FINDINGS II
Epiphany
IV - C - January 31, 2010
Jeremiah 1: 4-10; I Corinthians 13: 1-13;
Luke 4: 21-30
 By Harry T. Cook
1/25/10
RUBRIC
Except for extreme and unredeemable racists and for the kind
of Republican who believes only confirmed members of his party are fit to
govern, the American nation rejoiced in the election of Barak Obama in November
2008 and subsequently in his inauguration as the 44th President of the United
States two and a half months later. The celebration sometimes had a manic,
over-the-top feeling about it. One almost thought for a moment of a conquering
Caesar standing triumphantly in a chariot as the loyal troops marching behind
him chanted a lusty song of victory.
A year later, a significant portion of the nation has fallen
out of love with the one they believed might be a political messiah. "What is
this? A new teaching -- with authority," is what the congregation of the
Nazarene synagogue said of their hometown boy made good. "All spoke well of
him," as Mark has it. Moments later they want to kill him. Why? Because: "No
prophet is acceptable in the prophet's hometown." And why that? Because unless
the prophet speaks smooth things, asks nothing and gives everything at no cost
to all those with their hands out, he is a dead man -- or as good as dead.
WORKSHOP
With a reprise of the "c'est moi" (4:21), Luke introduces
the second act of the Nazarene drama. At first his fellow townspeople are
welcoming of Jesus (4:22), marveling at his common lineage (Joseph's son). Much
in the same manner that the Baptist attracted the crowds (3:7a), and then
repelled them (3:7b), so Luke's Jesus transforms the Nazarene's approval into
loathing by turning on them with scorn (4:23-28). Luke depicts Jesus as
apparently assuming they will sooner or later ask him to do for them the voodoo
he seemed to have done so well elsewhere (4:14b). Why does Luke have him make
that assumption? Perhaps this begins the process of rejection the end of which
will be depicted down the road as execution. (See 22:47ff, 22:54ff and 23:1ff).
It is as if 4:29 ("They got up and drove him out of the town
. . .") were the historical basis for John 1:11 ("He came to what was his own,
and his own people did not accept him.") In other words, if the messiah ruffles
our feathers by comparing us to the pagans of Zarephath and Syria (4:26-28), he
can go to hell.
The "doctor cure yourself" proverb unique to Luke among the
gospels may reflect a more graphic adage from Euripides to the effect that one
may be a physician to others but himself be a "body of festering pustules."
The fury of the Nazarenes at Jesus' accusation that they
were lesser people than the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian was
murderous. Luke says they would have killed Jesus if they could have done. But
(v. 30): "He passed through the midst of them and went on his way." How could
that have been? Suppose for a moment that the Nazarene event actually occurred
and occurred as Luke depicted it. Jesus would probably have gotten roughed up
in some way. Maybe on such an occasion he was killed. His followers over time
could have morphed such a local event into a national one, much as Paul and the
evangelists morphed it: from a national into a universal event.
For all kinds of reasons, though, at this point Luke spares
Jesus serious injury or death. A look at Acts 13:46, 18:6 and 19:9 may help
make sense of Luke 4:29. In that "second book," Luke depicts the repeated
rejection of the gospel. Luke 4:29 is the initial rejection.
The maxim about the prophet being without honor in his own
territory first proposed by Mark (6:4) is certainly borrowed from another
source, and it reflects a common experience. The idea is that someone with whom
you played sandlot baseball or hopscotch and with whom from childhood you were
on a first-name basis and with whom you exchanged all those childhood secrets
is hardly a person of whose unsearchable wisdom you'd necessarily be convinced.
When Luke employed the maxim, it was probably meant to apply
to all Israel under the term "hometown" just as John thus observed that the
entire creation which, in John's view, had sprung directly from the eternal
logos of which Jesus himself was an incarnation, rejected him.
The rejection motif may reflect the thinking of early Jesus-movement
groups as they strove to shape their societies around the ethical wisdom of
their hero and at the same time felt it necessary to explain why Jesus at one
point or another apparently died in the cause of that countercultural wisdom.
FOOTNOTE: The reading from Jeremiah speaks to
relationship between the prophet and his unwilling audience. Jeremiah imagines
Yahweh saying to prophets under fire: "Do not be afraid of them, for I am with
you to deliver you." - The First Corinthians 13 reading, so common (and
inappropriate) at weddings, mentions "prophecies" only once, to the effect that
they "will come to an end" along with tongues and knowledge. It is to say that
prophetic work as envisioned by Luke for Jesus would be unnecessary in a
culture of αγάπη (ahgahpay), i.e., love that does not seek to possess but to be
possessed.
HOMILETIC COMMENTARY
It might occur to the homilist or his or her informed
listeners to ask how a given congregation or larger community of organized
Christian-oriented religion might avoid reacting to the gospel and its
necessary critique of society as the Nazarenes and others reacted, i.e., by
driving the messenger away.
The annals of clergy deployment are overstuffed with
narratives about how men and women who came to understand that the gospel was
radically egalitarian, even socialistic, went on to tell the same to the
congregations who had employed and subsequently fired them. If the "hometown"
of the gospel passage at hand is for a clergy person the parish to which he or
she has accepted appointment, it is often enough the case that the sermons of
said clergy person advocating gospel-based social action, like the utterances
of the prophets alluded to in the maxim, go unhonored.
In the weeks and months following the revolt of African
Americans in Detroit now more than 40 years ago, the rector whose curate I was
told his congregation that all the fuss about the then-current issue of open
housing was nothing with which Christians needed to be concerned. He said, in
effect, that it didn't matter if "the blacks" were purposely zoned out of
certain areas by real estate covenants "because there is open housing in
heaven."
For that piece of theological idiocy he was much praised by
many. The following Sunday was my turn in the pulpit, and I could not resist
unsaying what he had said. I tried my best to sweeten the medicine, but I could
not spare him the swallowing of it.
I told the congregation that "heaven" should be understood as
a biblical metaphor for what life here and now was envisioned by Jesus and
other wisdom teachers to be, i.e., a society of people committed to live
according to such ethical principles as the Golden Rule. Ergo, if one claims
for himself the privilege of living where he wishes, he must not lay so much as
a straw in the way of any other who wishes to claim it, too.
One of the leading lay persons of that congregation told me after
church that I knew where I could stick my "ergo." My boss wasted little time in
getting me off the payroll and out of his hair. That would not be the last time
I would be considered persona non grata for such an offense as saying what the
gospel obviously was and applying it to current events. We had, among other
things yet to come, the Vietnam war, draft resistance, the battle for
reproductive rights, the curse of the Moral Majority and Reaganomics.
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