Monday of the Third Week of Lent - March 4, 2013
Monday of the Third Week of Lent
Luke 4:24 – 30
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 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.
There is a part of each person’s make-up attributable to cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning includes belief systems that come from the groups with which we identify. We hold certain beliefs about country, race, gender, religious values, and so on. Especially around nation and religious belief, we can easily view ourselves as right and others as wrong. We see issues from the perspective of “our good” and not the good of the whole.
For instance, we look after “American interests” around the world, even if doing so violates the interests of other nations and peoples.
The Gospel today records an incident where Jesus leaned into two stories from the Hebrew scriptures where non-Israelites received the grace and mercy of God. The crowd went from acclaiming him a hometown hero, to running him out of town at the threat of death. To these Israelites, the story celebrated outsiders, not human beings.
Then – as today – we can be unwilling to open ourselves to those outside “our group” . . . and unwilling to accept the other as a part of God’s vibrant world.
Luke 4:24 – 30
“Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 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.
There is a part of each person’s make-up attributable to cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning includes belief systems that come from the groups with which we identify. We hold certain beliefs about country, race, gender, religious values, and so on. Especially around nation and religious belief, we can easily view ourselves as right and others as wrong. We see issues from the perspective of “our good” and not the good of the whole.
For instance, we look after “American interests” around the world, even if doing so violates the interests of other nations and peoples.
The Gospel today records an incident where Jesus leaned into two stories from the Hebrew scriptures where non-Israelites received the grace and mercy of God. The crowd went from acclaiming him a hometown hero, to running him out of town at the threat of death. To these Israelites, the story celebrated outsiders, not human beings.
Then – as today – we can be unwilling to open ourselves to those outside “our group” . . . and unwilling to accept the other as a part of God’s vibrant world.
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