Jesus said Who?

Jesus said who?

Luke 4:21-30

Jesus returns home and reads, the following from Isaiah (found earlier in Luke 5:18-19)

‘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.’

Then the scripture says that after he rolled it back up, “Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’” And at that moment they were amazed and where even proudly asking “Is this not Joseph’s son?” They were so proud to have a prophet from their town. He could have stopped there with this good news. They did see it as good news even though the year of the Lord’s favor, the year of Jubilee, would require the forgiveness of debts, and who would feed the poor and what about the freed captives? But to this crowd they knew it was about them and their kin. This was Good News. Jesus then says, you will ask me to do what I did in Capernaum, which according to the Gospels was teach and preach on the Sabbath. Matthew’s Gospel goes into some more detail which was that Jesus proclaimed, “Repent for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” The message his cousin John had been preaching along the banks of the Jordon. It was not repent because the Kingdom will come, or repent because the Kingdom had arrived, but a call to simultaneous action. They are intricately dependent on each other. One of my preaching teachers, Matthew Meyer-Boulton, taught that every sermon most have an aspect of a call of repentance and the Good News (the Kingdom of Heaven is at Hand), and why not model Christian preaching after Jesus’.

Jesus was a great preacher and teacher and knew he could not let the sermon just end with that great news of Isaiah’s prophecy being fulfilled. It would had made the meal afterwards much less awkward, but he called them to repentance by bringing up two people that God had saved according to the Hebrew Scriptures, who where not Jewish. I am sure people who had been saying sweetly, is that not Joseph’s son, started saying, “He said Who?! They were the oppressed and the chosen, how could Jesus bring up these stories. They would know these stories, so it was not lost on them that the story of Elijah and the widow includes a story of resurrection (1 Kings 17:17-24). Now they were angry. Angry enough to try to harm Jesus, not because of the huge task of the year of Jubilee, or the responsibility for the poor, no because he brings up people that had been saved out of the realm of the “chosen” people. Even though it was their own scripture the implications was his fulfillment of the Good News would include people outside Israel.

Of course that is the good news for us Christians, as we are those outside Israel. Jesus saved all of us and we are continually trying to spread this message. Well I remember being reinvigorated in church in my 20’s and I would invite everyone to church. I was inviting them more with the attitude that I had something they needed. They were always welcome but I wanted them to part of the established “grace” I had found at church. It was a subtle difference, but until I invited people to church so that I may know them and learn what they may offer me in my relationship with God, my invitations had not been effective. We need to invite people to church because they will offer to us as much as we can offer them. And I don’t just mean choir members, Sunday School Teachers, or pledges, but their lives are sacred like anyone’s, including our own. We may be at this church first but we will all live the same amount with Jesus, for an eternity. So my repentance was to invite people to church with an idea that people outside our church boundaries will also teach us about Jesus.