Great Expectations

To understand what’s going on in this week’s portion, we first have to go back to last week’s lectionary Gospel reading, which is the first half of what Luke created as a unified story.  It’s the story of what happened when Jesus taught in the synagogue in his hometown, Nazareth.  Luke is an astute storyteller, so it’s important to bring the chopped-up halves back together to avoid distorting either half.

Not to give too much away: the synagogue is initially amazed and admiring of the teaching Jesus offered that Sabbath morning, but then by the end of one long paragraph, it was enraged enough to try to throw him off a cliff. 

As the story begins, Jesus has returned to Galilee shortly after his baptism, and has been teaching on Sabbaths in the synagogues in the nearby towns and villages.  The response has been very positive: Jesus has been praised by everyone.  This particular Sabbath, Jesus is at the synagogue in Nazareth, where he grew up. 

Getting a fuller picture of how this moment would have unfolded helped me get clearer about what happened that morning.  Sabbath services were open to at least all the town’s men, but inside the synagogue, distinctions were clearly made between those who had more power and esteem and those who had less.  The important people would be sitting on benches along the walls; the common people would be sitting on the floor, on flagstones, or perhaps on dirt. Those who would be leading prayers, reading, or speaking during the service would be sitting on a small raised platform, the bema.  Scrolls of the Books of Moses and of the writings of the prophets were stored in a special cabinet on the platform and were brought out with ceremony at the ritually appropriate moment— which was well into the morning’s service. 

Jesus is handed a scroll to read: it’s the portion given for the day, not one he chose for himself.  This passage is from the writings of Isaiah the prophet.  Jesus unrolls the scroll, finds his place, and begins reading:

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 go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

He ritually ties up the scroll, hands it to the attendant, then sits down and begins speaking to the gathered people saying,  “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Putting Luke’s account into a fuller context of Jewish worship practices shifted my picture of what happened that day.  Jesus standing up, reading from the synagogue’s scroll, and then sitting down to speak signifies that Jesus is understood and accepted as a Jewish rabbi.  The people in the synagogue space are listening to Jesus as someone with rabbinic authority.  And more than that, those gathered are at this point are extremely positive and approving in their response.  Here is a young hometown man who has become a rabbi: he can not only read scripture—and read it well, but can also discourse on it fluently, in a way that they find quite impressive. 

And I’ll suggest here that Jesus did not give a one-line teaching, as that would surely not have been impressive enough to earn such glowing reviews: in fact, it would have been quite strange.  I expect he gave a teaching, maybe the length of this one, in which he had much to say about interpreting the passage, and how it linked to other passages of Jewish scripture.

The text that Jesus read from was Isaiah 61:1-2.  This was an important text for Jewish communities during that troubled time of Roman occupation.  They hear the Isaiah passage as people who, even the most established among them, are themselves oppressed and their future insecure. 

 Many had lost the land that had belonged to their families for generations and which had provided their only livelihood.  Even those who were not in actual peonage/slavery were deeply in debt and at constant risk of losing what little security they still had.  Almost all of them were closer to bondage than they were to freedom.  They are heart-broken and also bitter about how the nation promised by God to their forefathers is now conquered, occupied, and profaned by a predatory Roman empire.

The Isaiah passage is one of hope for them.  For them, it is was a prophetic account that promises God’s acting through God’s anointed one to bring Israel consolation, reward, returned prosperity and freedom, all as a result of the anointed one utterly destroying  Israel’s enemies.

In his teaching, Jesus claims the anointing, that is, he claims the role of Messiah.  And the people themselves may well have been asking themselves, “Is HE the one who is to come?   Is this the one for whom we have been watching and praying?” 

Because this is what the people were hoping for, it is also what they initially heard.  Then something happens: the minds of the people turn quite sour. 

What happened? 

It was helpful for me to know that, after Jesus’ teaching, there is an additional time of prayer before the service ends.  At the core of this period is a time of silent prayer.  Then as worship closes, the group shifts to a less formal time together: and this would be when the rest of this story of their interaction with Jesus unfolds.  It’s only during this informal time that there’d be conversation back and forth between the people themselves, and also between the people and Jesus. 

There are parallel accounts of this Nazareth incident in the gospels of both Mark and Matthew.  As in Luke, these accounts describe the initial responses as very admiring and approving , though only Luke has details about the content of Jesus’ teaching that morning.   What Mark and Matthew do have are brief descriptions of the moment when the things seem to turn nasty. 

In their account, after the time of admiration, the crowd is now quoted as saying, “Where did this man get all this?” “Where did this wisdom teaching come from?”  [might sound like, “Wait a goll-darn minute here!”]   It seems clear that something that they’ve heard from Jesus isn’t what they’d thought it was.

Or, I suspect in this case, it’s something that they did NOT hear from Jesus that has utterly changed their hearts.  As I said, the people in Nazareth would have known this passage of promise in Isaiah very well.   They would have noticed, though perhaps not until the prayer time after Jesus’ teaching, that Jusus’ reading of the Isaiah text was missing a line at the end of the second verse.  In fact, it was missing perhaps their favorite line.  It reads:

• to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, [a line Jesus read]
• and the Day of Vengeance of our God.” [which he did not]. 

For the Israelite people like these in Nazareth, hard-pressed on every side, the hope for God’s Messiah includes the expectation that God will bring a Day of Vengeance upon the Roman Empire that continues to crush the life out of God’s faithful people.  Though they initially admired Jesus’ teaching, his dropping the idea of a Day of God’s Vengeance now no longer fits the profile they’ve been carrying.  NOW, they begin asking each other not only: “What crazy teaching IS this?” but also “Who does THIS guy think he is, anyway?  He’s just the carpenter’s son.  We know that family—his brothers, his sisters; they all live down the street; they’re nobody special.”

