October 30, 2005

A Disturbing Revelation

Luke 4:14-28

“All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this” (Luke 4:28).
When someone preaches a sermon that incites the congregation to try to kill him, one can safely conjecture that the preacher has touched a sensitive nerve. Such it was for Jesus when He delivered His first sermon to His own people in His hometown. His listeners, who initially praised Him, became so furious that they seized Him and tried to throw Him over a cliff. What was it that Jesus said to precipitate such a spasm of spontaneous mob violence?

Jesus dared to challenge some deeply-rooted and long-treasured notions about God. In His reading and exposition of the Scripture, He began a critique of Judaism’s theology of what Rene Girard calls ‘sacred violence.’ Furthermore, He called into question their deeply rooted sense of religious elitism as God’s chosen people. He opened up an entirely new way of perceiving the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob—so radical that the good folk of Nazareth could not handle it.

I. Texts that Explode

Luke begins his narrative with the observation that Jesus “went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him” (Luke 4:16-17). As the duly appointed reader for that Sabbath day service, He could have turned to any number of prophetic passages that would have incited paroxysms of nationalistic fervor, and that would have fired their lust for vengeance upon their enemies, particularly the hated Roman oppressors; texts such as:

“See, the day of the Lord is coming—a cruel day, with wrath and fierce anger—to make the land desolate and destroy the sinners within it” (Isaiah 13:9). Like John the Baptist, His prophetic forerunner, Jesus could have tapped into a long line of prophetic denunciation and militant Messianic fervor, but He did not.

Instead Jesus turned to an entirely different sort of passage, a text that anticipated the coming suffering servant of God. It is not so much what Jesus read that caused His listeners to sit up straight, as what He did not read:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
Because he has anointed me
To preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for
the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor . . . (Luke 4:18-19; Isaiah 61:1-2a).

Jesus stopped abruptly in mid-sentence. He “rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.” There was something definitive, decisive, and intentional about His actions. Luke relates that, “The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him” (vv. 20-21). Why such focused attention? Why such breathless anticipation? Was it His choice of Scripture? Or was there something about what He didn’t read that troubled them?

There were undoubtedly some in Jesus’ audience well-versed in that particular prophetic passage, since it spoke so directly to their Messianic yearning and expectation. They could not help but notice that Jesus did not finish the text. He failed to deliver the prophetic punch line. He cut off His reading before He got to the key phrase that represented an important dimension of His listeners’ Messianic expectations. What Jesus did not read was a vital component of the entire prophetic oracle, deeply inscribed upon His listener’s collective psyche. He did not read the phrase that announced, “the day of the vengeance of our God” (Isaiah 61:1-2).

What? No vengeance? What could have possibly constituted “good news to the poor” other than that they would not only become rich but would have the satisfaction of seeing the rich bankrupted? What satisfaction would there be in being “released from captivity” apart from seeing tyrants knocked off their thrones and locked up in those selfsame jails? What joy would there be in no longer being “downtrodden” if they were not going to grind the faces of the oppressors into the dirt? After all, what about divine retribution? Punishment? Balancing the scales of justice? Was this glaring omission accidental or deliberate? What we have here is:

II. Jesus’ radically repaints Israel’s popular portrait of God.

After closing the book, Jesus began His exposition of the text by saying, “Today this scripture [of the Lord’s favor] is fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21). The entire sweep of Jesus’ life and death makes it abundantly clear that His selection and editing of Isaiah’s servant hymn was not accidental but intentional, and that it reflected a whole new way of thinking about God. What Jesus was beginning, in this inaugural sermon, was nothing short of an entirely new re-write of Jewish theology. It would not be ‘off the wall’ but drawn, for the most part, from their sacred Scriptures. The good news that Jesus came to disclose and proclaim was nothing less than an exhilarating new revelation of God’s fundamental character, a redefinition of His essential nature, and an unimaginably sweeping recasting of God’s gracious purposes, not only for the Jews but all humankind. It would be the fulfillment of the ancient covenant given to Abraham that “all the peoples on earth will be blessed through you” (Genesis 12:3).

To reinforce the fact that He intentionally amended the text from Isaiah, Jesus lifted out of their Scriptures two examples of God’s rich mercy and boundless favor to the most unlikely sort of people. There were any number of noble patriots, people of valor, and mighty heroes of faith in Israel’s long history He could have eulogized, but He bypassed them all. Instead He focused attention on two obscure people, both idol-worshiping foreigners, mentioned almost in passing. The first could not have possibly been more offensive to His Jewish listeners:

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 (Luke 4:25-26; see 1 Kings 17:1-24).

