Luke 4:22-30

Rejection at Nazareth

                Fred Craddock, former preaching professor at Candler School of Theology has said that two kinds of sermons are painful to listen to.  One is a bad sermon, the type which reminds you of God only because while you are listening to it, you wonder if it will ever end and whether it really did have a beginning to it.

Craddock says the other type of sermon painful to hear is a good sermon, one given at a particular time and to a particular audience and which makes its point.  A good sermon can work a bit like a good scalpel.  It might cut through some diseased tissue and bring about healing. No one likes to think about being cut on, but we all like the idea of being healed.

            We can assume, I think, that the type sermon Jesus preached in his home town synagogue was a good one – painful for people to hear, but with the intention to bring about the healing that comes from a more accurate belief in God   -- assuming the listeners can accept the surgery of the message. 

            But the people of Nazareth listening to this particular message on this particular occasion couldn’t accept the message.  It was too painful for them, in fact so painful that when Jesus finished speaking, the congregation tried to kill him.

            Now, what in the world was it about this particular sermon that made these people so angry? I looked around today while I was reading what he said to them, the very same words, and I didn’t see any of you getting red in the face.  I doubt that your blood pressure was elevated from reading Luke 4.   But it sure got the goat of many a person that day in Nazareth.  

            Why? Especially after the sermon started out so well? The scripture he’d read was that wonderful and comforting text from Isaiah 61.  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because He hath anointed me to preach the Gospel to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are downtrodden, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

            Now that passage has Messianic implications, and these people would know that.  And Jesus says the scripture has been fulfilled. Many of us have seen that movie produced by Franco Zifferelli, Jesus of Nazareth, and it is a phenomenal movie, and you see this scene where Jesus reads Isaiah 61 and tells these people, “Today in your hearing the scriptures are fulfilled.”  That’s when Zifferelli has the hometown people getting mad at him because his words implied that he was the Messiah.

            But that’s Hollywood and movies and you’ve got to cut to the quick and not be too complex in such an ambitious epic as that.  But in the original script, that is Luke’s Gospel, when Jesus says, “the scripture is fulfilled,” Luke says “everybody was speaking well of him.”

            So far everything is good.  If Jesus had only quit while he was ahead, everyone could have gone home to the roast lamb and said things like, “Don’t you think Jesus presents his message very well – pass the gravy, please.”

            “I never heard anyone quite put it that way before – have some lentils.”

            “His sermon was good --  say this lamb chop is delicious. That Jesus has turned in to being a good speaker, hasn’t he?”

            Yeah, if Jesus had just quit on the high note, everyone could have gone home happy.  (If Jesus had always quit on the high note, he might have lived to a ripe old age.)  But Jesus went further. And what he said stirred up these people like a smoke bomb will stir up a hornet’s nest. They took offense at him, they became furious with him.  They rejected him -- after speaking so highly of him just minutes earlier.

            Here’s the turning point. It comes when Jesus quotes what appears to be a popular proverb of his day.  It isn’t a proverb that you find anywhere else in the Bible.  But Jesus knew the proverb and knew that the people knew the proverb:  “Physician, heal thyself.”

            No doubt you will say to me, Jesus says, “Physician, heal thyself.”  What does he mean by that? He goes on to explain: “No doubt, you will say to me, ‘what we have heard was done in Capernaum, do here in your home town as well.”

            Now, sometimes right about now, we pull in the Gospel of Mark where the account of Jesus’ first visit to Capernaum is summarized with this sentence: “He could do no mighty miracles there because of their unbelief.” 

Their unbelief of what? You’ll sometimes hear preachers say, that He did no miracles because they didn’t believe for their miracles, and that if we believe He’ll do miracles then He’ll do them for us.

            But in Luke’s Gospel the people seem to believe in His ability to do the miraculous. In Luke’s Gospel, they seem to be waiting for him to turn it loose.  “What you did in Capernaum, do here.”

            “Now, Jesus we’ve heard about some of these things that you have done down the road, and we just want you to do the same things for us here.  You should know the pains and illnesses of Nazareth better than anyone, so do what you will for us.  Heal thyself.  Heal thy own people.  Heal the ones you should love best of all.”

