Luke 4:21-30
Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Philadelphia is a city of neighborhoods, not that it is all that much different from most cities, but I know Philadelphia best. Growing up in Philly, there were sections that were largely Italian, Jewish, Black, Hispanic, German, Asian and so on. The section that I grew up in was largely German, dominated by St. Henry’s Roman Catholic Church, the German church, the church that had regular German Masses; there were also Tabor and St. Paul’s, two German Lutheran churches. This is not to say that there were not people of other ethnic groups in the neighborhood, there were. My best friend was Irish and a few doors down from me there was another friend, a Jewish girl. For the most part though, the neighborhoods were just sections of the city marked by ethnic origins that did not always match their geographic designations; when I was just a young teen, the older guys would roam into other neighborhoods looking for fights. It was not a good time; there was a lot of violence based usually on ethnic and racial differences. The truth is, all the neighborhoods had gangs that made lots of trouble. There were fights, more than fights, all out brawls, in the schools, in the playgrounds and on the street corners. But by the time I was of age to be a part of these fights, the gang war stuff had somewhat died down. I was a victim of this once, but I was able to avoid it for the most part. Still, there are strong loyalties to our communities, to our ethnic origins, and our religions.
But today, our neighborhoods are often more ethnically and racially mixed; the loyalty groups have changed. The loyalties to one group or another are based more on location, schools, sports organizations or some other local consideration. Things change, but they don’t. My point is that when I was a kid and even back far beyond the times of Paul and Jesus, people were known to develop great loyalties to their communities. In fact, we can see the intensity of such loyalty, centered around ethnic and religious concerns, showing its ugly head, in today’s Gospel. The people were loving Jesus; they were amazed by his words; he had them “eating out of his hand” and then Jesus began saying things that seemed designed to get them angry with him. Jesus appears as though he was intent on, “poking the bear”, “stoking the fires”, “stirring the pot”; Jesus, it seems, was purposely getting the people riled up. Their initial amazement led them to question, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” To which Jesus responded, bringing up a proverb, calling upon a doctor to heal himself, suggesting to Jesus that, as a prophet, they were expecting him to now do in his community the great deeds he had done in other communities. What followed was Jesus telling the people that they were not going to accept him and then he seemed to be challenging their religious and national loyalties by pointing out how Elijah provided for a Gentile woman and her son during the famine and that Elisha healed a Gentile leper at a time when there were certainly Jews suffering from leprosy that he did not help. The people turned on Jesus; they were literally ready to kill Jesus; he had insulted their national allegiance, he had diminished the importance of their religious affiliation, challenging all that they believed about God as being their God and their God alone.
It is a strange passage, one the paints Jesus as an instigator of trouble. No doubt he was an instigator, but why? Was it all about questioning their loyalties; or was it about questioning whether they had lost sight of God’s calling, of all Israel, to be a light to the nations? You see, Jesus wanted them to face up to the fact that their lives were not all about, what they were going to get from Jesus, from God; (and) it’s not all about what we are going to get from Jesus, from God; it’s sometimes about what we are going to do in response to the love we receive from God and about our fulfilling our calling to be a light to the world, to share the good news of Jesus Christ in both word and deed. And not just to our families, not just to our close friends and neighbors, and not just to those who believe and think like us. Jesus is making it very clear that his ministry is to the world, and so also to the Gentiles. I know I’ve told you this before, but Gentile is a word that simply means nations.
For the Jews of Jesus day, the world was divided into Jews, them, and everyone else, the Gentiles, the nations. For Jews there were prohibitions against sharing food with Gentiles; you certainly would not want to marry one; you could do business with them, but you needed to take care; you always wanted to keep them separated from you. A Gentile who came to believe in God, was only half accepted; it would take a generation for full acceptance of the believer’s family. Little was done to share the word of God’s love with Gentiles. This was not, as God had planned it; this was the point that Jesus was making to the good Jews of his childhood community. Jesus said it, “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But that doesn’t change the importance of his message! Being a light to the world is not easy, but look if you will at the Disciples and the early church. They got the message! The Disciples went out into the world; Peter’s first act of ministry was to Samaritans and then his second to Gentiles. Philip was sent to an Ethiopian eunuch. Tradition tells us that Thomas went all the way to India. Paul’s letters tell us about Christian community members who went to Rome and elsewhere to share the Gospel. And Paul, himself was all over the place.
There was certainly ministry to Jesus’ hometown, to the Jews throughout Israel, but the Messiah of God and his story and message was not for Jews alone. The Apostle Paul, as he traveled to a new place, would first stop at the village synagogue, but would then go out into the village and speak also with the Gentiles. We today are called upon to minister, within the Christian community, but then take our ministry out in the world, to people we know and don’t know, to people that are unlike us and like us, to people who believe, think and act differently than us and like us. Go out into the world and share the love and word of Jesus.