Confronting
(based on Luke 4:22-30)
One Sabbath day Jesus returned to his home town of Nazareth and preached
in their synagogue. Who were the people
sitting in the pews that morning when Jesus preached? First, it’s important to note that they were
all men. Women weren’t allowed to sit in
the sanctuary proper, at that time. They
and the children were relegated to sit or stand behind a banister or partition,
off to the side or in the back of the sanctuary. And for the past 100 years, the Jews were
obligated to pay taxes to Caesar, the Roman ruler who instructed their daily
living. Up till now, Rome had allowed
them to continue to worship and pray in their synagogues as they wished. But, one never knew if this would
continue. Nazareth, itself, was a small
town with all the prejudices of a tight inward-looking community. Life would
have revolved around the well, the elders sitting at the town’s gates, the
annual cycle of sowing seed, working the land, the yearly harvest and the
weekly Sabbath.
This audience thought they knew everything there was to know about
Jesus. They knew Mary’s family and
Joseph’s family, and the self-appointed historians in their midst could trace
the ancestries and relationships of their family trees back for many
generations. In this gathering of people,
many were related to one another, first, second and even third cousins.
When Jesus stood up to read from the scriptures and preach to the
people, we are told that they were initially impressed with the graciousness of
Jesus as he spoke to them. When he
finished, they turned to one another and talked about the message that he gave.
There was, at first, a voice of great approval
in the synagogue. Then the initial
appreciation was quickly followed by questions to one another. “This is the
carpenter’s son isn’t it, Joseph’s boy Jesus? Mary’s oldest boy, with those brothers and
sisters of his.”
Word had spread that Jesus had gotten baptized by his crazy cousin John down
in the Jordan and had started going around to the other villages preaching,
healing, and getting a name for himself.
“But to us,” they said, “he’ll always be our own Jesus, Joseph the
carpenter’s son.” And yet, there was a
side of them that wanted Jesus to do all those same things he did in the other
villages. They wanted Jesus to perform
for them, too. They liked the thought of
having their own Houdini-type magician in their midst. So here were a people chafing at being part of
the Gentile Roman empire, gripped by a small-town mentality, reluctant to be
over-enthusiastic about a local boy’s preaching and yet wanting him perform
some miracles for them in the synagogue of Nazareth. That’s the situation in
which Jesus preaches to them.
In the second part of his sermon, Jesus talks about Elijah, the greatest
prophet of Israel. They all knew of the
mighty events in his life, of his courage in resisting the prophets of Baal and
King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. The whole
nation had turned to worshiping Baal and there were many widows in the land,
hungry, struggling to survive in days of a famine that had lasted three and a
half years. There are all kinds of instructions in the Old Testament to take
care of widows. God has a special heart for widows. Even in the New Testament Christians are required
to take care of widows because they have a special place in the heart of God.
And Jesus continues in his sermon, “Yet Elijah was not sent to any of
them”. Immediately his audience’s
hackles began to rise. They didn’t like
this story, it was as if Jesus was trying to tell them something. Perhaps he was saying that they were like the
people of Elijah’s day. “Could that be
it?” they wondered. And as Jesus started
to tell it, they got angrier. Elijah was
sent to none of the Jewish widows. Elijah
was sent instead to Zarephath in the land of Sidon to a woman who was a widow
there.
How could God ignore the Jews of Israel? They were starving. How could he possibly have sent his prophet
to minister to a widow in Sidon? Sidon was Gentile territory on the north coast
of Israel, Tyre and Sidon, Phoenician cities with Zarephath in between them. Jesus reminded them that God sent his greatest
prophet to one of them!
Even though the Jews were God’s chosen people, it doesn’t necessarily
translate that the Jews during this time period had chosen God. Instead, Elijah came to a gentile widow. He tells her that her “jar of flour will not
be used up and the jug of oil will not run dry” (I Kings 17:14) no matter how
often she emptied them. She believed him
and the God that he believed in. She
didn’t ask, “How do I know that I can trust you?” She did not ask for a sign to be done before
she believed. She thought, “All I’ve got
is one meal left. I’m destitute. I’m desperate and I don’t know where to turn. If I don’t trust the God of Israel, if I don’t
trust this man sent by of God, I’m dead anyway, but if he is the man of God,
and if God did send him, then I live.” She
believed Elijah’s word to her from God and the flour did not give out nor did
the oil. Every day, more was there to
make another cake. But, on top of her
desperation and sorrow of poverty, her son got sick and died. God was not done showing her what faith in
Him could do however, and Elijah raised her son from the dead.
So, Jesus is seemingly making the statement to his audience that the God
who sent Elijah to her has sent him to them.
Will they accept him or not?
Because if they won’t accept him, Jesus knows some people who will.
If that story wasn’t harsh enough, Jesus is not finished.
He continues to tell about people dying of leprosy in the days of Elisha
and only one of them was cleansed of it – and it wasn’t any of his chosen
people. It was Naaman, the Aramean. Gasp!
Now Jesus is really pressing the matter.
Those at the synagogue had gone there that day thinking they might hear
Jesus and pass some judgment on him, patting him on the back for giving them a
great sermon. They were hoping that they
might see a miracle. Jesus turned the
tables on them. Instead, they found
themselves being judged by Jesus through his storytelling. And they didn’t like it and got angrier.
Christ pressed home his words. God
tells his servant Elisha to heal the leper Naaman. Naaman the commander-in-chief of the army, a
full-time famous and victorious military man. In fact, he was the one ultimately in charge
of those Syrian raiding parties who came across Israel’s border, terrorizing
Israel’s farms, taking teenage girls prisoners, hauling them back to Syria and
selling them. To the Jews, Naaman was
scum of the earth. The ultimate enemy.
Naaman was the man the Jews loved to hate, the one who made their lives
so miserable. Worse than that, he was a
leper; he was unclean, and he was also an idolater who went to the pagan temple
with his master the king to worship, to ask for success in their battles. A Jewish girl, one who had been abducted,
became a servant in his house to help his wife. She had an extraordinary
gracious attitude. She knew about
Naaman’s leprosy and she said to her mistress, “Your husband needs to go to the
man of God, Elisha, because God can heal him through his prophet.” The words of
this little Jewish girl stuck in Naaman’s mind and he began to believe in the
power of the God of Israel. He eventually wound up meeting Elisha. Here is an
enemy, a Gentile, somebody who has sacked and pillaged their homes and taken
captive their friends and family members, and now he’s a leper. “Serves him
right!” all Israel says. Yet . . . this is the man Elisha is authorized by God
to heal.
Naaman realizes his desperation and there’s no other relief and asks
himself a series of questions. Is
Jehovah really and truly God? Is Elisha
really his prophet? How am I going to
know that that’s true unless I do what Elisha requests of me? So Naaman got down from his horse, and went down
into the Jordan river seven times and when he emerged the seventh time this pagan,
unbelieving general, who did what the man of God said, was clean.
By now, Jesus’ audience is really angry.
This service has not gone the way they expected it to go, AT ALL! Instead of a nice sermon, they got “preached
to” and worse, they were admonished for their sins and unbelief by none other
than Jesus, who is just the carpenter’s son.
What a difference from the beginning of the service. In verse twenty-two they were all speaking
well of Jesus, and then as he really lay the word of God on them in their pride
and refusal to listen to him, we are told in verse twenty-eight and twenty-nine,
“All the people in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and
led him to the brow of the hill, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”
After all, who does he think he is?
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