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On His Way
Luke 4:21-30
Fourth Sunday
After Epiphany
28 January
2007
Stacey
Simpson Duke
I couldn’t be here last Sunday,
because the boys were sick, and, as it turned out, so was I. So I didn’t hear Paul’s sermon, on the
proclamation at Nazareth. But I did read
it this week. And it wasn’t half
bad. The thing is, my text today picks
up exactly where his text left off last week.
Do you know how on television,
when you’re watching a series and you turn on a new episode, and they always
start by saying something like, “Previously, on 24.” Or, “Previously, on Desperate
Housewives.” So that if you missed the
last episode, you can get caught up, or if you did see it you can be reminded
of the most essential plot points, and ready to see what happens next.
Well, maybe that’s not a bad way
for me to begin this sermon. So here we
go. “Previously, on the proclamation at
Nazareth”:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, (Jesus stands up
to read in the synagogue)
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
And when he finished reading those
words, he put away the scroll and told them:
Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. It was his first public act of ministry,
according to Luke, and his first word on what his life meant: liberation for the poor, the captive, the
blind, the oppressed. Today.
And the crowd’s first response to
this good news is amazement, and enthusiasm.
They are proud as can be at the gracious words coming out of the mouth
of their hometown boy. But that reaction
doesn’t last long, at least not once he explains what he means. When they hear the rest of his sermon, Luke tells
us the crowd is filled with rage. They
get up, drive him out of town, and lead him to the top of the hill so that they
can hurl him off a cliff. [Not really
the response we preachers are looking for when we climb into the pulpit.]
What happened? What did he say that caused them to go from
doting admiration to murderous rage in the course of one little sermon?
The fact is, he could not have
started his sermon with a more beloved text than the one he read from Isaiah,
with its promises of how the world would finally be set right for those who had
been done wrong. We know from the
discoveries of the Dead Sea Scrolls that this passage was crucial to the
self-understanding of many Jews in Jesus’ time.
They saw this passage as directly applying to them, they were the poor, they
were the captive, they were the
oppressed. Their Roman occupiers had
certainly made this so.
This text was their text – their
text of promise, their text of comfort.
For them to hear it read in synagogue gave them the same kind of
reassurance we get when we hear Psalm 23, or John 3:16. God loves you, God will take care of
you. To such promises as these, Jesus
adds the electrifying word “Today. Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in
your hearing.”
But he doesn’t stop there. He goes on to tell a couple of stories. Stories from their own tradition, their own
Scriptures, stories they already knew.
The first is the story of Elijah in the time of famine. Jesus says, “The truth is, there were many
widows,… but Elijah was sent to none of them except a Gentile one. And there were many lepers in Israel during
the time of the prophet Elisha, but none of them was cleansed except a
Gentile.” In other words, right after
proclaiming that today is the day God’s promises are fulfilled, he tells them
these old stories about how God passes over his chosen people, to minister to
strangers. Stories of how God’s grace
moves outside appropriate boundaries. Stories
that challenge not only their understanding of who is in and who is out, but
that challenge their very understanding of God. And they get so mad, and so
offended, that they try to kill him.
Which may seem like a bit of an
overreaction to us. It’s hard for us to
feel the shock and offense of Jesus’ sermon, maybe because we consider
ourselves to be the Gentiles he came to save.
We believe that what he was saying to those stunned folks in the
synagogue is that his mission was to go beyond the Jews to save the Gentiles – us.
And that is certainly what happened.
His life and death and resurrection cracked open the system, made grace
available for all, not just the chosen.
The thing is, if we hear his
message as simply being an announcement that he was going to take God’s grace
beyond the synagogue to me and you, then we are just as myopic as the people in
his hometown, who thought they had some special claim on God’s promise. They believed they owned Jesus, and his
message. Don’t we believe the same
thing?
