FINDINGS IV By Harry T. Cook

 

 

Epiphany IV - C - February 3, 2013
Jeremiah 1: 4-10; I Corinthians 13: 1-13; Luke 4: 21-30
 


 

Harry T. Cook
Harry T. Cook

By Harry T. Cook 

1/28/13

 

 
   

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 2008. 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.
 
Not long after the confetti had been swept up, a significant portion of the nation fell out of love with the one they believed might be a political messiah. Others were angry that Obama set out to do what he promised to do. "What is this," they asked?

 

An echo from the Nazarene synagogue: "What is this? A new teaching -- with authority" is what the congregation 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.

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 Nazarenes' 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) 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 that, in John's view, had sprung directly from the eternal
λογος 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 the 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 αγαπη, i.e. love that does not seek to possess but to be possessed. 

 
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 45 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 dose.
 
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 escalation of the Vietnam war, draft resistance, the battle for reproductive rights, the curse of the Moral Majority, Reaganomics and the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq.   

 

 


� Copyright 2013, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.


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