From the Sunday Note, with additional thoughts…
He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. (Isaiah 61:1-2, with 58:6)
Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They also asked, “Isn’t this the son of Joseph?”
He said to them, “Surely you will quote me this proverb, ‘Physician, cure yourself,’ and say,
‘Do here in your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.’”
And he said, “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land. It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet;
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away.
This Sunday’s Gospel in full, introduced by a few lines from last Sunday’s Gospel.
Sometime earlier, when Jesus walked from Nazareth to Capernaum to join his friends on their way to be baptized in the Jordan by John, he was to all appearances just an ordinary man from a town with a population archeologists now estimate at 1000 people. He had a few other relatives nearby, including his now-widowed mother. He was a “tekton” (carpenter/craftsman in Greek) as his father had been. By the time he returned from his baptism, amazing stories were rife: healings and exorcisms, prophetic words and actions in Capernaum and other towns in the area. Could one believe all these things of him? Expectations were high. It is not much of a reach for us to realize the synagogue would be packed, nor a surprise that he was chosen to do the reading of a selection from the Prophets that usually followed the reading of the Torah.
They did not get what they expected. He read a selection from Isaiah—but not one that was part of the regular cycle of readings from the Prophets. And then to say that Isaiah’s words were fulfilled “in your hearing” indicated that some ultimate Jubilee Year had arrived when all debts are remitted, all slaves set free, all people welcome to return to their ancestral land holdings—all because of the presence and words of Jesus, their long-time, hometown boy. Surely this is too much!
Jesus reads the incredulity in their faces. They want miracles and prodigies that will prove he is this fulfillment. Instead of being attracted and stepping toward him in faith, they want a spectacle—NOW! Just as had happened with a certain Tempter in the desert. The Tempter wanted Jesus to throw himself from the pinnacle of the Temple and let people see him being caught by angels—the kind of stunt Jesus always rejects. He will go on to perform many miracles for people in real need, but resolutely scorns invitations to do a miracle so that “then we will believe.” Jesus points out this hardness of heart that runs like a thread through all the previous history of God’s Chosen People, reminding his neighbors how both Elijah and Elisha, the wonder-working prophets, had instead responded with miracles for a woman and a man who struggled to have faith but were open to God. Gentiles in both cases!
That was not what they wanted to hear. At that, the hottest of the town hotheads (with everyone else following, of course) drag him up the brow of the hill the town is built on, ready to toss him over and be done with him forever. Luke carefully words all this to foreshadow a later time when Jesus is taken to die on a hill just outside Jerusalem yet will eventually “pass through the midst of them” and go on his way to glory. A time when needful Gentiles, open to faith, will begin receiving life from him, side-by-side with his many Jewish followers.
For further reflection:
We all like to think we are open to new ideas–yet we tend to be skeptical when we hear one. We all remember how naive we were as children, how much we did not understand, how much we still had to learn. But now that we are adults, and have learned a lot, does that really mean we have nothing else to learn? Do we realize we may have learned only part of the more complete truth a fully finished human being would understand? This is the kind of resistance Jesus runs into in Nazareth. The saints tell us in their writings that we all have many, many things yet to learn as we go about living as Christians. Hard, hard lessons that take time to sink in. The transformation God is calling each of us to is so deep, so complete, it will take our entire lives to accomplish. Christ never runs out of surprises for us as we walk with him.