Monday of the Third Week of Lent – March 8, 2010
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.
The passage actually begins ahead of these verses. The people of Jesus’ hometown are amazed at the gracious words of Jesus when he reads from the prophet Isaiah. He connects his life and ministry to Isaiah’s long-awaited Messiah. It is likely that, knowing his lineage as Joseph’s son (v. 22, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”), these hometown folks wanted the benefits that come from having greatness nearby. In other words, their kind words about Jesus were self-centered.
In fact, their self-interest rises to the surface as Jesus speaks in the passage above. They have thought of Jesus as a private hero, one who came to bring personal blessings to the hometown folks. Their focus was upon themselves.
Now they hear Jesus speak into their narrowness with two stories from the Hebrew Scriptures that speak to God using non-Jews to bring a kingdom that impacts the entire world, not just Israel. A foreign widow and a foreign military official experienced God’s generosity. The widow was fed. The military official was healed. But the crowd could not celebrate these expressions of God’s grace. At the recounting of these stories, the hometown crowd turned furious.
The narrow nationalism that celebrated Israel’s place with God neglected to imagine that the Chosen People had a mission beyond their borders. In fact, Israel was chosen by God to bring God’s life to all people. Though their focus was upon themselves, God was about something much larger than provincialism.
The tendency in much religious practice is to make life tighter, narrower, and less spacious. We too easily ask, “What’s in this for me?”
“What blessings and benefits will come to me?”
Often churches couch prayer as the way to get things from God. We describe worship in consumer terms, thinking about we’ll get out of it. We talk about the benefits of membership in our church. We promise the personal benefits of being on mission or involved in serving.
Once we get inside a system or institution, it’s easy to lose sight of the wider concerns for which we were created. Rather than growing wider in mission, our vision narrows and grows self-interested. The kingdom of God is re-scaled to the kingdom of us. We lose the capacity to celebrate with hungry foreigners who are fed or leprous foreigners who are healed.
The kingdom God brings, on the other hand, is expansive and inclusive. It welcomes the outsider and extends generosity to those on the underside of life. This kind of expansiveness and inclusivity challenges us through the season of Lent.
"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.
The passage actually begins ahead of these verses. The people of Jesus’ hometown are amazed at the gracious words of Jesus when he reads from the prophet Isaiah. He connects his life and ministry to Isaiah’s long-awaited Messiah. It is likely that, knowing his lineage as Joseph’s son (v. 22, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”), these hometown folks wanted the benefits that come from having greatness nearby. In other words, their kind words about Jesus were self-centered.
In fact, their self-interest rises to the surface as Jesus speaks in the passage above. They have thought of Jesus as a private hero, one who came to bring personal blessings to the hometown folks. Their focus was upon themselves.
Now they hear Jesus speak into their narrowness with two stories from the Hebrew Scriptures that speak to God using non-Jews to bring a kingdom that impacts the entire world, not just Israel. A foreign widow and a foreign military official experienced God’s generosity. The widow was fed. The military official was healed. But the crowd could not celebrate these expressions of God’s grace. At the recounting of these stories, the hometown crowd turned furious.
The narrow nationalism that celebrated Israel’s place with God neglected to imagine that the Chosen People had a mission beyond their borders. In fact, Israel was chosen by God to bring God’s life to all people. Though their focus was upon themselves, God was about something much larger than provincialism.
The tendency in much religious practice is to make life tighter, narrower, and less spacious. We too easily ask, “What’s in this for me?”
“What blessings and benefits will come to me?”
Often churches couch prayer as the way to get things from God. We describe worship in consumer terms, thinking about we’ll get out of it. We talk about the benefits of membership in our church. We promise the personal benefits of being on mission or involved in serving.
Once we get inside a system or institution, it’s easy to lose sight of the wider concerns for which we were created. Rather than growing wider in mission, our vision narrows and grows self-interested. The kingdom of God is re-scaled to the kingdom of us. We lose the capacity to celebrate with hungry foreigners who are fed or leprous foreigners who are healed.
The kingdom God brings, on the other hand, is expansive and inclusive. It welcomes the outsider and extends generosity to those on the underside of life. This kind of expansiveness and inclusivity challenges us through the season of Lent.
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