Luke 4:20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ 22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ 23 He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.”’ 24 And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. 25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; 26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27 There were also many lepers[d] in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ 28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Every week during our corporate confession we pray together, “We lament the powers of this world that subject us to sin and death and confess our participation in their schemes.” I think both parts of that sentence are important, the part about lamenting the powers and also the part about confessing our participation in the world they’re making. There are powers, there are forces, there are structures—the Economy, the Government, the Police, Patriarchy, transphobia, white supremacy, Capital—that take God’s good creation and channel it into these extractive and exploitative patterns, and so to be a Christian has to mean undermining those structures so that grace becomes the organizing principle of our life together. That’s why the debts we’ve paid off over the years here are not just a social justice illustration of a more general spiritual truth—they are sacraments, just like this table, that give form to grace in our midst. And so as Christians, it’s important for us to do the work that Jesus does: we unmask the powers by telling the truth about how they function in the world and in our lives and we disarm the powers through our solidarity with one another. We declare good news to the poor and freedom to the captives.
But I think the other part of our confession is just as important: we confess our participation in the power’s schemes. Maybe that sounds odd to some of us—I don’t believe anyone here is in the arms trade or is joining the police, so what does it mean that we participate in the powers’ schemes? A theologian named James McClendon wrote that the line between the church and the world runs through the heart of every believer. We’re learning to practice grace, we’re learning to tell the truth about the powers, but we still live in the world and so many of our instincts and habits of body and mind have been shaped by the world. All of us will probably eat food today grown and picked by a migrant worker who’s getting paid pennies and has to wonder if this is the day ICE is coming for them. Or in a more individual example, some of us will probably go to work sick in the next couple of weeks—and we won’t even really think about it—we’ll say “well it’s not COVID” or “I don’t have a fever” but even so your body will probably need rest and you’ll go to work anyway because that’s what we’re supposed to do. The powers of this world imprint themselves on everyone, so we confess our participation in their schemes to at the very least tell the truth about that.
That practice opens up, or could open up, I think, an important flexibility in the way we narrate our lives. In our story this morning, which picks up where we left off last week after Jesus reads from the book of Isaiah, the congregation is “amazed” and “speaks well” of Jesus. They hear his words and they are thrilled. And Jesus can read the room and see why they’re so excited. “Doubtless, now you’ll say to me, Physician, heal thyself!” So Jesus has just read these Scriptures and preached this very brief sermon, and he can feel that the crowd has identified themselves with what he’s said, they are the recipients of the good news he’s offering, they are the captives who will be released, they are the wounded who will be healed. This story is for them. So he anticipates what they’re thinking: do that here!
Which I think is true, that this is good news for them, but then Jesus does something interesting. He says, “But hang on a second, a prophet’s hometown normally doesn’t accept him. So I need to make sure you’re hearing all the aspects of what I’m saying.” And then he gives two anecdotes, these two little stories from the Old Testament, the story of the Widow of Zarapheth and the story of Namaan the Syrian, which are both stories of God doing the kinds of things Jesus has just described from the Book of Isaiah—the oppressed receive good news and the sick are healed—except that the recipients of good news are Gentiles, they are not a part of the “chosen nation.”
This is a really live issue in the early church, what is the relationship between Gentile converts and Jews? But I think inside of the world of the story, what Jesus is saying here opens up some space between the congregation’s sense of chosenness and the new world that Jesus is there to bring. And I wonder if that’s what causes this violent reaction, where Jesus’ own home church is ready to throw him off a cliff. What he’s saying here obviously strikes a nerve. He’s come to bring them good news, but he also complicates it or at least invites them to be reflective on every aspect of what that means rather than just hearing what they want to hear; the good news they all need will require them to change to. These people have this violent reaction to the thought of a certain group of people benefiting from the grace of God, but the Widow of Zarapheth was starving and Namaan the Syrian was in pain—they needed grace, too. So Jesus telling this story now doesn’t negate that the good news is for the people, but it does tell the truth about some hidden prejudice in their souls that they need to upend if they’re really going to know that good news, too.
This is why a writer like Dietrich Bonhoeffer will talk about the cost of true grace over and against a cheap grace that doesn’t ask anything of us. Grace isn’t costly because we have to earn it or because in some way the Protestant work ethic is true after all and we have to prove we’re chosen. But grace is costly because the powers of this world have shaped parts of us, or we’ve formed parts of ourselves to get along in a world ordered by the powers—this is why last month we talked about how sometimes grace looks like the loss or emptying of self. That’s not because your self is bad or wretched or whatever, but because the powers’ cruelty has needled its way into our souls.
