Don't Throw Jesus Off a Cliff

 Luke 4: 21-30 January 30, 2022

 

Jesus preaching in his home congregation, part 2.

If you missed part one,

Jesus has been baptized, and the first thing

he does in his ministry is embark on a

preaching tour in his home county.

People love him. Then he goes to his home congregation.

He’s in front of his childhood friends, aunts, uncles,

cousins, mother, father, sisters, and brothers.

 

And Jesus read the scripture from Isaiah:

“God has anointed me to

bring good news to the poor.

release to the captives

recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to proclaim the Year of the Lord’s Favor.”

 

Then Jesus gives his very brief sermon:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

In other words, just because Jesus read it, and

people heard it come out of Jesus mouth,

it has basically happened.

Mic drop. Leave the stage. Pretty bold of him.

If he wasn’t the son of God, you might think

he was egotistical.

 

Still, at this point, everyone is pretty impressed

with the “gracious words” that have come out

of his mouth. (I think they mean he seems pretty confident

not considerate and thoughtful.)
They’re proud at this point.

They all say, “My, isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
In other words, we knew him when, he’s ours, he’s one of us.

 

Oh, if he had just stopped there.

If he had just let them ooh and ahh over him and buy him lunch,

he could have healed a couple of people.

Got a good, healthy sponsorship for his ministry,

done his laundry at his mother’s house and

then just moved on to Cana or wherever he was headed next.

But no.

 

But Jesus doesn’t want to leave it at that.

Like a lot of young people who come home for the first time

after being away, Jesus wants to start something.

He tells them “Prophets are not accepted in their home town.”

In other words, he tells them they will not be accepting him.

They will not be his followers, he knows this.

 

He tells them this because he knows that

they will expect him to just come and serve his own people.

He knows the people in his hometown will expect him

to help his own family and friends before he goes out

and helps other people. “Physician heal yourself.”

He says what they’re already thinking:

“Do for your family what you’ve done in Capernaum.”

 

Family relations were everything in Jesus time.

You owed everything to your family, immediate and extended:

gifts, favors, special attention.

You stayed with them, you didn’t leave for the most part.

Family was first and second and last

and not always in a good way.

People were restrained by their family obligations

as much as they were protected by them.

People were obligated to serve their  own

and build up walls for other people.

There was a lot of talk of “us” and “them.”

 

I’m sure Jesus coming home to preach

was a sign to his people that he was finally

coming home to share the gifts he had with them:

The prestige, the healing, the favor, the salvation,

with his own people. If not exclusively, at least first.

Right? we need to serve our own first.

We’ve heard this over and over again in our politics and other places.

 

But Jesus comes to the next part of the sermon

which is what makes his friends and family loose their minds:

He says, “There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah,

when there was a severe famine yet Elijah, the prophet

was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.

And there were also many lepers in Israel in the time Elisha,

and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

Oh, they knew what that meant.

 

Elijah and Elisha were of course well known prophets.

But the widow at Zarephath in Sidon was a gentile.

And Naaman the Syrian was a gentile.

They were not family at all.

Neither of them were Jewish.

Neither one of them even believed in Yahweh.

 

What Jesus was saying was that

Elijah and Elisha could have gone out and helped

their own people first, they could have helped only

friends and relatives or at least only their own people.

But God sent them outside. To strangers

The God of Israel was working with and through

people of other faiths and no faith at all.

 

Elijah and Elisha were not sent first to the people inside

they reached the people inside through the people outside.

  

This is what got Jesus chased

out of the synagogue and almost thrown off a cliff.

And it could be argued,

this is what eventually got Jesus hung on a cross too.

 

I like to think that this kind of talk wouldn’t elicit that response

today, but this still runs contrary to main stream Christianity today.

In our consumer-based society, we fall into the trap

of thinking about our religion in the same way.

“What’s in it for me?” We want to feel comfortable,

We don’t want our Jesus to challenge us or tell us we’re wrong

or we’re not first or best.

We want Jesus to affirm everything

we’re about and everything we feel.

We want cuddly, good-pal Jesus.

Not the Jesus who we want to run off a cliff

at the end of a sermon Jesus.

 

We want a God that doesn’t challenge any of our beliefs at all.

We want that God wants us to stay just the way we are.

 

There’s a lively group of  ELCA pastors on Facebook.

We don’t always see eye to eye or get along.

But there’s usually a good discussion and we can bounce

things off one another and get good resources from one another.

We’re all usually preaching on the same things too.

This week a male preacher got a letter after preaching a sermon

about last week that had some content

about sexism and patriarchy in our churches

(seems like a topic a lot of us are talking about)

and a visitor to the church wrote a letter to the pastor

complaining about the political content of the sermon and said:

“have you thought that maybe the well-dressed, capitalist,

white, male, might feel uncomfortable coming into church hearing

a sermon like the one you preached this Sunday?”

 
The pastor was just kind of asking us how to respond to this.

He was flummoxed and had no idea what to say.

He said he was just trying to be true to last week’s Gospel reading.

People rightfully pointed out that he was being

ushered to the end of the cliff kind of like Jesus was.

 
You think Christians today would all see the irony in that.

But I guess not.

 

The people in Nazareth, Jesus home town

and many Christians today, I guess

had one main misunderstanding,

 they identified Jesus as Joseph’s son.

They identified Jesus as theirs.

 

But Jesus knew, and we know that Jesus

is the son of the living God,

the God of all, not just some.

 

Christ is the bridge between people all people.

 

Jesus is making this dramatic point in this story

and Luke includes it in there to make

a dramatic point to the people then

and to us today about Jesus life and ministry.

God will reach you and me and all of us.

That is a promise.

But if we are to trust Jesus’ gospel,

God isn’t just going to do it directly.

You, go to heaven.

That would be boring.

  

You will be saved, through the poor, through the prisoner,

through the blind, and the oppressed.

Through the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on,

through the meth addicts, and the career prisoners,

and the prostitutes, and the petty thieves,

the angry protesters that get a little out of hand,

and the tattooed, and the transgendered,

and the welfare queens,

and the unemployed Dollar Store Cashiers . . .

whoever the lost souls are of our generation.

 

This whole project of our salvation

is not going to happen independent of “them”.

So whoever you’ve been referring to

as “them” in that derogatory tone,

that’s who God is going to start with,

so we might as well start looking there

for our salvation.

 

Maybe not every person you’ve wanted

to hurl off a cliff is Jesus.

But some of them might be.