Sermons
January 19, 2025 (2nd Sunday after Epiphany)
“Go on, git!”[1]
Luke 4:14-30
Did you know that we’ve had movies now for over a century?
When the centennial celebration was going on, twenty years ago now, there were all kinds of lists published, ranking the top movies of all time, the top movie villains, and so on. One of these lists ranked the top 100 movie heroes.
When you think of heroes, what comes to your mind? A superhero in a cape? A man with big muscles fighting enemies and rescuing the helpless? A lawman in the “Wild West,” like Marshal Dillon?[1] Maybe a good-hearted bandit, like Robin Hood or, at least as portrayed fictionally, Jesse James or Pretty Boy Floyd?[2]
It turns out that the number-one hero on that list—and this doesn’t surprise me, honestly—wasn’t any of these things. He was a lawyer and a single father: Atticus Finch, played by Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird.
If you’ve seen that movie, you know that there were a lot of people who thought he was anything but a hero. In a small southern town during the Great Depression, Atticus Finch was defending a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. He was falsely accused, as becomes abundantly clear as the trial goes along; but that didn’t seem to matter to many of the white townsfolk. In doing what was right, without a whole lot of fanfare, Atticus risked a lot—his reputation, his livelihood, even the safety of his children.
It’s true in a lot of instances that only a few people recognize a hero when she or he is walking among us—the rest of us only figure it out in hindsight. In To Kill a Mockingbird it was the black folks in the community who knew Atticus Finch was a hero. In one of the courtroom scenes, Atticus’ kids, who had snuck in to watch the trial, were sitting in the balcony of the courtroom—a segregated courtroom, where white people sat on the main floor and blacks were in the balcony—and when he leaves the courtroom, the black man they’re sitting with tells them, “Stand up. Your father is passing.” And they stand along with every person in that balcony.
At the same time, the white residents of the town are shunning him, threatening him, even spitting on him—and at the end of the story, one of them even attacks his children.[3]
The movie never tells us whether anyone other than Scout and Jem, Boo Radley, and the African-American residents of the town ever realized Atticus Finch was a hero. Similarly, Luke never tells us whether the people of Nazareth ever recognized the greatness of Jesus. They sure didn’t get it on the day Luke tells us about in our text for today.
Things started out pretty well: the native son returns, the one they’d heard so many things about, to his hometown. They honor him by asking him to read the Scripture at the synagogue, and then to offer a few words of interpretation.
You can just imagine the headlines: “Local boy makes good”—Jesus, son of Joseph the builder,[4] has been in Galilee, especially in Capernaum, doing great things, casting out demons, preaching, healing the sick—and now he’ll be here, and he’ll share some of his talents with his own ones. Maybe they’ll put up a sign at the city limits, like the one at the city limits of my mom’s hometown. No, it’s not for her; she just happens to have come from the same town as NFL football player Troy Aikman and the long-ago rodeo cowboy Jim Shoulders.[5]
So Jesus reads the Scripture—part of one of the “Servant Songs” from the book of Isaiah. In that text, the prophet declares that God has anointed him to bring about the Year of Jubilee. Jesus finishes reading, rolls up the scroll, sat down (that was the customary position for a teacher in first-century Judaism), and declared that this prophecy was fulfilled.
And the people were amazed. The Year of Jubilee was something they knew about from the Law—you can find it in the 25th chapter of Leviticus—but it had never happened.
It was supposed to have occurred once every fifty years. On the Day of Atonement, the shofar—the ram’s horn—was sounded, and the year of the Lord’s favor began. Everyone who had been scattered far from home and family was to return in the Jubilee year. Land that had been sold to keep food on the table was returned to its original owners. Folks who had become slaves in times of hardship were set free. It was to be a year of festivity, a whole year of Sabbath for everyone, a year-long party.
And it never happened.
You can imagine why not. The point of Jubilee is to keep wealth from accumulating in the hands of a few. The point of Jubilee is to make sure no one lives their lives with nothing to look forward to but hard labor and exploitation. But folks who accumulate wealth, who get rich by the sweat of others, whose fortunes are built on the backs of others, don’t have much interest in Jubilee. And they generally have the wealth and power to be able to influence religious and civic leaders, so they were able to make sure the shofar of Jubilee never sounded.
