Challenged in Love

Today, both of our lectionary passages continue from where we ended last week.  However, this week, the passages enter into new territory.  Our First Corinthian passage turns from Paul talking about all of us being parts of Christ’s body to Paul’s famous Ode to Love.  And our Luke passage continues the story of Jesus’ inaugural speech delivered to his hometown synagogue.  You may recall the speech ended favorably last week with Jesus proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor, a year of Jubilee.  After our passage last week we are told, “…All spoke well of Jesus and were amazed at the gracious words that came from Jesus’ mouth.”  You can just feel the hometown pride swelling in the breasts of this crowd celebrating their local boy who has made it good in the big city.  But then, like a cold breeze in late January that sweeps the false-spring warm day away, the crowd suddenly turns, saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”  We knew this guy when he was a kid in our local streets and markets.  He was just a normal kid back then, so who is he to teach us now?  Jesus responds to the crowd’s question in surprising ways.  First Jesus repeats some often-used sayings, and then Jesus goes in a very different direction by citing Gods’ gifts of grace and love given to two very different non-Jewish people.  Why does Jesus suddenly talk about God’s love and miracles being given to strangers and foreigners?  Why isn’t Jesus talking about God loving the people right in front of him?

Let us join our hearts together in prayer.  “God of unending love, challenge us to be lovers of you, and lovers of one other.  And fill our faith with hope, and fill our hope with greatest of these, your love. Amen.”

Jesus responds to the crowd’s question about his humble beginnings with some perplexing responses.  First he anticipates the crowd by telling them what they are thinking, “Physician, heal yourself.” Then Jesus says a prophet is never accepted in the prophet’s hometown.  Let us look at the larger context to understand what Jesus is saying. 

The first response about Jesus healing himself is an echo of the temptation of the devil that started chapter four just twenty verses earlier.  The devil taunted Jesus, basically saying, “Come on, heal yourself, Jesus. Feed yourself when you are starving.  Give yourself earthy power.  Throw yourself from the pinnacle of the temple and save yourself.”  And some in the crowd doubtless began to realize Jesus was comparing them to the devil as they berated Jesus for not performing miracles like he had done in Capernaum. 

And then Jesus said, but regardless what I do, you will not accept me as a prophet because you knew me when I was a ragamuffin kid.  And you can’t let go of the childish image of me and think about me as a messenger of God’s love.  Well, by now, the crowd is starting to get a little hot under the collar. 

And then Jesus lowers the boom.  Jesus says there are lots of widows throughout Israel and here, just as there were in the time of Elijah.  But instead of blessing a widow here, God chose a widow at Zarephath [Zar-eh-fath] from Sidon, a town along the Mediterranean coast north of Israel that is home to the Philistines.  Philistines were mortal enemies of the Jews.  So Jesus cites a non-Jewish enemy widow as a recipient of God’s grace—not one of the local widows.  Jesus infers that Elijah was not accepted as a prophet in his own country—Elijah had to leave Israel to find this foreign widow to bless, because the Jews would not accept a hometown prophet.

And then, Jesus cites the story of Elisha and Naaman, a warrior from hated Syria.  Elisha was not accepted as a prophet by many of his people either.  Elisha ministered to an enemy, also.  Jesus just said, twice, to his hometown crowd, God looked elsewhere because you wouldn’t know a prophet if one stood before you.  And they became filled with rage. You upstart!  Who do you think you are?  And they drove Jesus out of town, and up a hill to throw Jesus to his death off the cliff.  These words in this phrase closely parallel the words used when the Devil tempted Jesus to throw himself off the temple pinnacle.  This crowd is now a mob with murder on their mind.  How dare Jesus say they would reject a prophet if he appeared in front of them.  Why, the nerve of that good-for-nothing son of Joseph.

So now, we begin to see the complex picture.  When Jesus gave his inaugural address to his hometown synagogue, it started out nice, but turned raucous when the crowd sensed Jesus was not giving them proper respect they deserved.  They were God’s chosen people, and how dare Jesus not respect them.  They had been prominent members of this synagogue for 30 years since before Jesus was born, and they were not going to have a newcomer whipper-snapper tell them anything about being God’s chosen people.  They were highly offended.  Doesn’t this upstart know who he is talking to?