            And we can understand how they might feel.  I mean if the gardens are drying up and here comes a cloud, a little shower of blessing which waters my neighbor’s garden and yet stops at the border of my yard, I might get a little perturbed.  God, why can’t you get the rain to come down another fifty feet and water my garden?

            If my neighbor’s child has the measles and so does my own child, if the neighbor comes running over to my house to tell me that her child has been healed, that her prayers have been answered, I don’t know if I’m going to be all that happy about her own child being healed if my own child still has the measles. God, why didn’t you do this for me?

            Jesus seems to know what they want.  “No doubt you will say to me,” he says. ‘Physician, heal thyself.  What we heard that you have done in Capernaum, do here as well.’”

            Jesus reminds them of two stories.  I say reminds them, because they already knew these stories.  Both are stories from the Old Testament.  More than likely the place that Jesus heard these stories was in that very synagogue while he was growing up.

            The first story is about the prophet Elijah who had been living out by a little creek because God had sent him there to survive a severe famine. And then the creek dried up.  Elijah hung around for a while because after all he was at that creek because God had told him to go there.  Until God finally said, “Arise and leave the land of Israel and go to Zarephath in the land of the Canaanites.  Behold, I have commanded a widow to provide for you there.”

            The people in the synagogue knew the story of how the widow gave her last supply of oil and meal to bake a cake of bread for Elijah, and when she gave up her oil and meal, the bowl and the jar never became empty, and she survived the famine, the recipient of a miracle from God.”

            And Jesus finished his story, saying, “there were many widows in Israel during that famine, and God didn’t send Elijah to any of them.”  What is implied there is the idea that God let those widows starve while he helped a woman in a foreign land.

Then Jesus reminds them of another story – of the time when another prophet, Elisha, heals a man named Naaman, the captain of the Syrian army.  God heals a Syria? A foreigner? Do you know how many lepers there were in Israel at the time?  And yet none of them was healed --just the man from the foreign land.

And the people in the home town synagogue got angry.  What is the use of having a Messiah who only does things over there and past tense? What’s the use of believing in Jesus if He isn’t going to do anything for us?  They got angry.  “Is this man saying that God denies His love to us while giving it to someone else?  Is Jesus turning His back on us, the very people who have nurtured Him and been his friend?  We may not have always understood Joseph’s boy, but we were there for him when his daddy died?”

If you happen to be among those in need of healing, what Jesus doesn’t do can really make you feel disturbed.  God, I believe You can do this.  Jesus, I believe you can do this.  Then, do it.  “What we heard of you doing in Capernaum do so now for us.” 

But it’s one thing to believe that in some way, the power of God has been present in Capernaum. It’s another thing to believe that if that same power doesn’t show itself here, that God is no less present, and that His love is no less real than in the distant places or across the highway.   

            Plenty of people want to be beneficiaries of a miracle.  Turn on the television and you’ll see people lined up for all manner of promises of healing, but it seems obvious that Jesus wants to do something more with us than to heal us. His priority is to do something that goes beyond healing.  Because a person can be healed and then just get sick again.  A person can be healed and it doesn’t mean that she’s going to even remember the name of the doctor two months from now.  Sometimes a person can be healed and they don’t really care if it’s Doctor Jesus or Doctor Jekyll who heals them.  Their inner soul, their inner spirit can remain unchanged. I think safe to say that what Jesus wanted to have happen when he did heal someone is for that healing to point them to a life of following Him because they knew who he was and is -- the Messiah, the Christ of God. 

            And I think it’s worth remembering that perhaps the most important results, at least in terms of being measurable long term results, were that out of Capernaum came Andrew and Simon Peter, and that out of Capernaum came James and John all of who followed Jesus. Even so, if you consider those four men to be walking miracles, it’s easier to believe that the most fruitful followers of Jesus Christ live somewhere else – at least as far away as Capernaum.

            Not in Nazareth.  Not here.

But why not here?

Why not here?

That’s the unbelief that Jesus wrestles with.  He knows that sometimes some of us are so busy looking for the next story of someone’s healing in Missouri or someone’s miracle in Harlem or someone’s church quadrupling in size to recognize what is most important.

