A sermon based upon Luke 4: 14-30
By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
September 15th, 2019
Tom Long tells how there was once a small, church-related college that had an annual event called Christian Emphasis Week. The student Christian group would invite a speaker to campus, who would preach several times and have discussions with the students – all aimed at deepening faith and creating a mood of religious revival.
One year, however, the students at this college got more than they bargained for. They invited a speaker whom none of them had heard before, but he had the reputation for being dynamic and exciting. Indeed, he was. On the first night of the special week, the campus chapel was filled with the faithful. Of course, the “Animal House” types and other impious students stayed away; this was, after all, an occasion for religious insiders, for the truly Christian.
The speaker began by opening the Bible and reading a passage of scripture. When he had finished, he closed the Bible and then suddenly flung it across the stage and out an open window. The congregation sat in stunned silence. Were their eyes playing tricks on them? Did the preacher really throw the Bible out a window? The preacher looked at them and said, “There goes your God,” and proceeded to preach a challenging sermon on the difference between worshiping the Bible and worshiping the God who comes to us through the scriptures.
In a similar way, Jesus performed something shocking in his hometown synagogue at Nazareth. At the outset, it seemed like a normal service. Jesus opened up the scriptures and read from the familiar text: the word from the prophet Isaiah about good news being preached to the poor and release being given to the captives. Then he preached. Luke does not preserve the whole sermon, just the main point: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (v. 21).
At first, the congregation responded warmly, enthusiastically. “Good sermon!” “Beautiful words!” Heads nodded, people murmured their assent and pride in this hometown boy who was so eloquent. But then a question began to stir among them. If Isaiah’s prophecy has really been fulfilled today, how come nothing happened? How come Jesus didn’t perform any of those mighty deeds we have heard he did in Capernaum? What does he mean, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing”?
It was then that Jesus threw the Bible out the window – or at least their understanding of the scripture. They thought that Isaiah’s words were only for them, for Israel, for Nazareth, for the local folk. Jesus proceeded to throw that understanding of the Bible out the window by saying that God’s care for the poor and the oppressed has always been for the outsiders as much as for the insiders. Indeed, when insiders try to restrict God’s grace to themselves, they cut themselves off from that very grace.
It was when the ‘insiders’ realized Jesus was for the ‘outsiders’ more than for them, that they wanted to throw Jesus off a cliff. They rejected not just his message, but they rejected Jesus himself. He was no longer one of them, but now, they felt as if Jesus was one of them.
WHY JESUS WAS HATED
After the great reversal Mary sang about, comes the great rejection. In all started in Jesus own hometown, Nazareth. Like the preacher who threw the Bible out the window, the people in Jesus own hometown, are ready to throw Jesus off a cliff (Luke 4: 29). You didn’t see that coming, did you?
This is, as one commentator said, the Gospel in miniature. It is a preview of what is still to come. The gospel of John, written around the same time as Luke, declares up front: “He came unto his own, and his own did not receive’, nor ‘accept him (Jn. 1:11).’ It is one of the strangest parts of the gospel. The gospel means ‘good news’ but it is good news started with some very bad news. The one who could have been Israel’s true Messiah, deliverer and redeemer, was rejected by his own people.
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How can you ‘save (your) people from their sins’ (Matt. 1:21) when by all appearances, you begin as a rejected, failed, and crucified Messiah? And how can the one who was rejected by his own hometown people, the people who knew him as “as Joseph’s son” (v. 22), be the Israel’s Savior, or more, become the savior of the whole world? It’s a powerful question; it’s still a very important question too. As the apostle Paul contemplated later, how did Israel’s rejection of Jesus become ‘salvation’ (Rom. 11:11) and ‘riches’ (Rm. 11:12) for the Gentiles (Rom 9-11). How did Jesus’ rejection become the pathway that calls us to accept Jesus as our own personal savior, and the savior of the whole world?
The answer begins by understanding exactly why Jesus’ own people rejected him. It is the great rejection that ends up at the cross. What was it about Jesus that made so many people mad? Well, when you study Jesus’ rejection you will find two basic sides to it. Let’s briefly consider them both.
First, you will see how Jesus was rejected because of what he did, and how he did it. This is where all the other gospels; Matthew, Mark, and John begin. They focus on the fact that Jesus healed people when he shouldn’t have been healing them; he fed people when he shouldn’t have been feeding them; and he also touch people, who should not have been touched, just like he reached out to people, he should have been leaving alone; because they were sinners, outsiders, and should have remained ‘outside’ God’s reach. This is also included right here in Jesus’ reading from Isaiah. Jesus is reading about how God’s love is especially meant for those who on the outside.
