We avoid the truth to protect each other. What we’re actually protecting is dishonesty and the enemies of love.
Jesus defies our fear to share the truth
Epiphany 4C | Luke 4:21-30, 1 Corinthians 13:1-13
That’s quite a sermon Jesus preached, if all the people in the synagogue are looking to throw the preacher off a cliff. I mean…yeesh! Seriously!
And now I’m starting to wonder what it would take for that to happen here! Of course, we can content ourselves with the knowledge that we’d never do that, right? Right?
No, of course not. That’s not something we’d do. That’s…beneath us, right? No. We have less violent ways of demonstrating our disfavor, don’t we? But I digress.
It really is a struggle to understand why the people would go from amazement and joy to murderous rage in just a couple of verses. Especially when we look at what Jesus says…which is a bit confusing but also not that bad. On an insult scale of one to ten, this is, at most a four.
It’s probably a two or three that they invoke the southern honor code to trump up to a five or six maybe. Then again, if Jesus were black and this were the Jim Crow era, he probably would get lynched.
The point is that it is not so much that Jesus’s words are remarkable. It’s about what the hearers do with them. And this crowd takes them as justifying murder.
How to avoid the truth
I know we come to church hoping to hear about grace and love. And we don’t want to hear about attempted lynchings. But this gospel story is too important to ignore. Because it deals with our psychology and what we’re willing to justify.
We don’t have to stray far from the headlines to know this is a problem we face. Modern lynchings like that of Ahmaud Arbery are happening now because people of faith justify them.
So let’s look at this story to see how it works for them so that maybe we can learn something from it.
The Local Boy Makes Good Trope
So we return to the synagogue in Jesus’s hometown. He’s come home, having done some incredible healings elsewhere. And what we get in this very short narrative is the familiar genre of “local boy makes good, returns home a hero”.
- They obviously know about his exploits and want to celebrate them.
- They also marvel that this kid from a blue collar family has done all of this.
- Therefore skepticism and fear take charge.
There is an obvious tension, isn’t there? They want to support him, but they also want to classify him. Elevate him above them and reduce him to among them. This is a kind of hometown paradox thing we do. We want what’s best for someone…until they get it. Then we feel compelled to yank them down.
It is obvious that class and station have a role to play here. But it’s a supporting role. Jesus reveals the leading role in his statements.
What Jesus Says
Jesus makes a sequence of statements that are deeply revealing about the people’s desires.
He starts by saying that they are going to turn it around on him. That he’s the problem. So that’s how they’ll yank the local boy off the pedestal.
Then he says that they are going to ask him to repeat the miracles they’ve heard about. Out of fairness, right? It’s only fair that you do for us, what you did for them? How many tragic stories have we all heard of professional athletes blowing their fortunes because people who loved them asked for the world from them? Out of fairness, of course.
Right away we should notice something deeply disturbing about what Jesus is predicting of these people.
Jesus does wonders and miracles to reveal God. Not out of a sense of fairness. To ask Jesus to deliver the grace of God to them just because? Because he knows them or because they think they are deserving? Or because they think Jesus somehow owes them?!! These are the biggest of red flags.
Jesus is naming what he knows is coming. And it doesn’t look good.
The history lesson is how Jesus tells them no.
He names the greatest prophet Elijah, who didn’t heal every person and neither did his protege, Elisha. There is no promise of universal healing here. Nor is it something that is coming to you because you desire it or think God owes it to you. That’s not how this works. Then or now.
And in a way, this is a sensible response from Jesus. It is direct, reasonable, and quite generous. Jesus does not insult these people.
And yet, the people lose their minds. Because it isn’t how Jesus said it or even what he said that caused this. They find the very idea of “no” insulting. And they act up.
This is the dark side of family systems.
One of the most predictable traits in a family system is how it negatively reacts to the positive growth of one of its members. Because so often the rest of the family doesn’t want to be outgrown. It treats internal change as if it were an external threat.
So protectors in families will take up proverbial arms against a loved one to make them fit back into the family system the way it was before. Even when they know it’s broken!
The Disney movie Encanto handles this beautifully. If you haven’t seen it, you have to.
Not every family always hates all change. But all family systems employ this dynamic in some way. And these dynamics are at play in systems that relate like families. Such as churches and villages. Places with matriarchs and patriarchs who care for the family. Siblings who play roles in the family. And children who are to be raised up to learn the family’s values and history.
This is why they perceive Jesus as a threat.
There is no proof or rational argument. He didn’t say anything that caused them to respond this way.
He named their greed and selfishness. And they sought to silence him to keep the truth from being spoken.
And because we exist in family systems and know how these things work, we are often prone to treating this as a misunderstanding or a difference of opinion. Or worse, we defend a reactive posture by saying he shouldn’t have said that!
Think about it. We treat attempted murder as if it were the logical consequence of hearing the truth. Because we accept the lie that fearful reactivity is rational. Or this is all somehow equal or deserved.
One hundred and twenty-one years ago, when a white mob gathered with the intention of lynching George Ward in downtown Terre Haute in broad daylight, this is how they did it. And this is also how they succeeded and got away with it. Because we are so afraid of truth, we are still willing to look for reasons to justify lynchings! We’ll even bend over backward to call it self-defense!
Jesus told them the truth. And they told themselves a lie.
And yet we treat truth like a fart. Whoever smelt it dealt it. We have the least rational response possible to truth. Because we’re afraid of it. And therefore, we punish for it.
This is not love. Certainly not as Paul describes it.
“…patient…kind…not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.”
Paul is describing the character of love here. And what it is not.
“It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
We have gotten so jaded by logic and disappointment that we reject truth; accept resentment as if it were love; and confuse manipulation for honesty. We dress up hate and call it love.
That’s how we dress up murder and call it just.
This is also why I’m being honest with you.
When we’d rather be talking about grace or the lighter side of faith. Which is the same way we usually tackle the idea of love. We’d rather talk about what it is, and not so much what it is not.
And that is where fear takes hold in us and our family systems. In avoiding truth to preserve a delicate peace—at the expense of love. What love really is.
Patient, kind, generous, compassionate.
That’s the difference at the heart of love; which is at the heart of Jesus’ work; for God is love. God’s way is to not insist on their own way. To be generous. To see the greatness of God and not look for what we should get out of it. That isn’t love.
As a people learning to love, I don’t expect us to be perfect. Because that isn’t the goal. The goal is to be part of God’s reorienting of the world toward love. And this is one of the ways we allow fear to get in our way. We don’t intend to. And that’s important. But in learning what love is (and isn’t) we can change and remove our obstacles to love.
So we can truly enjoy the grace and love of God.