Epiphany IV, Year C

Jeremiah, 1:4-10
1 Corinthians, 14:12b-20
Luke, 4:21-32

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Aesop gave us the saying “familiarity breeds contempt.” Mark Twain pointed out that familiarity can also be fruitful and cause rejoicing when he wrote, “Familiarity breeds contempt – and children.”

Today’s gospel shows us that familiarity can also breed jealousy, possessiveness, rigidity, and unfounded certainty. Today’s scene comes just as Jesus is beginning his ministry. After his cousin, John, had baptized him in the Jordan, Jesus traveled through the towns of Galilee, northern Israel, teaching and healing. The people praised him and rejoiced in his good works. He was making a name for himself.

He showed up at his home town, Nazareth, back in the dumpy, dusty, rocky hill town where he knew everyone and everyone knew him, or thought that they did. On the Sabbath, he stood up in the synagogue, the town’s community center, where he’d played and prayed for years, and he read the scriptures, the passage from Isaiah declaring that ‘Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed.’

This passage would have had particular resonance as good news to the people of Nazareth. Living under the yoke of the oppressive Roman Empire, living only a step or two above squalor, they were eager for a liberator, for a change of fortune. Jesus told everyone, “Today, this scripture is fulfilled.”

The hometown crowd loves this. This is better than they could ever have imagined. One of their own, the son of their neighbor Joseph, was making it big and promising to fulfill their hopes and expectations. Having stoked their dreams, aroused their affection and pride, Jesus could’ve ended it there. They would’ve all gone home feeling good.

But Jesus didn’t want them to cling to false expectations. He says to them: “You will say to me, ‘Physician, heal yourself.’ The great things you’ve done in Capernaum, do here.” The saying ‘Physician, heal yourself’ is another way of saying ‘Take care of your own.’ Jesus knows that his friends and relations expect special favor; he knows that they will insist that what he’s done in Capernaum, that town full of Gentiles, he must do there. It would be unthinkable to gratify Gentiles and do nothing special for his hometown. They expected a demonstration of Jesus’ powers, and they expected to benefit from his fame and powers. Their familiarity with Jesus makes them feel possessive of Jesus, deserving of his favor – that they had a claim upon him, that they already knew who he was, what he was up to.

Not only does Jesus refuse to perform a miracle for them, he reminded them of things they didn’t want to think about. He refers to a couple of bible stories, bible stories that offend their attitudes and assumptions and expectations, bible stories that expand our notion of ‘one’s own,’ bible stories that lead us to see the stranger, the foreigner, even our enemy as our brother. Jesus exposes the narrowness, the hardness of the crowd.

Two bible stories. First, Jesus mentions that during a famine the prophet Elijah had provided a steady supply of food to a pagan widow and her, and to them alone even while many Jews starved. They would have also remembered that when the widow’s son became ill and there was no breath left in him, Elijah had restored him to life. (1 Kings 17)

Second, Jesus mentions the prophet Elisha’s healing of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, which had invaded, occupied, and oppressed Israel, not unlike the Romans. The Syrians were enemies of Israel. Elisha had cured Naaman of leprosy, leprosy which was another mark of his outsider status, his supposed unacceptability to God. (2 Kings 5)

Jesus mentions these stories to show that God favors all people – strangers, outsiders, even enemies. One of the most consistent themes in scripture, and especially in the gospels, is God’s embrace and favor and love of all people, and especially the poor, the overlooked, the suffering. Jesus presented a serious challenge to the people of Nazareth, an attack on their status quo, on their convention, on their tradition. He questioned their understanding of scripture, their understanding of God, their understanding of themselves – their sense of superiority, exclusivity, and preference, and his questioning filled them with rage. They tried to stone Jesus. They were so angry they tried to murder one of their own.

When we read the stories about Jesus, we tend to identify with him. He’s witty and clever, always putting people in their place, revealing hypocrisy, inhumanity, and smallness of spirit. He’s got all the best lines. And we should identify with him. He’s what we want to be, what we are becoming – albeit very gradually.

Yet, while we naturally read scripture side by side with Jesus, we have to stretch our imaginations a bit. It’s a vital spiritual exercise to imagine that Jesus is speaking to me. We should imagine ourselves as one of the Pharisees, as one of the blundering disciples, as one of the hometown crowd. The spiritual disease of the hometown crowd, their strict limits for God’s favor, their certainty and rigidity, is common among all religious people. In the name of faith, in the Name of God, people of every age justify hatred and exclusion.

Reflecting upon Jesus’ rejection at Nazareth, we may become more sensitive to how we have used scripture to build walls and to exclude people, how we have limited God’s love and mercy. The good news is that Jesus is not primarily interested in admission requirements to the Kingdom of God. Rather, he’s interested in who’s being left out. That’s Jesus’ priority; that’s scripture’s priority. You can be sure that if Jesus’ friends and relations over-looked inconvenient bits of scripture that we do the same thing. Mis-understanding scripture comes with being faithful. No one, no one is without error.

However, we live in an age when smiling, unquestioning certainty is casting an ever larger and darker shadow over the whole world. More and more people claim to know God’s will, and to know it in remarkable detail and with less tolerance for deviation. Every day we look at the newspapers or television’s so-called ‘news,’ and we see the ugliness it produces – the violence and the hatred in Iraq and throughout the Middle East. And that same unblinking certainty increasingly shapes our own culture – implacable, rigid, closed-minded certainty on the extremes of left and right.

I become ever more grateful for Anglican restraint, for our tradition of a generous latitude, of not having to agree on all matters. Sadly, we Anglicans don’t always live up to our values and our tradition. Yet, far more than most, the Anglican tradition is testimony to the wisdom of recognizing a hierarchy of beliefs, a hierarchy of certainties. We recognize that holy, faithful people apprehend the truth with some variation. We recognize that utter religious certainty can be, and often is, blasphemy. We recognize that God passes human comprehension. We recognize that doubt is not a threat to faith, but part and parcel. We recognize that God is a mystery, to which our proper response is humility.

One of the many things I’ve learned from this parish, one of the many reasons I love this Christian community, is the diversity of opinion and experience to which I’m exposed here. I’ve learned that familiarity in a loving community doesn’t necessarily breed contempt; familiarity can drive out contempt. A Christian community nurtures familiarity where we open ourselves to the thoughts and experiences of others – put ourselves in their shoes, as it were. Familiarity married to empathy breeds humility, and humility opens our hearts to God.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.