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"Identity"

            Jesus launches his public ministry with an audacious claim that immediately calls us to evaluate who he is and to decide how we will relate to him. He also invites us to embrace his vision of God’s kingdom as open to all, on the basis of God’s sovereign grace, not because one group is more worthy or entitled to it than others.

 

            Baseball manager Ted Lyons once joked that he was up to bat in the ninth inning one day, when he “hit a pop fly so high that the fans got tired of waiting for it to come down. So, they all went home and listened to it drop by turning on the radio.”

 

            Everybody gets tired of waiting sometimes, whether it’s children waiting for Christmas morning so they can tear open the presents under the tree or commuters waiting for traffic to move or a family awaiting a soldier’s return from the battlefield or even waiting in line for our turn to place a fast-food order.

 

            The people of Jesus’ day had done a lot of waiting, too. It had been 400 years since the Israelites had heard God speak through a prophet.

 

            So when Jesus came to his hometown synagogue in Nazareth and read that God had anointed someone “to bring good news to the poor,” and “to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,”1 it must have tasted like cool water to people who had been dying of thirst in the desert.

 

            The passage Jesus read from Isaiah promising a Messiah was probably a favorite for many of them. It would have stirred every nationalistic bone in their bodies. Could their liberation from Roman bondage really be at hand?

 

            If only Jesus had stuck to the script on the teleprompter and told them what they wanted to hear!

 

            But Jesus then said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

 

People react to Jesus’ claims about his identity

 

            What? Was he really claiming to be the fulfillment of God’s messianic promise? Wasn’t he just the son of a local carpenter? Who did he think he was? How could he make such an audacious claim? Didn’t he know his place?

 

            Where did he get such cheekiness? they wondered.

            They couldn’t accept that Jesus was not only Joseph’s boy, but that he was also the Promised One, especially after Jesus declined to do in his hometown any of the things they had heard he had done in nearby Capernaum. Jesus wasn’t interested in having people follow him simply because he could do wonderful things.

 

            According to John’s Gospel, crowds followed Jesus because they saw the signs he did. Some believed in Jesus because of the signs, but others refused to believe, no matter how many signs he performed. Even after he fed 5,000 people with five barley rolls and two fish, people complained that he hadn’t given them enough proof of his divine origin.

 

            When Jesus was arrested and arraigned before Herod, the king wanted to see him perform some sign, but Jesus would not comply. God doesn’t reward unbelievers, rebels or mockers.

 

            Jesus taught his disciples not to cast their “pearls before swine” or “give what is holy to dogs”2 who couldn’t appreciate a sacred gift, and the people of Nazareth might well have perceived his refusal to do for them what he had done for others as an insult. Why shouldn’t his hometown get in on the action? Mark tells us that “they took offense at him,” adding that Jesus “could do no deed of power [in Nazareth], except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and cured them. And he was amazed at their unbelief.”3

 

People react to Jesus’ description of god’s kingdom

            Jesus’ listeners in Nazareth might have accepted his claim to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s messianic prophecy if he had told them what they wanted to believe about themselves: that they were God’s favorites, more worthy than others.

 

            But then Jesus dropped bombshells about how the prophets Elijah and Elisha, acting on God’s authority, did not confine God’s mercies to the nation of Israel, but extended blessings to religious and ethnic outsiders. Jesus used their own scriptures to quash their expectations that they were owed special privileges because of their religious or ethnic identity. Neither should we expect special favors from God just because we were raised in a Christian culture.

 

            Elijah prophesied that God would withhold rain from Israel for three and a half years. God sent him to a widow in the Gentile town of Zarephath. Though she and her son were on the brink of starvation, she gave the last of her provisions to feed and house Elijah. They never went hungry after that. Later, the woman’s son got sick and died, and Elijah prayed, restoring the child to life.

 

            Elisha prescribed effective treatment for the skin disease of Naaman, the commander of the Syrian army, which kidnapped and enslaved Israelites.

 

            Widows were not at the top of the ladder in terms of status in that society, and lepers didn’t even have a place on the ladder. But mentioning Naaman would have really irked Jesus’ listeners. Not only was he a leper and a foreigner, but he was also an oppressor. Hearing Jesus lift him up as an object of God’s mercy undoubtedly made his listeners think about the cruel Roman occupation under which they were currently living. Was Jesus suggesting that God’s blessings should extend even to them? That was just too much!

