Preacher Jesus Was ALL the Rage

Hometown sermons are hard to hear and hard to preach. Jesus had to learn that the hard way as well. Things didn’t go to well at his Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:14-30).

I keep trying to get a feel for what it was that Jesus said, or what it was that this synagogue congregation heard, that set them off so. And I’m especially intrigued that once so severely attacked by what he must have thought was a rather friendly, hometown crowd, Jesus’ reacts so calmly.

I’m remembering times when I taught theology, both at a high school and at a junior college. It was the most benign things I said that seemed to set people off so severely. I once previewed a sex-education video tape with parents of juniors, on which the most sterile, matronly healthcare worker used a very clinical plastic, invisible women to explain female anatomy. Whereupon a tenured faculty member at Notre Dame’s law school leaped from his chair and screamed, we had no business showing this tape to a co-ed class. Doing that would simply embarrass the girls and probably excite the boys.

I stood speechless, because I really didn’t know what to say and because I was hoping another parent might jump in and save me. My silence only seemed to set the lawyer into deeper rage and he kept fulminating about the inappropriateness of teaching sex-ed in a theology class; that our job was to teach abstinence as prescribed in the commandments and work harder to instill in the teens the virtues of chastity and purity. Finally, he screamed, the only purpose I had in showing such a thing was to encourage the youngsters to engage in deviate sexual conduct.

Well that did it. I shot back that the clinician’s teaching style was the time-honored Socratic Method - extending people’s knowledge of the unfamiliar by using what was familiar. I suggested that he probably used that same method to teach unfamiliar concepts in his own classroom. Further, I barked, everybody knows where his or her butt is anyway, except maybe you, since you seem to keep tying your necktie around it!

The crowd burst into laughter, and then applause, as he stormed out of the room. And while it looked like I was the victor, bested a lawyer in a verbal sparring match, the fact that we represented, in some sense, a church at war with itself, didn’t bear much fruitful witness to a world we claim is more broken and lost than we are.

Besides not being completely certain about how Jesus held himself together while everyone around him was trying to tear him apart, I’m only somewhat clear as to just what these folks heard that riled them so. I’m thinking that since they’d heard reports of the marvels Jesus had worked in nearby regions, places where there were fewer synagogues, more aliens and foreigners, an increased number of backsliding Jews, and even the heretic-Jews known as Samaritans, these folks were expecting some big payoffs from Jesus.

They were Jesus’ wider social context and faith community. Theirs was the village that had done such a good job supporting Mary and Joseph. These parents had raised such a splendid teacher / preacher with their help. Therefore, were they not due some sort of double portion of all the benefits Jesus seemed to be lavishing on their version of the great unwashed.

What they seem not ready to hear, is that Jesus doesn’t take as his model for mission someone like David, who divided the spoils of war among the Israelites. Jesus isn’t taking as his model for ministry someone like Judas Maccabeus, the son of a priest, who, in the name of Yahweh, led a war to overthrow a foreign king, boot the priests who’d made an alliance with the king, and reclaim the Jerusalem Temple.

Jesus tells these folks that the model of his mission and ministry - who his mission is directed toward and the kind of ministry he’ll exercise to achieve the mission - is more like the people’s own ancestral prophets. Prophets who spoke against insider-arrogance and prophets who demonstrated the inclusive, lavishness of God’s steadfast love, first, to outsiders.

In one sense, Jesus got what every preacher who stands in a pulpit wishes for, a reasonable hearing from those gathered, and a corporate response to the message. The trouble began when Jesus suggested, by choosing the word from Isaiah he had, that this crowd of believers, despite their certainty that they believed all the right things, was still not getting it. Jesus finishes off this blow to their religious egos by saying that, just like Israel’s first generation prophets, he, too, will prefer to show forth God’s unconditional love to those who’ve never experienced it, rather than heap more favor on those who receive it only to hoard it.

The result was another believing community at war with itself. This crowd sets out to hurl him off a hill. Ten weeks from now, we’ll hear about another crowd of enraged believers who succeed at nailing him one.

Unless we take our cue from prophets like Jeremiah and Jesus, Spirit-led and Spirit-fed folks who speak God’s words of truth both with reluctant humility and bold conviction we, too, are just a few bible verses away from the kind of mob rule that can turn us from faithful congregation to a crowd at war with itself. What makes that both possible, and perhaps likely, has more to do with what we forget, than it does with what we remember.

I think it’s wonderful so many of us remember the 10 commandments. How does that make us authorities on who should sleep with who, when, but not how we run our businesses, hold elections, or collect taxes?

I think it’s marvelous that so many of us remember Gen 2:24, Therefore a man shall leave is father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. How does that make us authorities on whose union God blesses?

I think it’s great that in this age of so-called biblical illiteracy so many folks recite John 3:16. How does that make so many authorities on who God will keep out of heaven? I don’t think any of that would be happening if we weren’t so forgetful.

Have we forgotten those times when each one of us, like the widow of Zarephath, was:
• starving for the nourishment of belonging
• wracked by grief at our inability to provide for our children
• so poor and sunk so low we looked forward to dying
• parched and dried by our doubting God’s love
only to have a stranger, someone like Elijah, speak a godly word that yielded an abundant harvest of deliverance.

How could we, the people of this Book, become arrogant believers and hoarders of God’s grace, unless we’ve forgotten, that each of us, like Naaman, was:
• despised because of a skin condition - its color
• disregarded because of our gender
• discounted because of how much / little education we have
• held in disdain because of our ethnicity
only to have a stranger, someone like Elisha, speak a godly word that unleashes a torrent of healing and wholeness.

The Spirit of the Lord was upon Jesus. The Spirit who anointed Jesus was not the sort of Spirit who would let Jesus tame this God or this God’s Book, turning either into a tame pet. The Spirit who sent Jesus was not the sort of Spirit who would permit Jesus to claim the God who makes and keeps this Book’s promises as the possessions of a select few.

As Jesus’ first sermon began, Luke says, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Words full of the unearned, unmerited favor, and steadfast love in which God held them.

By sermon’s end, faced with an allegedly believing community at war with itself, Luke says, “Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” Jesus knew that the love of God is strong. God doesn’t require our weapons. God isn’t made safer, stronger, or more believable by our violent words or deeds. Humanity’s respect for God isn’t promoted by holy warfare. God’s existence doesn’t depend on us, and God’s will is far larger than our causes of the day. We might unleash our destructive passions in order to feel better, but we should be under no illusion that doing so serves God in any way.

Wherever you worship I hope you, too, hear and are filled with words of unearned, unmerited grace. What you leave there to do, full of the Spirit that empowered Jesus, is to let others know that you: believe what you read; preach what you believe; and, live what you preach.

You’ll know if you’re doing that well enough, because when you do, surely, you’re gracious words will enrage somebody.