But there is something else that is going on. All the gospel’s address it, but Luke hits it head on, right from the beginning. Luke wants us to see right up front, that it wasn’t just Jesus’ message or method that was being rejected, but it was Jesus himself. When Jesus informed his own hometown that ‘the Spirit of the Lord was upon him to preach good news to the poor’, the outsider, and the down and out, it was Jesus himself, and his claim that God was speaking directly through him, that was the heart of the rejection. Jesus’ own hometown did not want to see Jesus as anything more than their own ‘hometown’ boy, just like later, Mary and Jesus’ family, couldn’t see Jesus as any more than her ‘crazy’ son. It wasn’t just Jesus’ message or message that was ‘crazy’, but it was Jesus himself.
This is also where it finally comes down in the gospel story. It is the main reason that Jesus is crucified. Israel’s ruling leaders declared him ‘crazy’ by charging him with ‘blasphemy’; not because of what he did, but because of who he said he was, ‘the Messiah, the son of the blessed…’ (Mark 14:61). In much the same way, the Roman government was willing to put Jesus to death by the cruel act of crucifixion because the masses called for his crucifixion, declaring him not only crazy, but also dangerous. Jesus message was deemed to be so dangerous to the status quo, that he had to die.
It is this very bad new of ‘rejection’ that is at the heart of the good news. Don’t you find that still a bit strange? Don’t you find it rather strange that the one a few Jews called ‘the Messiah’ was put to death, executed as a common criminal? Don’t you find it very strange that the one this church is built to worship and glorify is one who was rejected by his own people, including those friends and neighbors in his own hometown?
JESUS IS STILL HARD TO LIKE
Of course, all this raises the question all over again for us. Jesus is still hard for people to like, even today. As one theologian says, it still stings when a Jewish person says to us today, “How can you Christians still say Jesus is the Christ, the Messiah, when the world is still going to hell in a hang-basket? (Stanley Hauerwas). Once, when I was preaching for a week at a church in the rural area outside of Cherryville, I asked one of the young, faithful attenders, how long he’d been a member they church. “I’m not a member’, he told me. When I asked why he told me he was Jewish. He had married a Baptist girl from that congregation, and he promised he would come to church with her. “Why can’t you become a Christian, like her?” I asked. His answer was that because Jesus was a Jew. And to a Jew, a Jew like Jesus was, can’t ever be God. That’s why I’m not a Christian he said. As a Jew he didn’t like a Jew being God.
There are still lots of reasons people still don’t want Jesus to be God, the true Messiah, or the Son of God. You and I know that even to mention Jesus in the ‘public square’ or pray to Jesus in most any kind of public place has become a negative, unwanted, even uncomfortable and embarrassing, hasn’t it? As someone has said, you can talk about Buddha, Mohammed, or most any other kind of religious leader or activists, but leave Jesus out of it. You can talk about Martin Luther King Jr. as a great activist but don’t mention that he was a Baptist preacher? You can talk about a lot of other great achievers in history too, sharing all kinds of important or personal information about them too, but if someone points to their Christian faith, it’s much better now to overlook that fact, isn’t it?
What’s going on? Why is Jesus getting to be so hard to like? Why is the Christian faith, and even our church lives being pushed further and further into the background of who we are or who we are supposed to be, even in our so called, “Christian” culture? Why is Jesus someone who needs to be ‘crucified’ all over again? At least that’s how the New Testament book of Hebrews put it? Even as Christianity was just getting started, there was a group of people promoting that some of those early churches leave Jesus behind, trample his blood underfoot, and to forget and loose their Christian faith, and go back where they belonged—before Jesus, without Jesus, or as some say today, to move ahead, beyond Jesus, beyond religion, or the Christian faith. “We can do better, without all that religious stuff”, some are saying.
I have a book in my library, which declares, “They Love Jesus, but not the Church”. Here’s my problem with that statement. The Church is the body of Jesus Christ in the world today. You can’t have Jesus without the church, and you can’t love Jesus without loving the church, warts and all. This of course, doesn’t mean that the church is perfect, or that the church and churches don’t have a long way to go in being like Jesus in the world, but it does mean that you can’t love Jesus without also loving the Jesus who lives through the church, who are not an institution, but who are people who are actually trying to live out their faith in Jesus in the world. The church is the people who come together to try to learn to be like Jesus in this world. Without a people trying to live and answer with their own lives the truth of Jesus, you don’t have true churches and you don’t have a true Christian faith. To have Jesus, you must have, in some shape or form, a people learning how to be and do church.
But it is right here, pointed against the church that we have this ‘hate’ growing too. So, where is all this ‘hate’ for the church and for Jesus coming from? Can we name it? Can we see in what was happening in Nazareth, what is still happening in our world today? What makes and still makes Jesus hard to like and hard to love? Isn’t it because Jesus, the true Jesus, the living Jesus, the LORD Jesus, is always someone who is hard to follow, because of what he asks us to do with our own lives?
