And Jesus said, ‘Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place’. . . When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away. (Luke 4.24, 28-30)
Prophets, as a rule, don’t die peaceful deaths. The reason is simple. They get under people’s skins and, like a splinter, cause irritation and inflammation, requiring removal. Jeremiah was stoned to death in Egypt. John the Baptist had his head chopped off. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was hanged in Hitler’s Germany. Gandhi was shot to death. Dr. King was killed by a bullet while he stood on a hotel balcony in Memphis.
Jesus, called the son of Joseph by his contemporaries, knew history, a knowledge allowing him to say, as we hear today, “No prophet is accepted in his own native place.” Well-versed in the ancient sacred texts, he could read the handwriting on the wall, rejection of him and his message almost a certainty when he walked into the synagogue in Nazareth, his hometown, on an otherwise sunny Sabbath. He didn’t have to look up into the sky to know that clouds were already forming overhead.
At first the locals seemed impressed, or as Luke, the teller of the story, described it, “all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But their amazement lasted a split second, morphing into an angry outburst, resulting in their forcefully grabbing him to throw him off a nearby cliff, hoping in this way to wash their hands of him, as Pilate ultimately would do down the road.
Hearing the story, we’re puzzled by the whiplash in attitudes, almost schizoid, one minute the audience happy to hear Jesus, the next mad as hell and ready to kill him. We’ve heard of dissatisfied people throwing tomatoes, even turnips, in bygone centuries at actors or politicians when performances weren’t up to par or policies weren’t measuring up. However, the people of Nazareth took their anger to a higher level, wanting blood, demanding an execution.
So, what turned them so against Jesus, somebody most of them had known as a child, seeing him work alongside his father, Joseph, as he learned the skills of a carpenter? We can’t be sure since we weren’t there, but Luke gives us some clues, especially in Jesus’s words to the people from his old neighborhood. It is safe to say that something in what he said didn’t go down well with his audience. Not at all.
For one, he refused to be a dancing monkey for the people, a circus sideshow performing stunts and showcasing his healing powers, an expectation on the part of the people. He seems to be voicing their thoughts, if not their words, when he says, “Surely you say, ‘Do here in your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.’” As people will soon enough see, he is not a showoff or an attention-seeker. The healings and cures that he brings to the poor and to the suffering are not performances for the crowds.
For another, his words also show that he is welcoming and accepting of all others–a constant theme in this gospel. Luke, whom we will see is the gospel writer friendliest towards gentiles, has Jesus repeat in front of the crowd two examples from their past wherein divine favor was shown to non-Jews, implying God likes other people as much as he did the Judeans, an unpopular position to take in Galilee or anywhere else in the region. The examples he used were a widow in Lebanon that Elijah was sent to assist and a Syrian leper that Elisha helped to heal.
Long considering themselves especially favored by the Most High God, the people of Judea were not open to believing that their God had a soft spot in his heart for foreigners, gentiles, or pagans–a homogenous group comprised of “the other.” In fact, rules and restrictions abounded that curtailed contact with peoples outside their group, meaning all non-Jews.
And yet, that is exactly what Rabbi Jesus was saying in the synagogue to his Jewish audience, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, was God and father to all peoples, inside and outside the borders of Judea. His preaching and his healing would be offered freely to one and all, no discrimination based on ethnicity, geography, or religiosity.
That proposition, that God cares for the non-Jew as he cares for the Jew, is too much for this audience to accept, little to no tolerance among them for opening their doors, much less their daily practices, to outsiders. Yet, as Luke will show throughout his gospel–even more so in his second volume, Acts of the Apostles– the good news belongs to the Jew and to the non-Jew alike and, more often than not, the non-Jew more readily is open to hearing the message.
This is the opposite of what the people of Nazareth have learned and what they have believed–that their specialness brings position and privileges to them that other peoples are not given. Using two examples of people considered enemies by the Jews, but blessed in a special way by the Most High God, Rabbi Jesus evokes the anger of the crowd, who are not ready to open their hearts, much less God’s heart, to others.
The episode that we witness in the synagogue in Nazareth is set before us at the start of the public ministry of the Rabbi for good cause, Luke intending and inviting us to see in it a paradigm and a predictor of the whole of the Rabbi’s outreach to Jew and non-Jew alike, a hospitality towards outsiders that will be met with rejection and ridicule by the insiders.
