Why is a prophet not honored in his hometown? This Sunday, the Gospel reading is from Luke, Chapter 4, in which Jesus is rejected in his hometown of Nazareth.
Was it merely a case of familiarity breeding contempt? Or was something more going on here?
Let’s take a look at the verses specified in the Lectionary:
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“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.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Luke 4:16-21
So far, so good - Jesus was accustomed to going to the synagogue on the sabbath and we can infer from the Scripture that it was also his custom to read from Scripture from time to time since someone handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He proceeded to read from Isaiah 61:1-2 and then sat down. Everyone was watching him - why?
Looking back before this passage we can find the suggestion of an answer. Prior to this, Jesus had been baptized by John and then was tempted in the wilderness. When he emerged from this trial, he began his ministry in earnest and we learn that:
Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
Luke 4:14-15
Surely the people of Nazareth had heard of the wonders that Jesus was working and were expecting something. When he told them that Isaiah’s prophecy had been fulfilled that day when he read from the scroll, they may have been of two minds. First, as we see in the following verse, they may have been wondering how this home town boy had exceeded all reasonable expectations. “Is this not Joseph’s son?” they asked — wondering how someone with whom they were familiar could say such a thing. Then again, some of them may have recalled the story of David, and how this youngest son was called from watching over sheep to shepherding the kingdom of Israel.
Bradford Bosworth, writing in The Upper Room Disciplines 2019, recounts that when Jesus sat down after saying “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” those last words got him run out town.
Surely that’s right, but I think that the icing on the cake likely came from what Jesus said next (which is part of next Sunday’s Gospel reading):
He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’ ” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, 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 none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”
Luke 4:23-27
Can there be any doubt that his neighbors, having first been challenged by Jesus’s claim to be the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy, felt injured and insulted beyond bearing when he taunted them (to their way of thinking) by telling them that the promised one was not sent exclusively to the chosen people? Luke does away with any doubt in this regard in the very next verses: “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.”
Let’s hear Luke once more — “When they heard this”. While he’s writing about Jesus’s neighbors in Nazareth, he’s also writing about all of us down through ages and right up to today. When we hear that Jesus works wonders, when we read that Jesus answers prayers, we can fall into the same thinking that motivated the good people of Nazareth.
This very thing that draws us near to the transcendent Creator of the universe — his incarnation — can make him so familiar to us that we forget that he has the power to calm the stormy seas or, if we do remember that, we forget that he is the living Word that created the seas. Then we, like the hometown people, can find ourselves growing angry with our “neighbor”, Jesus.
How can he favor those people across town, when my family is struggling financially?
How can he answer the prayers of those people in another city, and fail to cure the cancer of my child?
How can he allow the wrong political party to prevail, when my party is the one that truly worships him?
How can Jesus allow foreigners — non-believers even — to get away with murdering Christians?
And that’s not even considering his “failure” to stop the earthquakes, the hurricanes, the tornadoes and tsunamis from occurring. We want to shout out him —
Do here the miracles you’ve done in other places at other times!
When that cry seems to be unanswered, it challenges our faith. It can even make us angry — angry enough to reject him, can’t it?
The Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark differ from that of St. Luke in recounting the rejection of Jesus in Nazareth. They don’t include the reading from Isaiah nor the words from verse 22a, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth”. The other synoptic Gospel accounts would seem to support the idea that the folks of Nazareth rejected the “hometown boy” simply because they couldn’t wrap their minds around the concept of someone that they knew so intimately being the Promised One predicted by the prophets.
Yet Luke’s account strikes a deeper chord within me. One that resonates with how we might fail to accept the Jesus who desires to meet us on our own level — as one human being to another. As one who became flesh and dwelt among us. As one whom I can fail to remember has other plans and designs that our beyond my understanding.
If anything, Jesus came to teach us that God loves us. That doesn’t mean that we get our own way any more than James and John were able to sit at the right hand or an earthly conqueror. That doesn’t mean that we, like Peter, can persuade him to abandon his Father’s ultimate plan of salvation. But just because we don’t get to demand answers based on own agenda, doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be willing to ask for anything in his name.
The gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark tell us that Jesus did not work many miracles in Nazareth, if any. Maybe that’s because they didn’t expect any wonders from the “hometown boy”.
It wasn’t because he couldn’t do so, but because they couldn’t bring themselves to ask.
What lesson is there in this for us?