Fourth Sunday after Epiphany; 30 January 2022; Epiphany 4C (RCL); Jeremiah 1:4-10; Psalm 71:1-6; 1 Corinthians 13:1-13; Luke 4:21-30.
Last week, we heard Jesus read from the prophet Isaiah, announcing the year of the Lord’s favor (the Jubilee), and then proclaim, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The crowd was amazed, and wondered at the gracious words coming from Jesus’ mouth. These are the first public words of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, so we need to pay close attention to them. The crowd seems to think Jesus is announcing God’s favor on them, but they have another think coming.
The passage as a whole is rather choppy. What does the crowd mean when they say, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son”? Do they mean, local boy made good, or who does he think he is? It can be read both ways. And then Jesus responds with the proverb, “Doctor,heal yourself,” which seems to come out of nowhere. And he goes on to say, “Do here what we have heard you did at Capernaum.” Wait, we haven’t heard anything about what Jesus did at Capernaum. Luke seems to be working really hard, and not very smoothly, to get from the gracious words coming out of Jesus’ mouth announcing the Jubilee, to the crowd’s rage. He hasn’t crafted a very believable transition.
The next paragraph has Jesus telling the crowd that during the time of Elijah and Elisha, God did more for outsiders than insiders. This was during the reigns of Ahab and Jehoram in Israel. Both had hard words for the kings of Israel, and the stories Jesus tells indicated that God favored foreigners more than Israel (the northern kingdom, which had occupied the region now called Samaria and Galilee). At this point, the crowd’s praise has turned to rage, and they try to throw Jesus off a cliff.
Luke seems to want to set up this conflict with the first sermon of Jesus he records, establishing the dynamic that will lead to Jesus’ death right from the outset. Jesus slips through the crowd and journeys on. Luke will use the word for journey over and over again in his Gospel, but particular for Jesus’ progress toward Jerusalem.
In Acts, Luke’s second volume, Paul takes the message of the kingdom, or the year of the Lord’s favor, to the Gentiles. Luke lays the groundwork for that shift right here in his record of Jesus’ first sermon. According to Luke, Jesus had always intended his message for Gentiles, while Matthew and Mark seem to suggest the shift came about after Jesus’ death and with some difficulty (see the story of Jesus and the Syro-phoenician woman — which Luke omits).
Paul, of course, in his letters (particularly Galatians) records his struggles to expand the message of the kingdom to include the Gentiles. His Corinthian community is one of those blended communities which faced its own difficulties living out the message of the kingdom. Paul reports many divisions within the Corinthian community, from who baptized whom, to who spoke in tongues, who prophesied, and who had which gift of the spirit. His hymn to love in chapter 13 is not so much a paean to love as it is a broadside against the behavior of the Corinthian community. Knowledge, prophecy, faith, tongues, all the things they brag about are nothing in comparison to love. And love is the opposite of their boasting.
And in the end, love is knowing and being known, face to face, full-on, no riddles, and being loved and loving anyway. And that love remains.
The congregation at Nazareth expected the year of the Lord’s favor to be good news for them, to elevate them into the position they imagined God had for them. Jesus ruined their expectations by pointing out what God does for others. Paul humbles his Corinthian community by suggesting that God knows exactly who they are, warts and all, and loves them anyway. The kingdom is the hard work of loving one another, and all God’s creation, and knowing that God knows us for who we are, and loves us anyway. This is participation in the divine life, and asks of us true self-assessment and self-love. No wonder the crowd was angry.