Lectionary blog for Jan. 31, 2016
Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Text: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71;
1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30
I grew up on a farm in Surry County, N.C. Our farm is only seven or eight miles from the town of Mount Airy where the actor Andy Griffith grew up. He was the star of “The Andy Griffith Show,” a “sit com” about a small town in North Carolina called Mayberry. If you go to Mount Airy now, you might drive in on the Andy Griffith Parkway. If you turn on to Rockford Street, as you go up the hill past the hospital and across the street from the water tower, you’ll find Andy’s childhood home. It’s now a bed and breakfast, and you can spend the night there if you care to. A little bit farther down Rockford Street you’ll find the Andy Griffith Theater, in front of which is a statue of Mayberry Sherriff Andy Taylor, heading off to the old fishing hole with his son, Opie. Now that’s how you treat a hometown boy who has become famous.
In our Gospel lesson, it looks as if the good people of Nazareth are inclined to treat Jesus in a similar manner. Before he came home to visit and showed up at the synagogue with his mama, as a good boy should, the people had heard reports of him preaching, teaching and performing healing miracles in Capernaum. They were a little surprised at his fame (“Is not this Joseph’s son?”), but they were not unfriendly. When he read from Isaiah, he gave what might be the world’s shortest homily – “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Frankly, they were somewhat blown away. Listen to what Luke says in verse 22: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came out of his mouth.” So far, things are going great for Jesus in his trip back home to preach to the home folks. But as we know, things didn’t stay great – what happened?
It almost looks like Jesus was spoiling for a fight. Really, all the crowd said that could be taken a little, wee bit, negatively was “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” – which might indicate that they thought he was, in the good southern phase, “Getting a little above his raisings,” putting on airs, or something like that. “Just who does he think he is, talking like a scribe and all?” But I don’t think that’s what they meant. They just appear both stunned and pleased; like my daddy was when I actually caught a fly ball for the first time after months of his trying to teach me how.
I think Jesus knew something that we don’t know, something that’s not written in the text, something that is only hinted at in the first thing Jesus says to them about doctors healing themselves. I think Jesus had heard murmurings that the people were wondering why he was performing all those miracles over in Capernaum. “Why not here?” they said. “We have sick people in Nazareth. Don’t they need healing? Don’t they deserve healing?”
And here’s the other thing they were probably thinking: Healings draw crowds. Crowds need food, crowds need wine, crowds spend money. Why should Capernaum and all those other places get the money? Doesn’t Joseph’s son understand how things work in a town like this? We get our carpentry work done by Joseph, even if there is a guy over in the next village who is cheaper and better? Why? So that when Joseph needs fish, or wine, or flour, or a tent, he’ll come to us for those things. So why doesn’t Jesus do his healing here, where it could benefit us?
Jesus turns to their shared religious tradition for his answer, reminding them of two stories from the Hebrew Scriptures. In each story, a prophet of God healed foreigners, aliens, even enemies, while seemingly ignoring the needs of fellow Jews. Elijah took care of the widow of Zarephath in Sidon and his successor, Elisha, healed the Syrian general Namaan of his leprosy. This is when things turned ugly, and the people drove Jesus out of town, intending to kill him.
During the season of Epiphany, we talk a lot about Jesus as the one who reveals God to the world. We mostly talk about this in very positive and uplifting terms, using words like love and light. We sing beautiful songs like “Christ be our light,” and “We are called,” etc. And we can be lulled into thinking that this Christ business, this Jesus’ Movement as Michael Curry calls it, is going to be onward and upward from here on out. But it’s not. We forget that we need light because the world is filled with darkness; we need love because the world is filled with hate; we need a savior because our world and our lives are filled with sin. Jesus is the Epiphany that shows us who God is, but Christ is also the Epiphany who shows us who we are – and sometimes “it ain’t pretty.”
Sometimes we are selfish and we want Jesus to be ours and ours alone. That was the objection that one of my professors had to the hymn “Blessed Assurance.” “How dare we,” he thundered, “claim ‘Jesus is mine?’ That is so wrong. Jesus does not belong to us. We belong to Jesus.”
I still like to sing the hymn, but I got the point. We are often too concerned with what Jesus can do for us, too interested in having a Jesus who looks like us, thinks like us, and acts like us without considering that Jesus was not made in our image, but rather we in his. And it is not a physical, ethnic or gender image but a spiritual one. Jesus’ point to the people of Nazareth is that the Messiah has come not just for them but for everyone, and that the people of Sidon, and the people of Syria, and the Romans and Greeks and other foreigners who lived in Capernaum, were not only just as much God’s children as the people who lived in Nazareth – sometimes the needs of those foreigners and aliens would take priority over the needs of the folk who considered themselves God’s chosen people.
And this enraged them, made them exceedingly angry, because they had forgotten the lesson of Jeremiah. They had forgotten that as God’s chosen people they had been claimed by God in their mother’s womb for a purpose – not for privilege; they had been created to be prophets to the nations, not rulers of the world.
And we in the church sometimes forget these lessons, too. We begin to think it’s all about us and have to be reminded that “No, no it’s not.” It’s all about being a servant people who are invited to share God’s redeeming and healing light and never ending love with the whole world.
Amen and amen.