There were several reprehensible aspects about this particular example. First, Jesus drew special attention to a woman, something no self-respecting rabbi would do. In all patriarchal societies of that day, women were second-class citizens, totally subordinate to their fathers, brothers, and husbands. They were denied an education, a voice or vote in any public assembly, or redress of grievances in a court of law. They had no civil rights. They could not own property or refuse the husband selected for them by their fathers. Unlike their husbands, wives could not marry more than one man or initiate divorce. Women’s roles were narrowly proscribed and limited to domestic duties. There were no women present in the synagogue on the day when Jesus read and expounded the Scripture, for they were forbidden to read, hear, or discuss the Hebrew Scriptures. Neither could they offer public prayer. (See C. S. Cowles, A Woman's Place? Leadership in the Church, chapter 2, for a full discussion of the role and status of women in ancient Israel and among the Jews of Jesus' day.)

Second, this woman was a widow. Among women, widows were the most to be pitied. With no father to protect them or husband to provide home and sustenance, they were vulnerable and defenseless. Their deceased husband’s property did not pass on to them, but to their sons. If their sons died, as was the case for this widow of Zarephath, their property could be seized by their husband’s next of kin, and they would be left with nothing. That is why the widow who had taken Elijah in as a boarder cried out in such distress, “Did you come to remind me of my sin and kill my son?” (1 Kings 17:18). Bereft of her son, she could lose her house and be reduced to homeless vagrancy. Widows were totally marginalized in Jewish society and believed to be cursed by God. Even today in many parts of India, widows are routinely thrown onto their deceased husband’s burning funeral pyres as they have been for thousands of years. It is of more than passing interest to note that the early church’s first compassionate ministry was directed to the care of destitute widows (Acts 6:1ff).

Finally, and most problematic for patriotic and pious Jews, this widow was a pagan Sidonian. Jewish antipathy toward Sidonians had a long history. Sidon was the eldest son of Canaan, who in turn was the eldest son of Ham, Noah’s youngest son. Because of an act of indiscretion on Ham’s part, Noah placed a curse not on Ham, but oddly on Ham’s oldest son, Canaan. It was a curse that would be binding upon him and upon all of his descendants forever (Genesis 9:20-27). This provided justification, in part, for a later generation of Israelites under Joshua’s leadership to attempt to exterminate systematically the inhabitants of the land of Canaan, history’s first known case of genocide, or ‘ethnic cleansing’ as it has come to be called. They had no moral qualms about such a horrendous deed in that the Canaanites were under a curse anyway and thus expendable. The Sidonians escaped annihilation only because Asher, the tribe charged with completing the conquest of TransJordan, failed to wipe them out utterly (Joshua 13:4-6; 19:24-34). Not only did the descendants of Sidon survive but their mission was to keep Baal worship alive in their territory.

Sidon was the nation that produced the most infamous woman in Israel’s history. Jezebel, king Ahab’s wife, was the “daughter of Ethbaal king of the Sidonians” (1 Kings 16:31). She opened wide the flood-gates of Baal worship and tried to annihilate all the prophets of Israel. Jezebel’s name in Hebrew means “dung.” Phyllis Trible notes that “No woman (or man) in the Hebrew Scriptures endures a more hostile press than Jezebel.” (Phyllis Trible, “Exegesis for Storytellers and Other Strangers,” Journal of Biblical Literature 114 (1995), 4.) One of the strangest ironies of the Elijah narratives is that the prophet’s career was bracketed between two Sidonian women; the poor widow who took him in and Jezebel who sought to do him in.

It did not sit well with Jesus’ listeners to be reminded that it was a Baal-worshiping Sidonian widow who offered the prophet of God water and a morsel of bread. Even less did they want to hear that she was the one who, because of her faithful obedience to Elijah’s word, became a recipient of the Lord’s gracious miracle of continuing sustenance. Though there were undoubtedly many widows’ sons in Israel who died in childhood during the great famine and left their mothers bereft, it was not these but a hated foreigner and idolater who experienced one of the greatest supernatural miracles of mercy recorded in the Scriptures. In response to Elijah’s fervent prayer, God raised her dead son back to life (1 Kings 17:22).

Clearly, the God testified to in the Hebrew Scriptures is no respecter of gender, social status, religion, or nationality. He cares about women. He is especially attentive to widows. He has boundless compassion not only on the ‘chosen’ but on those who are not. Noah may have cursed the Sidonians through Canaan but God did not. Though despised by the Israelites they were precious in His sight, worthy of His favor, and recipients of His miracle-working power. One virulent, anti-Yahwist, Sidonian woman does not doom all other Sidonian women and children to extermination.

III. Jesus Opens a New Window into the Heart of God

The second example Jesus lifted out of their Scriptures was also a most unlikely individual. Naaman, like the Sidonian widow, had three strikes against him (2 Kings 5:1-14). First he was a Syrian. The Israelites and Syrians shared a common ancestry traceable to the Patriarchs, whose wives were from the land of Haran (Aram in Hebrew) as Syria was then known. They also spoke the same language, Aramaic. Yet the two nations had been locked in conflict for generations.

Second, Naaman was a military officer. In all likelihood he was responsible for many of the attacks that had been carried out against Israelites during the time of Elisha. The irony of the Naaman story is that it was his wife’s maid, a Hebrew girl taken captive by Naaman’s troops on a raid into Israelite territory, who told the commander about Elisha and his miracle-working powers.