We’ve all heard that phrase “Hurt people hurt people.” And all of us are hurt in some way. Some of those hurts are related to being a person of color or queer or working class or a woman, some of them are just from having a body that’s going to die at some point. And there’s nothing inherently noble in that pain. Suffering, eventually, presents us with a choice. We can become bitter and hardened, we can become twitchy and avoidant, or we can become empathetic and more sensitive to the pain all around us. Anybody can become bitter and hardened. To me, that’s one of the secondary evils of the way the nation of Israel has carried out it’s genocide in Palestine with cries of “Never Forget” in regards to the Holocaust (the primary evil being the death of so many Palestinians and the destruction of Gaza). Other Jews or people with Jewish heritage, like myself and our friends at Jewish Voice for Peace, have taken our own family memories of those traumas and chosen solidarity with Palestine, but for many Jews, they unquestioningly support Israel out of fear and trauma. Hurt people hurt people.
Just because we’re a part of an identity group or a church or a social cause doesn’t mean we’re free of repeating the cruelty of this world. Just because we’re an LGBTQ+ affirming church doesn't mean we don’t have internalized homophobia and transphobia to deal with. Just because you’re a socialist doesn’t mean your individual ethics don’t matter—plenty of people have really good politics and are kind of jerks. Just because we have a diagnosed mental illness and our actions resulted from some pathology doesn’t give us a free pass to be thoughtless toward the people around us, even if we assure them we feel really bad about it. In some ways I feel like that’s become the liberal version of “I’m sorry you feel that way.” Where, like, just how that’s not really an apology, neither is “I was anxious” or “I was ashamed.” It’s possible to be just as hurtful, just as damaging, to try and curate someone’s reaction to your behavior by foregrounding your guilt, because now not only are they hurt, but they’re also the bad guy for expressing their hurt.
Our minds are so amazing, we’re so good at taking a political framework or an aspect of our identity or a therapeutic diagnosis, all of which can be so necessary and life-giving, and using any of those righteous frameworks to mask anti-social tendencies so that we can narrate ourselves as harmed—and not be wrong—while also actually being pretty callous to the people around us. The people of Nazareth are oppressed, they are hurt, they are captive. But they cannot abide a shift in point of view that might highlight other’s wounds, even if those wounds are analogous to their own, and they definitely can’t imagine obligations they might have to those others. They’re so turned in on themselves in their own suffering that not only do they lose an opportunity for solidarity with their neighbors, they undermine that solidarity in order to cosset their own anxieties.
That’s ultimately why I think this story is important for us to meditate on now, in a moment when we so desperately need solidarity, when an intersectional, working class movement is our only hope; and yet also when the powers that be are intentionally flooding us with bad news, threats, and wicked plans so that all of our wounds and fears are constantly throbbing—the powers want us to be so turned in ourselves that we won’t join one another, and all the better if it’s for good reasons that you’d sound pretty mean to question. Like, how convenient for Capital if we’d throw each other off a cliff in order to hold space for ourselves, all the while calling out “I feel really bad about this” while you’re on the way down.
Jesus never says the good news isn’t for Nazareth, too. He just reminds them that generally a prophet’s hometown rejects him, and his good news could easily be heard as an invitation into solidarity with their neighbors, his good news invites them to step beyond themselves, to struggle against their pet worries to find that God is already stirring up grace on the other side of them. Jesus doesn’t reject his hometown; they reject him because they need to keep narrating themselves as the main characters in the story he’s telling, even if that means twisting themselves into knots to avoid their hurts without having to do anything to live differently. But Jesus is inviting us to rethink what it means to be a character, a subject, what it means to be a part of a story. He invites us to expand our point of view and become a new kind of subject, a collective of Jews and Gentiles holding all things in common over and against a world of extractive empires divided up by borders. He invites us to find ourselves already held and cared for in that collective and in the Spirit of God that’s already stirring up our communion.
Friends, I know these days are scary. I know they’re maddening and anxiety inducing. But we come to this place to hear stories and to join our voices and to meet at the table so that the Spirit of God might open up our point of view, might turn us toward each other and our neighbors rather than in on ourselves. I want to encourage you, when you feel the world closing in around you, remember that the line between the Spirit and the world runs through your own heart, too—as tightly as the world squeezes, it can’t close you off from grace. So when you’re scared, when you’re especially anxious, make yourself seek connection: take your shoes off and feel the grass on your feet, send a text message, schedule a coffee, make someone dinner, go to the rally or the talk. No one ever said, “Man, what a waste of time texting my best friend ‘I love you, hope you’re having a good day.” Or I defy you to be disappointed with yourself after bringing a sick friend a meal. Just see what happens to your energy when you go to that organizing meeting even though you’re tired (see if you don’t get a little jolt).
The good news that Jesus preaches is not “me against everyone else” propaganda. By calling the congregation’s attention to oppression, woundedness, and captivity, he’s not winding the communities’ ego more tightly around their suffering—he’s inviting them to join with all the oppressed, wounded, and captive wherever we are, and that’s his calling to us, too. Amen.
Comments