They thought he belonged to them –
he was raised there, they were his friends, his neighbors, his aunts and uncles
and cousins. They thought he belonged to
them. We think the same thing. He belongs to us so much we even named
ourselves after him. We come to church
and read his words and go out and try to live like he did. We tend to think
that somehow means we got it. We got him, we got his message, we understand
the truth about God and grace and what it means to follow. We are his people, he is our guy.
And like the listeners in the
synagogue that day, we forget. Forget
how terrifyingly free God really is.
Forget how radically inclusive the gospel of grace is. Forget how the moment any of us thinks we are
the in-group and others are out is the moment we have shut ourselves away from
where he goes – because he always goes to those outside the boundaries. We forget that grace is offensive because it
is unfair – it goes to people who didn’t do anything to deserve it. Our faithfulness does not get us grace,
because grace is not grace if it can be gotten by our doing. The moment we
think we’ve got it and that we deserve it, is the moment it moves right past
us. Grace always goes to those who do
not deserve it. This does not strike us
as fair. And it did not strike the
listeners in the synagogue as fair either, and they tried to kill him.
In a sermon preached 35 years ago
at the historic Riverside Church in New York City, biblical scholar James A.
Sanders said about this sermon of Jesus:
What Jesus was saying at
Think about it. What if the main point of being a part of
Christ and his church is not to make sure we get all the good stuff we think
faith promises – like peace, comfort, salvation, joy. What if the main point is to know and
proclaim that God is God. That God is
terrifyingly free. That God’s truth
subverts our understandings, and God’s grace crosses our boundaries. That the
only response to such broad grace and love is to dance with it, not to try to
claim it and contain it.
The people in the synagogue that
day couldn’t dance with it. They
couldn’t get excited over the announcement that God’s grace and love go to the
wrong people. The proclamation of such unlimited grace so scandalized them that
they couldn’t receive that proclamation, or that grace. The boy they called their own challenged what
they thought they knew about faith and God, and they tried to kill him for
it.
But Luke tells us that Jesus
passed through their midst and went on his way.
He doesn’t tell us how he slipped the crowd, just that he did, and then
he kept going. That is what happens when
we try to claim him and contain him – he will just keep going. He will move on, he will elude us. He is freer than we think – bigger than all
our understandings and assumptions of who he is and how he works, and the
moment we think we have got him, that he is ours, he is gone.
You know, we translate the last
verse of today’s text as Jesus “went on his way,” but the actual Greek word
Luke uses means Jesus “was going on his way.”
Meaning, an ongoing action – not done, but in progress, in motion. He was going on his way. And he still is. He is still going, still moving, still on his
way forward, past our boundaries, to the foreigner, the stranger, the enemy,
the other, the one we can’t agree with, the one we know is wrong, the one we
cannot love or trust. That’s where he is
going. The question is, can we
follow? Can we dance when his grace
shows up wherever it wills? Can we laugh
when his truth turns our own understandings on end? Can we have faith and be faithful when grace
means not reward for the deserving but radical inclusion of the undeserving?
One more thing. Luke uses the word that means “was going on
his way” many other times in his Gospel, and when he uses it, he always means
it in a bigger sense too[2]
– that Jesus was going on his way to Jerusalem, to his cross. In the end, his radical good news would get
him killed. If we follow on his way, it
will mean a death for us, too – death to our self-understanding as the right
people, the good people, the ones who have already got his grace; death to our
[smugness and] certainty of how he works; death to our idea that we can work
our faith to our advantage, to get the blessings we deserve. But if we follow, it doesn’t only mean our
death, it means our life, too – our resurrection as new people, people who know
and proclaim and live by one all-powerful liberating, terrifying truth: that
God is God.
The One who lived that truth best
of all is still going on his way. He’s
out ahead of us now, beckoning us to follow if we dare. He’s going to places that don’t seem
appropriate, to people who don’t seem deserving, with a message we can barely
wrap our minds around, let alone our lives.
That’s okay. We don’t have to
completely understand it. He’s not
asking you to completely understand his truth.
He’s just asking you to follow.
The question is: can you?
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