On Being
Challenged
May
2, 2022
The Scripture quotations contained here are from the New
Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian
Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A., and
are used with permission. All rights reserved.
All four
canonical Gospels have near their beginning some kind of statement, either by
Jesus himself or by the author of the text, about who Jesus is and what his
mission is all about. They aren’t all the same. Mark has Jesus begin by
repeating John the Baptist’s proclamation almost word for word. Matthew has him
start saying essentially the same thing. I’ll get to Luke in a moment. John
begins with the powerful prologue that is the Bible’s best confession of the
Incarnation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the
Word was God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” John 1:1, 14a.
Then there’s
Luke. Luke’s opening statement is actually a whole scene. Jesus, “filled with
the power of the Spirit,” returns to Galilee from Judah, where John the Baptist
has baptized him. People begin to hear about him. He teaches them in their
synagogues and is praised by everyone. Luke 4:14-15. He comes to Nazareth, his
hometown, and goes to the synagogue on the sabbath. A synagogue service of
course includes reading scripture. So an attendant at the synagogue gives Jesus
the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He reads these words from it:
‘The Spirit of
the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to
proclaim release to
the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed to free,
to proclaim the
year of the Lord’s favor.’
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant,
and sat down. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing.’ Luke 4:18-21.
These verses give us a good deal
of what Jesus’ ministry was about. Notice. Luke’s Jesus says nothing about
believing in him, which at times it seems is all John’s Jesus ever does talk
about. Rather, he lays out a program of justice for the oppressed (“the year of
the Lord’s favor” is about justice too) and physical healing for those who need
it. We’re then told that, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the
gracious words that came from his mouth….” Luke 4:22a.
Surely it would
have been surprising to people who had been told all their lives that obeying
torah law was what faith in God was all about to hear one apparently full of
the Holy Spirit talking not about torah law but about justice and healing. Yet
the people who heard Jesus reacted positively not negatively to that part of
what Jesus says to them (although why they may have done so is something I’ll
address below). All would have been well and good had Jesus stopped there, but
he didn’t. He went on:
‘But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the
time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and
there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of
them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in
the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the
Syrian.’ Luke 4:25-27.[1]
Whereupon the people who had so
liked him a moment earlier get so mad at him that they try to throw him off a
cliff. Somehow he manages to get away from them and moves on. Luke 4:28-30.
Why did the
people of Nazareth get so mad at Jesus for reminding them of two well-known
stories from their own scripture? Well, who were the widow of Zarephath and
Naaman the Syrian? They were both Gentiles not Jews. Jesus was using Jewish
scripture to tell his Jewish listeners that their God cared for non-Jews as
much or more than their God cared for Jews like them. Those listeners would
have had to open their minds and change their view of what God wanted from them
to grasp the first thing Jesus told them. The second thing he told them was too
much for them. I can hear them saying things like, “What do you mean our God
cares for Gentiles! That’s an outrage! God is our God not theirs! Get
outta here with your heretical nonsense!” All that though all he did was remind
them of a couple of their own stories.
Now, it is of
course easy for us to sit here in our very different time, place, and culture and
be most critical of those people back in first century CE Nazareth. They were
too narrowminded. They held too hard onto beliefs that they really should have
changed. They may have seemed to accept what Jesus said about the poor, the
captives, the blind, and the oppressed; but did they really? Might they not
have accepted the words Jesus read them from Isaiah because they begin with a
promise of good news to the poor, and they were all poor? Maybe they just
accepted those words out of self-interest. It’s possible to criticize them even
for the reason they might have accepted that first thing Jesus told them.
It's a whole lot
easier to criticize them for the way they reacted to the second thing Jesus
told them. He reminded them of two stories, both from what in Judaism is just
the book of Kings that we Christians split in two. The Nazarenes clung for dear
life to a belief that they were God’s favorites, not those damned Gentiles.
After all, they lived under the Roman yoke, and those cursed Romans were
Gentiles too. They may also have known about the Greek, i.e., Gentile, king
Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who more than a century earlier had tried to destroy
their religion and impose Greek culture on them. They hated Gentiles, and they
weren’t about to listen to some young, upstart preacher tell them their God
didn’t hate Gentiles too. We may well think how unenlightened of them, how narrowminded,
how bigoted.