In 586 bce, the Babylonian Empire put an end to the Jewish people’s independence as a nation. They never again had a country of their own, not under the control of another country or empire, until 1948. Over the years the prophets and others began to see Jubilee as the year God returned the land to the Jews—its rightful owners. They came to believe the Messiah would inaugurate the Jubilee by throwing out the foreign powers who were in charge in the Jewish homeland and execute God’s vengeance on all who had oppressed God’s people.
So Jesus read that passage from Isaiah, and he announced that it was fulfilled. Jubilee was beginning. The people would have back what was rightfully theirs. They would see the Romans trampled in the dirt as the Jews were lifted up where they belonged.
Jubilee was good news, and here was the hometown boy announcing that he was the one who would begin it. The local sign painter probably began the design on the back of his bulletin right then and there: Welcome to Nazareth, home of Jesus the Messiah!
But then things started to go wrong. Jesus continued to speak, but what he said wasn’t what they wanted to hear. He quit preaching and started meddling.
He said, You think Jubilee’s going to be just for you. You think I’m here to take care of my own, that God’s favor is only for my people, the Jews. But I have news for you: It’s never been that way. Read your very own Scriptures.
Our greatest prophets—Elijah and Elisha—both did their greatest miracles for foreigners. Remember?
Elijah went to a widow in Sidon, and raised her son from the dead, even though there were plenty of widows in Israel. Remember?
Elisha healed a Syrian military leader[6] who had leprosy, even though there were lots of lepers in Israel. Remember?
“Chosen people,” Jesus told his Nazarene neighbors, doesn’t mean “God loves us more than anyone else.” Jubilee begins here, in the synagogue in Nazareth, but it’s for everyone—not just the hometown folks, not just the Jews.
The congregation didn’t much care for this message. They wanted Jesus all to themselves—they wanted him to take care of his own, to work miracles for them, to throw out the Gentiles. They wanted Jubilee to mean they were elevated above all those foreigners and foreign powers who had long controlled their land and their fortunes. They sure didn’t want to be reminded that their own Scriptures speak many times of God’s concern for foreigners.[7]
So they turned on Jesus, tried to throw him of a cliff.
Those poor Nazarenes. They had no idea who they were rejecting. We know Jesus was truly the Messiah—the Christ—and since we’re all Gentiles, we’re really glad Jubilee was for everyone. Why did the Nazarenes have to be so closed-minded? We feel sorry for them. Jesus was right, and they were so wrong.
I think we ought not be so quick to judge them. Let’s think about a few things.
What if Jesus showed up here and told us that all our signs that say “God Bless America” have it wrong, because far too often it seems like people are implying something more: “…and curse America’s enemies”? What if Jesus showed up and said Jubilee includes even—maybe especially—the folks that it just turns our stomachs to think of having to share heaven with?
Do you think we’d be any more receptive to what he has to say than the Nazarenes were?
Epiphany is the time when we recognize that God has come near in Jesus Christ. It’s the time when we see the light of God’s glory shining in our lives. It’s the time when we recognize that the kingdom of God is at hand.
But what if it turns out that the kingdom of God doesn’t look like we thought it would? What if it includes people we want left out? What if in the kingdom we don’t have the privileged positions we think we deserve?
Are we going to hear what Jesus has to say to us, and welcome the kingdom even though it means a pretty major reshuffling of the status quo—or will we try to find another cliff to throw him off of?
[1] h/t to Jimmy Fallon.
[2] On DISH right now, you can watch Gunsmoke at nearly any time of day or night; it airs on three different channels. I enjoy it partly because they occasionally mention locations in Kansas that are familiar to me—a couple nights ago I even watched one in which a character talked about having been in Coffeyville!
[3] The alleged “good-hearted” exploits of these characters in fictional accounts isn’t necessarily in keeping with reality.
[4] They are saved by their reclusive neighbor, Arthur (Boo) Radley, played by Robert Duvall in his very first movie role.
[5] We typically think of Joseph as a carpenter, but in a land where most dwellings were made of stone, he probably didn’t do as much woodworking as we think a carpenter would. The Greek word, tekton, can be more properly translated as “builder.”
[6] Henryetta, Oklahoma.
[7] Syria, or Aram as it’s often called in the Bible, was a sometime enemy of Israel and Judah. Saber-rattling by Syria was what prompted the prophecy about the Immanuel child in Isaiah 7.
[8] See, for instance, the book of Jonah.