I saw it happen to a pastor from the Midwest early in my ministry. It was back in the late eighties.  A group of twelve pastors from across the country met for four separate weeks out in Texas where we busied ourselves studying the nature and the purpose of the church, the dynamics of our congregations and our own spiritual formation of who we were as pastors. 

Most of us were quite ordinary people.  But this one pastor from the Midwest was a young man who was called the Boy Wonder of his denomination’s conference.  He had taken a church in a non-growing area inside the perimeter of a major city and in two years doubled the size of that congregation.  Bob was called upon, even as a young man, to speak to the pastors of struggling churches so that they, too, could double the sizes of their congregations.  Yes, every church by nature should grow, but Bob’s congregation was growing , admittedly by Bob, in large part because he was beating the bushes to prove to the bishop and the district superintendent that he deserved to be in the plush appointments of their conference.

None of us other eleven pastors had seen such drastic results and we all marveled at Bob and wanted to see how we could model what he was doing so we too could prove to our bishops and district superintendents that we belonged in the plush appointments of our conferences.

Bob, in those first few weeks of our time together, admitted that he had little patience for other pastors in areas who weren’t growing their churches and who had to talk about what God was doing in their churches as, “Well, God answered some prayers in the life of that man,” or “God healed their marriage,” or “we’ve got a small group of women who are hungry to know God.”

Bob had little patience for that sort of thing.  I think it was the final week we were together, after we’d developed some trust among ourselves, that something about Bob had changed.  Something had happened in his church, and it had happened to him, and in his telling the story he showed some feelings we’d not seen in him before.  He told us about the teen aged boy who was in a terrible accident and brought in to the hospital.  Doctors said they had done all they could, there was no hope, call in your family, this young person was going to die, and they called for Pastor Bob.  He arrived at the hospital, found the room, boy barely breathing.  They all circled the bed and joined hands and prayed.

And a miracle happened.  Oh, it was nothing that anyone outside the circle would have called a miracle. The boy died.  Shortly after they had prayed, the boy died.

Here’s what I vividly remember about his story.  Bob said as all the family members had joined hands in that intensive care unit, they -- all of them, all of them to a person -- felt it.  They all felt the overwhelming presence of God, Bob said like he’d never felt before.  To a person, they all said they felt the presence of comfort, and knew they could bear the terrible moment.   The tears were welling in Bob’s eyes when he told it – and, I don’t know, maybe I was a little uncomfortable seeing Bob like that, and uncomfortable with the silence that followed the story.  And I said, “You must have felt grateful to feel God so close.”

And he looked up at me rather sharply and said, “No, no.  I got angry.”

“Why?

“I got to thinking, where has He been all along?”
            I didn’t say this, but I thought it.  I thought it, then, and I think it now:  Do you mean to tell me that God wasn’t out there with you growing that congregation? Are you telling me that you were growing that congregation on your own?”

I can’t help it.  It’s what I thought.

Maybe we’re so busy out there doing “God’s work,” that we forget that His real work is to make His Presence known among His people.  Sure, when that presence is made known it’s to spread to other people.  But the first thing is to know the presence. And to have that presence soften your heart to realize that here is the beginning place.  In here.  Not out there someplace, but in here in my heart. There’s nothing much really worth spreading to other people except what has already been made manifest in my heart.

Jesus the Messiah, the Son of God, was standing face to face with the home town people of Nazareth.  And He knew what they expected.  “Do for us what you did for those people down at Capernaum.”

            When maybe what He was expecting was to look out and see someone ready to follow Him as did John from Capernaum.  As did James from Capernaum. As did Andrew from Capernaum.  As did Simon Peter from Capernaum.

Maybe that was part of the reason nothing much happened there in Nazareth.  They were looking for the miracles he was performing in Capernaum.  He was looking for the sort of disciples he had found there.         

            I know the other proverb.  A prophet is not welcome in his home town.  But he could be.  It could have been some of the people in Nazareth who followed him. It could have been.

You can find them anywhere.   You don’t have to look far. Why do you think you’d have to look far?