Monday of the Third Week of Lent -- March 28, 2011
Luke 4:24 – 30
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “prophets are not accepted in their hometowns. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
We all carry within us assumptions about the way life should be. Those assumptions first began shaping us when we were infants, then children. Our grandparents and parents had their own assumptions, and they passed them on to us.
Further, our social groups and the schools we attended had patterns of behavior that were assumed as normal and expected.
The country in which we were raised assumed certain norms, and we fell into those norms, for the most part, without question.
Jesus, in the Gospels, undercut some of the most basic assumptions the “religious” people of his time carried . . . assumptions about how life is ordered, about what is important, and about who God is.
Could I say it this way? Jesus is trying to give us a different set of assumptions. What we have carried to the present from infancy and childhood may have been fine and appropriate for a particular season of our lives, but to continue living in those same patterns keeps us from growing up spiritually. In that sense, I believe most of us have a spirituality that is stunted, that has not matured commensurate to our chronological age.
I think Jesus intended to offer us a new way of being in the world for God.
Let me use this Gospel passage as an example. Most religious people of Jesus’ time had clear-cut ideas about who was “inside” and who was “outside” God’s favor. Jesus reversed those assumptions, continually eating with outsiders, speaking God’s blessing upon sinners and outcasts, and loving those looked down upon by the most pious people of his day.
He mentioned the prophet Elijah, revered in Jewish religion, who followed God’s leading to a non-Jewish widow during a period of famine.
And he referred to Naaman, a Syrian king who suffered from leprosy and was healed by the prophet Elisha despite Naaman’s bull-headed resistance to Elisha’s directives. The healing of this outsider could be attributed only to God’s grace, because Naaman resisted the healing at every turn.
[The story of Elisha’s encounter with Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1 – 15 is the Old Testament passage for today. It would be worth your time to spend some time with it today.]
The people who heard Jesus speak these words were indignant that he used the examples of two foreigners who were recipients of God’s grace. They did nothing to earn God’s generosity, and in some ways, resisted it; nevertheless, God poured goodness and healing upon them.
These people who heard Jesus were so offended by his words, they wanted to kill him immediately.
In most all of us there is a self-serving, self-interested impulse that wants to believe that we are insiders and others are outsiders. We call it family loyalty or patriotism . . . or on another level, racism or bigotry.
There is something neat and orderly about knowing who is “in” and who is “out.” I still shake my head over the words of a lady who professed to be a Christian, saying, “If everybody else is going to be in heaven, I don’t think I want to go.” I guess it only feels right to be “in” if there are others who are “out.”
But that’s just one more assumed pattern Jesus sought to reshape.
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “prophets are not accepted in their hometowns. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
We all carry within us assumptions about the way life should be. Those assumptions first began shaping us when we were infants, then children. Our grandparents and parents had their own assumptions, and they passed them on to us.
Further, our social groups and the schools we attended had patterns of behavior that were assumed as normal and expected.
The country in which we were raised assumed certain norms, and we fell into those norms, for the most part, without question.
Jesus, in the Gospels, undercut some of the most basic assumptions the “religious” people of his time carried . . . assumptions about how life is ordered, about what is important, and about who God is.
Could I say it this way? Jesus is trying to give us a different set of assumptions. What we have carried to the present from infancy and childhood may have been fine and appropriate for a particular season of our lives, but to continue living in those same patterns keeps us from growing up spiritually. In that sense, I believe most of us have a spirituality that is stunted, that has not matured commensurate to our chronological age.
I think Jesus intended to offer us a new way of being in the world for God.
Let me use this Gospel passage as an example. Most religious people of Jesus’ time had clear-cut ideas about who was “inside” and who was “outside” God’s favor. Jesus reversed those assumptions, continually eating with outsiders, speaking God’s blessing upon sinners and outcasts, and loving those looked down upon by the most pious people of his day.
He mentioned the prophet Elijah, revered in Jewish religion, who followed God’s leading to a non-Jewish widow during a period of famine.
And he referred to Naaman, a Syrian king who suffered from leprosy and was healed by the prophet Elisha despite Naaman’s bull-headed resistance to Elisha’s directives. The healing of this outsider could be attributed only to God’s grace, because Naaman resisted the healing at every turn.
[The story of Elisha’s encounter with Naaman in 2 Kings 5:1 – 15 is the Old Testament passage for today. It would be worth your time to spend some time with it today.]
The people who heard Jesus speak these words were indignant that he used the examples of two foreigners who were recipients of God’s grace. They did nothing to earn God’s generosity, and in some ways, resisted it; nevertheless, God poured goodness and healing upon them.
These people who heard Jesus were so offended by his words, they wanted to kill him immediately.
In most all of us there is a self-serving, self-interested impulse that wants to believe that we are insiders and others are outsiders. We call it family loyalty or patriotism . . . or on another level, racism or bigotry.
There is something neat and orderly about knowing who is “in” and who is “out.” I still shake my head over the words of a lady who professed to be a Christian, saying, “If everybody else is going to be in heaven, I don’t think I want to go.” I guess it only feels right to be “in” if there are others who are “out.”
But that’s just one more assumed pattern Jesus sought to reshape.
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