Fulfilled in Your Hearing, by Jan Richardson. Used by permission.
The Nazarenes are mad.
Really mad.
Like, attempted-murder-in-the-second-degree mad.
Now, maybe the community of Luke’s Gospel is just being a little hyperbolic, sketching an event in a way that communicates to us something important that they want us to know. Luke likely wants us to know that Jesus, filled with the Holy Spirit, immediately is met with aggressive resistance, then and now. That rings true.
And more recent evangelists made a choice about this story, too. Some 28 years ago, when leaders of different Protestant communions came together to revise the Sunday readings we all use, they kept this story in the middle of Epiphany season, year C. One reason is that Epiphany is a season of appearance and response: in Epiphany God appears to everyone around the world, and we all respond. We usually start the season by singing the old carol, “We Three Kings of Orient Are,” and in one of the later stanzas the text says, “Heaven sings alleluia; alleluia the earth replies.” Appearance and response; heaven says something and we earthlings say something back; God moves a pawn; we move our rook. And so this story sits right here in the middle of the appearance/response season. And here is what happens:
God appears in Jesus when he preaches to his townfolk, and the Nazarenes say, “Yeah we’re gonna kill you.”
I want us to get next to these Nazarenes, and really understand them. I want us to empathize with their homicidal rage. (Though I very much do not want us to share it.) I just want us to see how it makes sense. When I worked as a therapist, I often reminded myself that all behavior, even bizarre and problematic behavior, makes sense; I just have to understand why.
The Nazarenes were furious because Jesus essentially told them that God’s Good News wasn’t about them any more than it was about anybody else. (Quick sidebar: this text, like a few other biblical texts, has been obscenely misinterpreted as an anti-Jewish text, used to rationalize acts of atrocity against the Jewish people. That interpretation is a particularly ironic tragedy, because the essence of the text is that in the eye of God no one is greater and no one is less. We Christians must consciously acknowledge this history, and strongly reject this interpretation.)
But back to the encounter in Nazareth. The angry Nazarenes had an anxious grip on a problematic idea: that even though they were just like any other village in an occupied territory at the far corner of an empire, they thought that they were the apple of God’s eye in a way that many others were not. Jesus courageously challenged this idea. He recalled stories from the Hebrew Bible that revealed God’s love for every living human person, not just one person, one family, one town, or one group. In Genesis 12, God promises Abraham that all the families of the earth will be blessed through him. So Jesus was on good Torah footing here. He wasn’t saying anything truly controversial.
And yet, the murderous rage! It overwhelms them and they rush him to the cliff to throw him to his death. For us to understand this rage, we may have to get quiet, and really reflect.
Imagine: someone who matters to you tells you that it’s not all about you. Someone you recognize as one of your own. Maybe it’s someone you used to babysit, so you’re older than he is, and here he has the audacity to tell you that it’s not all about you. Jesus is challenging a privilege here, and that’s why they get so angry. Jesus is someone in the know — someone who obviously has not only learned to read and write (which may have been a little unusual in those days) but someone who studied the holy book, someone they can’t just write off as a kook — and he’s saying, “It’s not all about you.”
Again, this is an appearance, a manifestation, of God’s presence and power. This is God’s move, today. God appears in the form of an undoubtedly intelligent scholar and teacher, and God in that teacher says, “It’s not all about you.” Do you understand their rage yet?
Maybe not. What might get under our skin? What might motivate us to deep anger? I might get angry if someone said to me, “Stephen, your vocation is not all about you. Even your identity is not all about you! Everything you do, everything that you think is valuable about what you do, everything you are, every effort you make to improve the world, or just help Grace Church function better—none of it is all about you! When you leave, someone will take your place. Ideally they will be better at your job than you are. (Isn’t that something you want, for Grace Church?) And as much as you might say that that’s what you want, wouldn’t that bother you, Stephen, in your secret heart? Wouldn’t you feel…jealous? Envious? Sad? If so, then you really don’t understand yet that none of it is all about you.”
That little speech might at least irritate me, particularly if the person giving it were a reliable, trustworthy, intelligent person.
Here might be another way to make me mad—
You could say, “Your monthly budget and spending habits are not all about you. Your footprint on the earth is not all about you. Your decisions in the voting booth are not all about you.”
But those are good examples of things that I instinctively know are about a larger ethical sphere. Here are some others that might cut deeper—
“Stephen,” God in Jesus could say, “your marriage is not all about you. Your friendships are not all about you. Your physical health is not all about you. Your time in quiet solitude is not all about you. Your relationship with God is not all about you. It never is. Never! Your relationship with God is always about you and everybody else. Everything about you, everything, your name, your self-understanding, your possessions, your physical appearance, your hopes and dreams, your career plans, your personal choices, every last little thing that you do with your brain and your heart and your body—it is all about everybody else, and never just you. If the entire planet were convulsed in a massive explosion and you rocketed alone to safety in a small capsule, passing the moon’s orbit into outer space as the last living person, then your life would cease to have any meaning, and you would no longer be a human being. You would still be a member of the late-Earth species homo sapiens, sure, but without everybody else, you are not you. God will still love you, and God will still be with you, but you will be more like a thing than a person.”
Am I getting warmer? If someone said all that to you, would you be angry?
Angry or not, God wants us to know that every single thing we say and do in this church together, every word of our prayers, every song we sing and every breath we take, is about everyone in the world. God appears to everyone. And so in this sense we are not special. We do not matter more. We are no better than any other church, or any other human assembly of any kind.
My deepest hope is that instead of feeling angry about this, we will feel relieved, and even delighted. First, relieved: if it’s not all about me, then I don’t have to compete, because competition is irrational, even silly. And that means I don’t have to win, and nobody is a loser. And maybe we will even feel delighted: God always appears to everyone, so I can find God in my relationship with every single person, even the people who behave badly, even the people I detest. And I can respond to God in my relationship with every single person. Whether they’re easy to love or hard to like, it doesn’t matter: God is here, and I can respond with love, the deep, difficult, wrenching, life-giving love that Paul sings about so movingly in his first letter to the Corinthians.
This season, we focus on God’s appearance, and our response. It is fitting, then, that our response is to form a circle of gratitude near this Table, where the bread is broken for everyone. The broken bread reminds us that we are not special or better than anybody else, because we are one in the Body of Christ. And unlike those poor Nazarenes, instead of trying to kill Jesus (which, let’s confess, we sometimes try to do), we simply sing, together, with one voice, these words: “Giver of Life, draw us together in the Body of Christ, and in the fullness of time gather us with all your people into the joy of our true eternal home.”
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Preached on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany (Year C), January 30, 2022, at Grace Episcopal Church, Bainbridge Island, Washington.
Jeremiah 1:4-10
Psalm 71:1-6
1 Corinthians 13:1-13
Luke 4:21-30