            The prophet Jonah also resented God for calling him to preach to his enemies, the brutal Ninevites, because he feared they might repent, and then God would show them mercy they didn’t deserve.

 

            But the extension of the grace of God to all people, whoever they are, is central to Jesus’ message and ministry. It’s found in the Hebrew scriptures as well as in New Testament texts.

 

            In his gospel and its sequel, the book of Acts, Luke frequently wrote about how God’s salvation was large enough to encompass Jew and Gentile. In Acts 10, for example, Peter tells Cornelius, a Roman centurion, and his household, “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every people anyone who fears him and practices righteousness is acceptable to him.”4

 

            Jesus could not accept a narrow, provincial view of God’s kingdom as an exclusive club open to a select few. He saw his true family as much bigger than his biological relatives or neighbors from his hometown, as he said, “Whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.”5

 

            But let’s not kid ourselves that we have somehow outgrown prejudice. We cling to our grudges, just as Jonah and the people of Nazareth did. Jesus’ own disciple, Peter, asked how many times he had to forgive someone before he could call it a day and revert to his habit of self-protection.

 

            But God, whose name is “I am who I am,” is sovereign. God is free to show mercy to whomever he chooses, whether we agree with him or not.

 

            English theologian Matthew Poole wrote that “This is a doctrine the world was never patient to hear. ... We would fain make God a debtor to us. Those of Nazareth think they had as good, if not a better, right to Christ’s miracles than those of Capernaum. ... [but] God bestows his favors on persons in a sovereign way, and sometimes upon the most unlikely.”6

 

How will we respond?

 

            The Nazarenes were ready to throw Jesus off a cliff and stone him for daring to preach a message that God will show compassion to whomever God chooses to show compassion.

 

            What about us? Will we hear Jesus’ challenge as an opportunity for us to grow in grace, or will we look for a cross on which to hang him when his message hits too close to home?

 

            How big is our God’s grace? Do we see it as expansive and inclusive, or as limited to ourselves and our kind?

 

            Do we resent God or get mad when God doesn’t do what we want him to do? Are we serving God, or do we expect God to serve us? Who’s Master around here? Do we feel entitled to God’s blessings and demand that God limit his mercy to people we think should be objects of his grace?

            Corrie ten Boom7 and her father and sister were Dutch Christians who hid many Jews from the Nazis during World War II. They were caught and imprisoned at Ravensbrück. Her father and sister didn’t survive, but due to a clerical error, she was released one week before all the women in her age group were sent to the gas chamber.

 

            After the war, Corrie spoke in Munich about God’s forgiveness. At the end of the program, a balding heavyset man thanked her for her message. He said he had been a guard at Ravensbrück during the war but had become a Christian since then. He said he knew that God had forgiven him for the cruel things he did there, but he wanted to know if Corrie would forgive him as well.

 

            As soon as Corrie saw the man, she recognized him, and memories of their suffering at his hands flooded her mind. Could she really forgive a man who had been her archenemy? She knew it was not in her own heart to do so. She prayed for the power to forgive as Jesus forgave his murderers.

 

            As she reached out her hand, she felt a current of healing spread through her body, as she cried, “I forgive you, brother! With all my heart!”

 

            I pray that Jesus won’t pass through our midst and go on his way to minister to others, leaving us untouched by his mercy.

 

            May God deliver us from any sense of superiority or attitude of unforgiveness that may linger in our hearts, so that we may join with Christ in his ministry to the widows, lepers and foreigners of our own time and place.

 

 

1 Luke 4:16-19.

2 Matthew 7:6.

3 Mark 6:1-6.

4 Acts 10:34-35.

5 Matthew 12:46-50.

6 Matthew Poole, Matthew Poole’s Commentary on the Holy Bible (3 vols.), 1853, https://www.logos.com/product/8517/matthew-pooles-commentary-on-the-holy-bible.

7 Corrie ten Boom, “Corrie ten Boom on Forgiveness,” Guideposts, November 1972, https://guideposts.org/positive-living/guideposts-classics-corrie-ten-boom-forgiveness/.

 

 

 

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