenese did and we are wont to do ourselves) we begin to think we have a special claim on it. The truth is there to be learned, and Jesus made himself knowable so that we might know him. But not that we might own him.
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