As Luke did in his birth narrative of Jesus, presenting shepherds–considered lower-rung people, if not outcasts–as the first to receive the good news, so he will continue to present the same embrace of all others by the Man of Galilee, even those most rejected and despised, such as tax-collectors and streetwalkers, sinners and Samaritans. As we will see soon enough, he condemns no one, not even two criminals crucified alongside him at the end.
The obvious question for us to consider is, placing ourselves in the synagogue with the people of Nazareth, would we have been any different in our reaction to what Rabbi Jesus says. While it is easy enough for us to say, hypothetically, since we weren’t there, that we would not have reacted in the same way, our current behavior towards the outcast, the persecuted, the maligned, and the foreigner among us may be a better answer in the long run, removing speculation and replacing it with present practices.
Ours is an age of tribalism, where identity is determined along fiercely defended ideological lines, turning our society into gladiators in the Roman arena fighting one another to the death. Anyone outside our tribe is considered “other,” an umbrella term that includes all those who are different from us in color, creed, and class–among other markers–and excludes from our consideration or company these same people who deviate in any way from our determination of what’s right.
The lines in the sand that separate us from one another are no longer simply geographical, but also political, economical, and ethnological. We live in a world where we identify ourselves by what divides us rather than what unites us, a perilous place to be when our survival depends on our interconnection, not on our disconnection.
In his last book, Where Do We Go From Here?, Dr. King told of a novelist who died, leaving behind plots for future storylines he intended to develop. One of these plots was about “a widely separated family that inherits a great world house in which they have to live together.” Dr. King saw in that story the contemporary human story.
He wrote, “This is the great problem of humankind. We have inherited a great world house in which we have to live together: black, white, brown, yellow, and red; easterner and westerner; gentile and Jew, protestant and catholic, muslim, and hindu; a family unduly sparated in idea, culture, and interest, who because we can never again live apart, must somehow learn to live with each other in peace.”
It is clear that, even after 50 years since the murder of Dr. King, we have not found an answer to his provocative question of where we go from here. In truth, the problem has only increased as has the urgency for an answer, the evidence mounting that we have learned little in how to live with each other in peace, our airways, highways, and hallways filled with daily examples of people who prefer war to peace.
Already here at the start of his dual-volume gospel, Luke presents a way for us to live in peace. It is the way of the Galilean Teacher, who judged no one, rejected no one, condemned no one. Instead, he opened his mind and his heart and his hands to all others, especially those despised and desecrated and destroyed by those with power, position, and prestige.
That message, already condensed and consolidated in the episode in Nazareth, will present itself for the remainder of the gospel, urging us to walk the way of the Galilean as he touches the leper, praises the Samaritan, and eats with the tax-collector. It becomes clear, as the pages of the gospel turn, that Rabbi Jesus practiced hospitality, opening the doors to one and all, sending no one away, welcoming everyone as a child of the Most High God.
In Ruth Coker Burks’ recently released memoir entitled, All the Young Men, she writes of how she, a 26-year-old single mom living in Hot Springs, Arkansas in 1986, found herself becoming the friend, advocate, and caregiver to young men dying of AIDS. It began, she says, when she was visiting a friend at the hospital and she noticed that the door to one of the rooms was painted red. She watched as the nurses drew straws to see who would tend to the patient inside, none of them wanting to get the short straw.
On impulse, Ruth entered the room and began to care for the young man who cried for his mother in the last moments of his life. Word spread in the community that she was the only person willing to help these young men afflicted by AIDS and she was called upon to help them, which she did without hesitation and with complete dedication.
The pages of her book portray a woman who loved those who had been discarded as unlovable, giving them respect, compassion, and dignity, as they suffered through the ravages of this terrible disease. At one point in the book she writes, “The question I get most, the one I hate, is why I went into his room. And why I helped people. ‘Why do you do it? How?’” She then writes, “The answer is, How could I not? The real question is, How could you not?”
Her question is a good one for us to ponder as we find the Galilean Rabbi rejected in his own small hometown for doing much the same, loving the unlovable. And we will have to find an answer to the question, “How could we not?”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 