Now, here I will stop a moment to place our other passage, the love passage from First Corinthians, into conversation with our story from Luke.  Thinking about Jesus’ speech to his hometown folks, do you think it was a loving speech according to our passage from First Corinthians?  Paul says our speech must be motivated by love.  Paul says that miracles and signs and wonders are worthless without love.  Love is not arrogant or boastful or rude.  It doesn’t insist on having its own way by being a bully.  Is this message to Jesus’ hometown crowd a loving message?  Maybe Jesus is saying that while the Gospel of God’s love is certainly given to comfort the afflicted of the world, the Gospel here has another very different task that is not so easy for us to hear.  The Gospel here is also expressed by Jesus as the year of Jubilee where all share God’s abundance.  This part of the Gospel message afflicts the comfortable because it demands we share.   Jesus ties his inaugural address to the crowd before him, with both Gospels, and the crowd becomes agitated and very uncomfortable.

Luke says the Jews in Jesus’ hometown crowd felt they knew all about God’s love and blessings.  We are God’s chosen, they said.  We are not really interested in sharing our privilege with foreign widows and enemies who are different than we are.  Don’t preach to us, Jesus, about God blessing the others or foreigners or enemies.  And they attacked Jesus, trying to kill him.

Do you think Jesus’ inaugural speech is loving?  Well, I think we can agree, it wasn’t all nice.  So, must we be nice to be loving?  I guess we would say in modern parlance that Jesus showed them tough love that day—not nice love, but tough love, Jubilee love, sharing love.  Jesus says, God loves the poor, the captives, the blind and the oppressed, and God’s Kingdom is come when we join the year of the Lord’s favor bringing mercy and justice and loving kindness to everyone.  Yes, the Gospel means God loves us unconditionally, but the Gospel also means we are challenged to share God’s abundant gifts with everyone.  Jubilee sharing is hard to hear.

It is possible to be loving and not nice, because that is what Jesus is doing here.  Jesus is not being a nice hometown Jewish boy.  He was expressing the Gospel by challenging the crowd to love of all of humanity.  To the oppressed, the Gospel is a comfort.  But to this crowd before Jesus, the Jubilee Gospel afflicts them as the comfortable and privileged.  This is the tough part of the Gospel that we don’t really want to hear and deal with.  This is the part of the Gospel that reminds us that we are all a part of the same body, and if one suffers, then all suffer.

The world now has the largest gap between the comfortable and the afflicted than ever before in modern history.  We have more money in our coin jars at home than most global families have in total.  We are comfortable beyond the wildest imaginations of most of the world.  If God is active in the world as depicted by this inaugural speech of Jesus, then God is active in the world’s poorest regions like sub-Saharan Africa, or in the slums of Latin America, or even the destitute homeless in downtown Connecticut cities.    Jesus warns these comfy faithful in his inaugural address that when we become self-satisfied and unthinking in our faith, whether in that synagogue then, or this church today, that we lose sight of the full complex meaning of the Gospel of God’s unconditional love.  The Gospel is about sharing God’s abundance and love with one another.  The Gospel isnot about being nice.

Our Christ preaches that God is most deeply present to the poorest widow and to our global enemy.  Our God often stands with those who are least like us.  And our challenge, just as it was to the privileged people who listened to Jesus in the synagogue that day, is to hear the part of the Gospel that is lovingly intended to afflict our comfortableness just as willingly as we always want to hear the part of the Gospel that comforts us when we are afflicted.  God consistently rejects the privileged comfort of the few.  God desires that all be comforted by sharing the Jubilee Gospel.

So, if anyone is afflicted, then we are called as Christ-followers to rise up and be the heart and hands of God to comfort that affliction.  When we ignore the afflicted of the world, we ignore the complete body of Christ at our peril.  If we forget this Jubilee-sharing part of the Gospel, then Jesus will just pass through us and ignore us, just as he escaped through the crowd when they tried to hurl him off the cliff.  That crowd was not following Jesus.  The Gospel of love in shared Jubilee deeply challenges us to be our brother’s and our sister’s loving keeper.  When we live the Gospel of sharing God’s Jubilee of love, our loving and sharing transform the world.  Amen.