we keep trying to throw Jesus off a cliff – and he just walks away
Epiphany 4C | Luke 4:21-30
I think every person in that synagogue would take Paul’s message this morning over Jesus’s. Pretty obvious, as they just tried to kill him.
Then again, I think there are many Christians who prefer Paul to Jesus in general. Especially this Paul. The Paul who has said to the people that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, man or woman, as we are all part of God’s dream.
The same Paul who spoke of all of us as members of the body of Christ — that we’re all necessary and different. We all bring something new and beautiful and unique to the life of Christ.
This Paul. The one who caps off this whole idea of radical inclusion by saying that it’s all about three things: faith, hope, and love. And love is the greatest part.
That preaches. It can preach for a lifetime.
But people don’t only prefer this Paul to Jesus, but also the other Paul. The judgmental Paul and the writings attributed to Paul years after he was killed. They love the order and the structure and the patriarchy. They love slaves remaining slaves and women remaining under the power of men. And of course, those Greeks who stopped getting along with Jews.
A lot of people love that Paul way more than Jesus.
Of course it’s easy for us to dismiss that Paul for Jesus. Never mind the fair-weather attitude. Or the strangeness of ignoring Jesus in the first place.
With their own ears
Last week, we read the first half of this story. Jesus hasn’t called any disciples yet: that’s coming soon. He’s just been tempted in the desert, comes back to his hometown as a grown man full of life’s experience.
In that culture, rabbis have all the Hebrew Scriptures memorized before 18, by then apprenticed, and starting their ministry. People usually died around 40. So a 30 year-old Jesus arriving on the scene isn’t a young man, he’s middle-aged, long over hill, and an experienced teacher.
Jesus comes in and teaches them about God through Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
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 the people are amazed. He’s so wise!
Of course they see him as a child, as a member of a poor family, perhaps even notorious given the infamously unconventional pregnancy. He’s so far from what they expected.
Never mind what Mary told them. Never mind what Zachariah preached or what the word coming to them 30 years ago said. All that word was junk to their ears.
Until they heard about the healings. And they saw him with their own eyes. Heard the preaching with their own ears.
This is Joseph’s son?
This is when the passage gets sketchy for the hearer because Jesus starts to sound unhinged and less than gracious. He just had the people eating out of his hand, with perhaps only slight skepticism.
Jesus pushes them. He tells them what he thinks they’re thinking. I’m probably not the only one who gets mad when somebody does that to me.
He says prophets aren’t welcome in their home towns, then goes about ensuring he’ll be unwelcome. Jesus describes times in which prophets called on God to deprive the people of grace.
Why is he ensuring he’ll be unwelcome? Is this about providence or punishment?
Of course these examples of Elijah and Elisha are less reflective of those prophets’ worthiness: they were already rejected. Nor are they images raised to describe a capricious character of God, as the people had long been violating God’s commandments.
Jesus uses examples of prophets already rejected because the people had already rejected God’s dream.
Jesus is sharing a hard word with the congregation. God has a dream for them and for this world. A dream that ensures people are fed and slaves are freed. A dream Jesus can’t see alive there when he shows up in Nazareth. This dream is so alien to his former neighbors that they’re willing to kill him because he dared say something about it.
Do we welcome this dream?
Dr. David Davis writes about this passage:
When your encounter with the Gospel causes knots to form in your stomach, when you realize again that how you broker your time, and the decisions you make with your kids, and how you to do your money, and the plans you put in place at work, and the absolute oppression you endure to a schedule, or when you struggle again with how it all reflects upon and relates to the life of faith…
when your view of the world and your politics and your opinions are being poked not by your disagreement with a preacher, or your frustrations with the rhetoric of the public square, or your inability to safely and naively compartmentalize your life because after all religion and politics don’t mix, when your life out there is being prodded by your very understanding of God and the magnitude of the Gospel, when your experience of life and of death is so ripe, when your awareness of suffering and the burden you bear in caring for another weighs so heavily, when your angst about the world or your children’s future, when it all drives you to point a finger at the Almighty and have it out for a change, when you just want to put in a word for the hometown crowd….
I have to ask what do you think you’re doing?
We’re constantly trying to drag Jesus to the cliff, to throw him off. We don’t like his politics or what he says about wealth or because he spends 2/3 of his time talking about money and power and none of it on sex. We want to pitch the Jesus we find in our scripture, in our churches, and in our lives over a cliff because it doesn’t make us comfortable.
He makes us feel guilty.
We have him in our grip, trying to lift him up…
“But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.”
Jesus always just walks away.
We try to make Jesus our scapegoat.
The thing about scapegoats is that they were a systemic release valve. Their place in society was intentional.
The vengeful energy would build up to such a great degree that the people would explode and kill each other. So for years and years, the people would select a goat and force it to carry the sins of the people’s transgressions. They’d send this poor goat out into the desert to die, removing the divisive elements from the city and releasing the tension out there, to spare it from being here.
In other words, they could stop blaming each other and blame this innocent animal instead. It was kind of a cruel means of creating peace… for a season. Until they’d need another goat.
And when Jesus names the cruelty in our communities, the injustice in our governments, and the lack of faith in our churches, he won’t let us get him. So we start looking for some other place to put the blame. Teachers, the poor, newcomers, priests, organists, vestry, public officials, whoever seems to have some sway.
But the point isn’t that we can no more throw Jesus off a cliff than his neighbors could 2000 years ago. It’s that when we try, he just walks away.
Jesus isn’t with us.
He isn’t with our scapegoating of immigrants or
God told us to beat our swords into
We put depleted uranium on our missiles to blow through thicker walls and poison the survivors.
We tear up our nuclear treaties, fly drones across international borders, and develop ingenious ways to destroy lives.
Jesus is a million miles away from that.
He’s got someplace else to be. Jesus is busy on the other side of the fence and with the people ravaged by war. He’s in the hospitals and irradiated bomb sites. There are millions of streets and soup kitchens and homeless shelters and prisons all over this planet where Jesus is needed. Where words of faith and hope and love are needed.
That’s why Jesus turns the mirror on us and challenges us.
Because God’s dream needs us to stop killing the messenger and scapegoating the innocent. Because we aren’t only the problem. We’re also the solution.
If we just embrace what God has called us to do, who the Spirit draws us to follow.
As followers of Jesus, we don’t walk into our world with weapons of war and enough supplies to survive an apocalypse. We aren’t called to blame a goat (or an immigrant) for our problems or for our distance from God’s dream.
Instead we walk empty-handed, together with those multitudes of gifts, our spirit of generosity, and those three abiding gifts the Spirit gives freely: faith, hope, and love.
With Christ, this is all we need to make a dream come true.