Home town Boy

Luke 4:14-30

Preached by Rev. Trina Zelle

January 24, 2010

In my experience, no matter what the situation, there’s always someone who puts themselves in charge.  It’s no different in the scene here today. As the camera pans in on the front of Nazareth’s local synagogue, the local-know-it-all has taken up a front and center position and is talking to anyone who will listen.  “Yeah, yeah, it’s true.  He’s coming.  You’d better grab a seat right now, before it gets really crowded in there.

“What?  Yes, it really is…our own home town boy himself, Jesus.  Coming back to us here in Nazareth.  Here where he got his start.  To the folks who knew him when.

“What?  Why is everyone so excited about that?  You haven’t heard?  Well, let me tell you.  Just last week he healed a woman who’d been bleeding for twelve years.  All she had to do was touch his robe.  And not too long after that, he brought a little girl back from the sleep of death to the land of the living.  Unbelievable.

“OK, I’ll save you a couple of seats while you go find your cousin.  But you’d better hurry right back.  Everyone wants to see him and I don’t know how long I can hold onto them.”

And we can hear others, making similar comments as they strain to see Jesus coming down the road.  This kid grew up with our kids!  I remember watching him play with the other boys out in the alley.  Oh, he showed me the first thing he ever built in his dad’s carpentry shop!  It was a little cart for his younger brother.  He was so proud.  And now, here he is – all grown up – and famous for doing incredible things.  Who would have imagined anyone from Nazareth going as far as he has?

Well, as you and I both know, ninety percent of the excitement of watching someone come back home after “making it” in the big world out there is that it makes the people at home feel special.  After all, this guy did good.  This guy comes from us.  Therefore, we must be pretty special too. 

Now, there are a number of unwritten rules for this local boy makes good exercise.  The returning hero needs to have accomplished something special enough that we are lifted out of our everyday routine.  But, the returning hero also needs to show a certain etiquette.  They need to be humble.  They need to acknowledge both by their words and with their demeanor that they never could have done what they did without the start that we gave them.  That, although he or she  might rise above us in the world’s estimation, he, or she -- and we, will always know that they’re no better than the rest of us.

Jesus stands. He has the congregation’s undivided attention. He takes the scroll – the scripture portion for that day from the prophet Isaiah -- and reads the words that form the foundation of his ministry – the proclamation that God’s spirit has returned to dwell among the people bringing healing and freedom and justice.    

Then he says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” They are amazed – and happy. Apparently God has not forgotten them after all.  The time of their release is near – surely freedom from this hated Roman occupation is coming.  Our home town boy just said so! 

If only Jesus had stopped there. If only he has said those few words and then  just sat down, leaving the congregation with their happy thoughts.  Instead, he continues:

“(But) 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.” ’

Then he says: ‘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. . .yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a foreign widow 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.’

Au contraire Jesus, they were accepting you as a prophet here in your home town – until you decided to diss them! And quite a rebuke it was of those whose entire self-understanding is based on being “God’s chosen” and therefore a cut above the rest – despite their worldly misery. They had never heard that obscure piece of scripture he was referencing – was it really in there or was he just making it up?  It had never come up as part of the weekly readings before!

But here he is, pointing out to them how God had sent Israel’s most famous prophet to save a foreign widow in Sidon which was most definitely not the “real” Israel -- from the ravages of famine – bypassing tons of Israelite ones in similar straits along the way. And lest they miss the point of what he was saying, he talks about how Elijah’s successor Elisha had healed a foreign army general of leprosy.  Evidently the faith of this foreigner was superior to that of Israelites in need of healing.  Of course they don’t take this very well.  I’m sure that the murmuring starts up immediately. 

Really Jesus?  Really?

Then the murmuring really amps up. Who does this guy think he is anyway?  Where did he get off insulting us like this? What does he think -- that he’s better than the rest of us?  Well he better think again.  After all, he’s just a craftsman.  Who made him a rabbi?  Who did he train under?

No one, of course.  He’s self taught.  Who would have taken him on – after all, he doesn’t even have a real father.  Oh, Joseph tried to cover for Mary, but you can’t hide anything from a small town grapevine.