Third and most repugnantly, Naaman was a leper. Lepers were not only totally excluded from society, but were believed to have been cursed by God. Thus they were totally outside the boundaries of human compassion and divine consideration. It would have been beyond the power of Jesus’ contemporaries ever to imagine a foreign, idolatrous leper as recipient of God’s favor. Yet, as Jesus reminded His listeners, even though “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” (Luke 4:27).

Reflecting the nondiscriminatory heart of God, Jesus not only healed lepers but went to the unprecedented and foolhardy extreme of reaching out and touching them, thus contaminating himself with the leper’s curse. Since Mosaic law dictated that anyone who touched a leper must remain outside the camp for 30 days, “Jesus could no longer publicly enter a city, but stayed out in unpopulated areas” (Mark 1:40-45). Jesus so identified with lepers in their horrifying state that He gladly embraced the curse of their exclusion and exile. In so doing, He gave dramatic proof of God’s boundless compassion for society’s most repulsive outcasts. That gesture demonstrated, in a socially reprehensible and utterly reckless way, that lepers and other social misfits were deeply loved by God. In healing them Jesus undercut the long-standing belief that leprosy, as Moses assumed, was a direct consequence of sin. Instead of being cursed by God, they were blessed. Instead of being rejected, they were accepted. Instead of being excluded, they were embraced within the circle of God’s boundless care.

In lifting up these two foreigners as exhibits of “the favorable year of the Lord” (Luke 4:1), Jesus was in effect turning Isaiah’s prophecy on its head. When we look at the extended context of the servant psalm read by Jesus (Isaiah 61:1-3a), it is clear that the prophet envisions a Messianic age of blessedness for the people of God at the expense of pagan nations such as Sidon and Syria. The “day of the Lord” anticipated by Isaiah would have been one in which the tables would be turned. The Messiah would knock the proud and powerful off their thrones and exalt the perennially downtrodden, oppressed, and harassed Israelites. Not only would Jerusalem become the capital city of the world, but the nations would come to the despised and oft-humiliated Jews on bended knee.

Jesus, however, turned the text inside out. The “everlasting light” (Isaiah 60:19) that brought sustenance and resurrection bypassed Israel’s many widows and fell instead upon a pagan foreigner. The “glory of the Lord” (Isaiah 60:1-2) withheld from Elisha’s countrymen was revealed to a despised enemy. Included among those who “will be called priests of the Lord” and “named ministers of our God” (Isaiah 61:6) will be not only Jews but people from all the nations.

This was too much for the solid citizens of Nazareth. They were not ready to hear about a God who bears no grudge toward the historic enemies of the Israelites, who has no interest in balancing the scales of justice by an avalanche of destructive wrath, and who makes no distinction between men and women, married and widowed, Jew and Gentile, friend and enemy. They could not comprehend a God whose love is boundless, whose care includes the lowliest of women and the smallest pagan child, and whose healing touch reaches and embraces even untouchables.

Obviously something had to be done about this rebel son, this prophetic interloper, this unorthodox heretic, who dared to take such interpretive liberties with their sacred Scriptures. Consequently, “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 down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way” (4:28-30).

Jesus would “lift the veil” that had prevented His generation from comprehending the magnanimous scope of God’s love disclosed in their Scriptures. He would pull aside the curtain that had for so long hidden God’s love and acceptance that would embrace the nations, until the whole earth would be filled with the “glory of the Lord” (Isaiah 60:1-2; 2 Corinthians 3:14-18).

The hand that struck the shackles from the bruised and bloody limbs of British slaves was the hand of a hunchback. A slight, elfish, and grotesquely misshapen figure, William Wilberforce compensated for his handicap by acquiring a singular graciousness and charm of manner. He succeeded so well in this that he was elected to Parliament where he served with distinction for 30 years. “I saw a shrimp mount the House of Commons table,” recalled Boswell; “but, as I listened, he grew and grew until the shrimp became a whale!” Under the urgency of his passionate pleading for the slave, his craggy face becomes that of an angel.

The wellspring of the most important social reformer in English history was the moment at 26 when he was seized with agonizing conviction, and cried out, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” In an instant he received the assurance of sins forgiven. “What infinite love,” he later testified, “that Christ should die to save such a sinner as I!”

Deeply troubled by what John Wesley called “that most vile of all social institutions,” Wilberforce dedicated his life to work aggressively to end the iniquitous British slave trade. During the 18th century alone, British ships transported a million slaves from Africa to Jamaica. After 20 years of incessant struggle, he succeeded in getting Parliament to abolish the slave trade throughout Great Britain.

Not content with half measures, Wilberforce then ceaselessly agitated for their emancipation. While he lay dying in 1833, a messenger brought word that the slaves had been set free. “I have nothing now to plead,” he whispered, “but the poor publican’s prayer, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner.’”