Jesus feels the closing and hardening of their hearts, their loss of faith in him.  While he tried to perform the kinds of “mighty works” he had been performing in other towns, their lack of faith prevented him.

Jesus’ response is to remind them of two stories that would have been more familiar to them than they are to us.  In the context of all that had happened that morning in Nazareth, they would have taken on a subversive and inflammatory meaning.  The first is about an act of Elijah, the most honored of the early prophets of Israel.  Because the scriptures tell that Elijahhad never died but instead had been taken to the heavens by a chariot of fire, his coming to earth again was anticipated as the beginning of the awaited messianic times.  So accounts of what Elijah said and did carried great weight. 

The story Jesus tells is of when God sends his prophet Elijah to a particular widow living in a small village outside Sidon.  At that time, Yahweh had turned away his grace from Israel because Israelite kings had been marrying foreign women, and building altars and temples to their false God,  Ba’al.  Exasperated, God had allowed no rain to fall throughout the region for over three years, resulting in wide-spread famine.  What’s important to know about Sidon is that not only was it not within the boundaries of Israel, but it could actually be said to be Ground Zero for Ba’al worship.  In fact, the Israelite king’s Ba-al–worshiping wife, Jezebel, was the daughter of Sidon’s king.  But it’s in SIDON that Elijah miraculously provides a widow’s store of ground meal and pressed oil would be replenished enough to see her and her son through the famine. 

Jesus’s way of reminding the people of the story seems deliberately provocative.  He says:

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 no one of them except to a widow in Sidon.

And Jesus’ second story was very similar, except it comes at a later point when Yahweh is not unhappy with the kings of Israel.  In this story, the prophet Elisha, heals Naaman the Syrian of leprosy, though there were also many suffering from leprosy in Israel, none of whom was healed. 

Now Naaman was not just any Syrian: he was the commanding general of the Assyrian army.  Again, the story is about Yahweh’s blessing going not to people of Israel, no matter how worthy, but to a non-worshipper who would be counted as an enemy of Israel. 

It’s hard to frame a comparison to our times in the United States that would be comparable: Maybe it would be as if our worst national nightmare had somehow come true 50 years ago, the Russians had conquered the United States, and after making life a living hell, a spiritual leader was telling stories of God’s blessings going to the conquering Russians and to us as occupied Americans. 

These stories so enraged the people of Nazareth that they got up and drove Jesus to the edge of town, where they intended to throw him off a cliff.  But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

So what can we take away from this passage?

I don’t think it’s the typical, vaguely anti-Semitic interpretation that the Nazareth Israelites are simply too blind and too close-minded to accept Jesus, dismissing him just on the basis of his being a hometown man of low status.  By the end, what seems at stake has become far more than dismissiveness of a hometown boy.   

I suspect that for them, as for us now as we try to interpret this passage, how Jesus is understood has everything to do with who we believe God is, and what we believe salvation is. 

The Nazareth synagogue believed that Yahweh was a God of Vengeance and that violent destruction of the Roman occupying military force was the both the sign and the content of God’s expected redeeming actions. 

Jesus instead presented them with an entirely different God than the vengeful Yahweh who would save his people through violence.  He pointed to a God who, even though he had entered into covenant relationship with Israel, was nevertheless ready to grant grace and healing to outsiders and enemies –even sometimes while withholding blessings to Israel.  In telling these stories, Jesus was inviting, in a very provocative way, a radical reversal of expectation of God and of the meaning of salvation. 

I believe that the people of Nazareth were in good faith, authentically and faithfully following Yahweh to the limit of their understanding.  They were true seekers yearning for salvation, both physical and spiritual, for themselves and the people of Israel.  They were trying to keep their families and their hope alive in an underprivileged region of a conquered and occupied country. 

Now a visiting rabbi, a young man who’d grown up nearby, unexpectedly declares himself the Anointed One of Yahweh and offers two stories from their own scriptures that could well have sounded to them as an assertion that God could not be counted on for deliverance.  It would have been psychologically easier by far to declare this young rabbi to be blaspheming than to assent to the challenge that Jesus’ words represented.  If Jesus’ words were true, where did they have left to stand? 

At the same time, the Christ-nature of Jesus is unconditional love for these individuals.  When I read this passage, I don’t hear Jesus passing judgment on the people of Nazareth: it’s not a stretch to imagine Jesus engaging in this dialogue without any desire to castigate, but only with compassion and encouragement.  What he offered them were the most life-serving words and actions there were to offer them in that moment. 

We can imagine Jesus was offering them a rather wordy kind of Zen koan.  If pondered deeply, it could lead to sudden enlightenment: a way of seeing, as if for the first time, that perhaps they didn’t know what God had in mind nor how God’s salvation worked.  Perhaps their minds and souls could be blown open to the possibility that the God of Israel would act in ways that would not match their predictions, however thoroughly they had studied the prophet, and however much they longed for military vengeance for their oppressors. 

For them, and also for us, the salvation that God offers may not meet our expectations, reward our worthiness, or even respond to our very real needs in the ways we’d like.  For them, as for us, salvation might come in disguises that make it profoundly difficult to recognize.  It might even contradict the beliefs, ideas, and practices that we have shaped our spiritual life around.  And then we, too, might come face-to-face with God’s saving Presence but, because we believed it would be other than it is, fail to recognize it.