Well, not so
fast. What was going on here? Jesus was challenging some of their core beliefs.
He was telling them your thinking is wrong. It’s too narrow. You see God wrong.
You think God is as smallminded and bigoted as you are. Well, God isn’t. You
may like what Isaiah and Jesus said about the poor because you’re all poor
(which in a place like Nazareth they certainly were). But what about the other
hurting people they mentioned? God cares as much about them as God cares about
you. Open your eyes! Open your minds! Do the same with the Gentiles. You hate
them, God doesn’t. Broaden your view! Get over your prejudices! See that God
actually loves people you think God hates just because you hate them!
It's easy to be
critical of the residents of Nazareth in this story, but we really shouldn’t be
so quick to condemn them. All we’re seeing in them is the nearly universal
human reaction to being challenged, especially being challenged to broaden our
minds, stop hating, and stop making our God too small. The parallels to this
story in our own country and its history are not hard to find. A great many
Americans used to believe, and tragically some still do, that Black people aren’t
really people at all, and God doesn’t think they are either. Christians with a
broader view and a larger God challenged that diabolical belief, and some of
those who held it fought a brutal civil was in a vain attempt to preserve the
oppressive laws, policies, and actions they used that belief to justify.
More recently,
most Americans believed that all LGBTQ+ people were perverts, that their
sexuality was always and necessarily sinful, and that God thought so too. Then
some Christians began to challenge those demonic views. We said why would God
create people who by their very nature are more sinful than the rest of us? How
can real love and the commitment of two people to care for one another and
share their lives ever be sinful? Besides, in the Gospels Jesus says not one
word about homosexuality. Yet Christians who held onto their bigotry against
sexual minorities dug in their heels the way American racists did and do. They
got their churches to declare all homosexual acts to be inconsistent with
Christian values. They opposed efforts to extend to gay people legal protection
of their civil rights, saying, horribly wrongly, that such laws create “special
rights,” (which they definitely do not. Trust me on this one. I used to be a
lawyer). They made a crusade of opposing same-gender marriage. Far too many of
them still do.
These reactions
by the defenders of prejudice were morally wrong, but these reactions are not
hard to understand. No one likes having their core beliefs challenged. The
people Jesus encountered in the first century didn’t. American racists didn’t
and don’t. American homophobes didn’t and don’t. But here’s the thing. We humans
are always making our God too small. We are always making our God too human,
too much like us. Jesus proclaimed a God so much bigger than the God of the
people of his time that it got him crucified (by Gentiles not Jews) as a threat
to public order. And so many of us still don’t get it. When our core beliefs
are challenged, especially our beliefs about God, we resist like crazy. We shout
No! That’s not the God I’ve believed in all my life! That’s not who God is!
Well folks, that
is who God is. God is bigger than we can ever get our heads around. God’s love
is as vast as the universe. It is universal and unconditional. God extends it
to you and to me whether we think we deserve or have earned it or not. It
applies to everyone we’re so sure hasn’t earned it at all. With God we don’t
earn love. We accept it. We live into it. We respond to God’s love with love.
Not with hatred. Not with bigotry. With love. Love as close to God’s kind of
live as we can come. We won’t ever do it perfectly. We are after all human not
divine. Yet our being fallible humans doesn’t get us off the hook. Our only
proper response to God’s love is love. It always has been. It always will be.
So if you’re
finding some of your core beliefs being challenged, don’t just shout No! Of
course don’t accept any challenge uncritically. Not all challenges by far can
move us closer to God. Ask yourself, Am I being too narrow? Am I hating people
God loves? (And of course God loves all people.) Am I projecting small human
ways onto the vastness of God? If you are, don’t beat up on yourself. God loves
you too. Don’t weep and moan, but don’t stay the same either. Open your mind.
Broaden your view. Move closer to God. It is all we can do, and it is enough.
[1]
For the story of the widow of Zarephath see 1 Kings 17:8-16. For the story of
Naaman the Syrian see 2 Kings 5:1-19a.
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