In fact, the people from his home town are so angry that Jesus – small town boy and son God – has to flee his life.  The Greek word that we read as “rage” in this passage is “scandalon.”  They are “scandalized” by what he has just said to them.  But the word carries a second connotation:  “stumbling block.”  His words have become a stumbling block to their understanding of who he really is and the nature of his mission.   

I wonder how Jesus felt.  Bewildered? Hurt?  Remember, he knew these people from way back when just as they had known him.  They had always seemed to pious and God-fearing.  And supportive of him – from his earliest days.  And now – well this amounts to a dress rehearsal for what he’s going to experience in Jerusalem when yesterday’s adoring crowd becomes today’s mob calling for his execution. The power of the human will.  Totally capable of thwarting God’s.  Even unto death.

It would seem that Jesus’ home town crowd wants its heroes to be tame ones -- someone who’s special but not too different.  Not too hard to understand or accept. 

Instead, his words are like cold water in their faces.  They don’t know where this man is coming from;  they don’t understand him; and, truth be told, they don’t much like him anymore either.  That what he is saying is truth itself is unimportant.  They’re looking for good feelings and comfortable sentiments, not truth.  Certainly not God’s truth being spoken here.

They aren’t aware of it of course, because they have blocked themselves off from seeing Jesus for who he really is, but in their contemptuous rejection of Jesus, the townspeople are also rejecting the God they worship as well.  Turns out that God face-to-face is not all that appealing. The spirit of God moving in their midst refuses to follow the script that they have written in their heads.

There are a lot of lessons for us in this unhappy homecoming story.  First, Thomas Wolf was right. You can’t go home again.  Well, of course you can, but you’d better be prepared for everything to be different.  Because you’re different.  They are too.  And you’ve both grown in increasingly separate directions.   

But perhaps the most important lesson is the way we humans tend to reject truth-telling from unlikely sources.  Unlikely doesn’t necessarily mean unfamiliar.  If we know someone too well – actually – if we think we know someone, (because, we obviously don’t know them if we are horrified by the things that they are saying) -- then it’s very hard to get beyond their perceived ordinariness to the extraordinariness of what they are saying.  Or doing.

We tend to think we know Jesus pretty well too – the same way the home-town crowd did.  We know him through the bible stories we were told in our childhood – the feeding of the five thousand.  Allowing the children to come near to him.  But do we know him face to face?  Can we bear to hear the new thing he is telling us, the new thing the is propelling us to? 

We say that we want to.  We say that we want to know him.  Follow him.  Have our lives be witnesses to his presence.  But more often than not, we want a predictable homecoming speech instead of fiery words of challenge.  We hope for Disney-safe spiritual thrill rides not an authentic relationship.  Where we might be taken into real danger zones where real growth happens. Where we might be challenged to step out from the familiar and traditional into the outrageous, scandalous new thing that God is doing. Where, ultimately, we will be asked to die as surely as Jesus did.  Die to all our home town hopes and plans and dreams.

In the end, the people of Jesus’ home town were too small and not small enough.  They were too small to admit or even see that someone infinitely greater than they could ever imagine had sprung up in their midst.  They didn’t know scripture well enough to recall Isaiah’s other words: “Behold, he grew up among us like a young plant and we knew him not.”

But they weren’t quite small enough to feel their own need.  Their own vulnerability. Apparently they were just well enough off, just healthy enough,  just prosperous enough to have their sensibilities offended by Jesus’ words.  Had they been bleeding for twelve years, or suffered the loss of a child or been confronted by their own powerlessness in some way, they might have recognized Jesus as their greatest hope.  But they didn’t.  They didn’t see it.  They didn’t see him.  They were so offended that they couldn’t hear the truth of his words – that God hangs out with and often speaks through the outcasts, and the poor, and pretty much everyone whom the “good people” despise. That this is God’s M.O.  Don’t they remember what kind of shape they were in when God first came to them – despised slaves in a foreign land.  

So they write him off.

We need to be careful that we don’t write him off; ignore the difficult things he says to us through unlikely people – whether they are overly familiar to us or new on the scene; or turn a deaf ear to what he is calling us to do.  Because this Jesus is our only hope.  The Jesus we don’t know yet.  And the only thing harder than following this Jesus would be not following him, and staying stuck in our home town rut after he has passed on by.  Amen.