The true Jesus is hard to follow now, just like he was hard to follow in Nazareth, in Israel, and is still hard to follow, also by us. Jesus is hard to like and hard to follow, because he is the living Christ who not only tells us the truth, but asks us to live the truth, even when the truth hurts. He is the Christ who, as one great Christian said, is the one who ‘bids us to come and die’; to ‘take up our cross, and to follow him’ in our living, not just in our dying.
Who would ever want to like, love, or follow someone who calls us to leave our world of entertaining ourselves, looking after ourselves, experiencing the world mainly for ourselves, and for our wants, to ‘lose our lives for his sake’, for God’s sake, and for the sake of the ‘least of these’? Who could ever like someone who would ask not only something from us, but everything from us? Who could ever like someone who will only be our savior, by being our LORD? Could you ever like someone as demanding and commanding, as this? Could you ever like someone who would ‘turn the tables’ of your life over and ask you to look at life in whole new, un-self-focused way?
JESUS IS THE TRUE SAVIOR OF THE SOUL
To try to answer why you might still consider Jesus now, is to remember why Jesus became Christ then, as least to a few. What was it about Jesus that made him acceptable to certain people in Israel, and beyond Israel in that very ancient world? And could there still be a reason to hear, accept and follow Jesus today? The remarkable picture at the end of our text, pictures Jesus walking right through the disgust, hate, and maybe ‘fear’ of his own hometown people, might point to how Jesus could walk right through your own rejection of him, into your heart? How, why, and what would it look like if Jesus walked through all the rejection into your own heart and life? Would you let this happen? And if you did allow Jesus, the living Christ, who is alive and well, not just in the church, but through God’s Spirit, is alive and loose in the world, what would it look like? What does it mean to allow Jesus into our world?
Well, to answer what it might look like to accept Jesus today, let’s consider again what happened at that little college, where the preacher started the preaching by throwing the Bible out the window. The congregation that night steamed in outrage and left the service muttering blasphemy. Word spread around campus about what had happened, and the next night the religious regulars stayed away, but the “tax collectors and sinners” drew near. The place was packed with fraternity types, those who would never think of themselves as religious, and the curious.
The preacher chose to preach that night on forgiveness, and when it was done, he engaged the congregation in dialog. One in the audience, intrigued but skeptical, said, “I heard what you said tonight, but how can a person know – really know – they are forgiven?”
The speaker looked directly at the questioner and said firmly, “I tell you, in the name of Jesus, you are forgiven.”
“Right, right,” responded the student. “I heard you say that. But my ques-tion is, How can you really know that for a fact?”
“I tell you,” repeated the speaker in an even more forceful voice, “in the name of Jesus, you are forgiven.”
“I don’t think you catch my question,” protested the student. “I want to know how you can really know, I mean know for sure, that you’re forgiven.”
Now a third time the speaker looked him in the eye and said, “I tell you, in the name of Jesus, you are forgiven.”
It was then that something electric happened in the room. The word took hold in a way beyond understanding, and this student, this outsider, this one who would never have darkened the door of a church, sat down knowing in his heart that “in the name of Jesus” he was forgiven (As told by Tom Long in Annual Manual, 2012-2013).
Now, maybe there’s something to how the ‘outsiders’ at that little school came to know and accept Jesus. Jesus wasn’t known making him a big, public name; nor was Jesus known only by reading and studying about him in the Bible. No, this Jesus, the true Jesus is only know personally, spiritually, and even mystically, through the heart of hearts. The Jesus who is real in this world today, is the Jesus who spiritually still walks through all the hate, rejection, and disgust, and walks to bring God’s love and forgiveness straight into our hearts.
This is the Jesus God wants you to know today. It’s not the Jesus of he head, nor the Jesus of history, nor the Jesus of politics, which is what killed Jesus, by the way, but it’s the Jesus who came to live for them, and to die for all of us; so that we can find our way straight into the heart of this God who not only creates life, but redeems our lives, because he still loves and forgives us. This is the God is not the God of those who have arrived, who have it all, nor is he God of those who are the insiders to what they think God is or isn’t, but this is the God who is the God of the outsider, who know that they aren’t who they should be, but come to realize through God’s redeeming love, that they are also, not yet what or who they can be; thanks to the God who’s love, is the only thing that wasn’t defeated on Jesus cross, and now, comes streaming, if not walking, straight throw all the rejection and hate, straight into the human heart.
You may not love this kind of Jesus, but this kind of Jesus has come, and still comes, by this Spirit, to love, forgive, and to redeem you. Will you let him walk straight through your preconceived notions of what God is or isn’t, and allow God’s love to reach you? Amen.
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