Home in Nazareth

Epiphany 4                       Luke 4: 21-32

28 January 2001

here is nothing easier, really, than understanding what is going on in our Gospel lesson this morning.  I think we all get it—yet there may be something useful in drawing out the elements of it, in order to take a look at them and ask what they mean for us.  First of all, then, Jesus is at home in the place he grew up.  Nazareth was a small place.  And we all know something about small places.  Plymouth, by 20^th century standards, is a small place.  So is St Thomas.  What happens to people who grow up in small places is that they are known.  That is a good thing.  We have now trashed the merits of small town life in our art and economics and politics for well over a hundred years, to where small town life as it once was lived in this part of the world is nearly impossible.  We have dwelt upon the pettiness and the poverty of vision, the lack of opportunity, and the oppressiveness of small town living.  Our economy has been organized on such a large scale that it has driven out the small economies by which small places once lived.  Recently, though, some have been trying to rediscover the value of the small place—now that it is largely gone—because there is one good thing, among others, that can happen there: real community: living among people who really know you. 

n a small community you have a place, if you are willing to take it.  That sense of being at home, being rooted, is important to an authentic humanity—perhaps to basic human sanity.  Without it, people are susceptible to fads and fashions, they take their sense of what is fitting from mass media, they increasingly become cogs in a large machine, they are willing to accept the destruction of other places for the sake of profits where they are, because all places—and increasingly all people—to them are interchangeable.  They may be quite successful or wealthy, but not being really known, having no true community, they will be missing something essentially human.  Our world these days is filled with people who are missing this essentially human thing—and we are paying the price of dehumanization in many ways.

ut, since all things human, no matter how basically good, are also susceptible to sin, small town life is not spared from its evil.  There are people in small towns who like to be in charge, just as there are in larger places.  There are people who like to wield control over others—they like being big fish in a small pond.  There are people to want to keep their neighbors in the places they have assigned to them.  In a small town, unfortunately, it is hard for someone once known to be a trouble-maker when he was young ever to fully outgrow the reputation.  He may have to move away in order to grow a new identity.  If the people we have grown up around often love us, and love us even though they know us, they also often want to keep us in the place to which they have assigned us.  It is this latter condition that leads many to find small communities stifling and oppressive, although boredom can also come from a desire for anonymous individualism—acting out far away from people who know us by doing things we really know are not right.

ith all of these reflections behind us, we can look at what happened when Jesus came home to Nazareth to preach the sermon at Synagogue on the Sabbath Day.  His vocation had taken him quite a distance from the man the community thought they knew—the carpenter, Joseph’s son.  He knew those people—in fact, it was by growing up in Nazareth that he had come to know people—to understand what went on in the human heart.  According to observations in the Gospels, that is one thing that impressed most who met him: He understood what went on inside people, he was a great psychologist before the term was ever invented.  He knew these people and they assumed that they knew him.  How difficult it is to admit that we have misjudged someone—that some kid, whom we thought we knew when he was growing up, could ever really amount to anything.  To the citizens of Nazareth, Jesus was Joseph’s son, the carpenter, who had been a good quiet, industrious man for 30-some years as he lived and worked among them.  Now suddenly, he had these pretensions to something different.  He was claiming to be some kind of prophet, but they knew better than that.

hey listened to him speak and had to admit that there was something in his words that touched them.  Perhaps a few of his old neighbors scratched their heads and muttered that there was more to that boy than they had thought.  Where did he learn to talk like that, they wondered, this man who had been merely a quiet tradesman in town.  But when it came time for them to look into their own hearts and make the response his words called for, they could not bring themselves to have any confidence in him.  Who was a carpenter to make fine speeches?  Prophets were supposed to be mysterious, no one knew where they came from, so how could this man be a prophet, when they had known him all their lives and his?  Where did they think the old prophets had come from—that they dropped down from the sky?  Did Isaiah’s home town reject him?  Jeremiah’s?  Did no one in Nazareth ever get close enough to Jesus to see into his heart when he lived among them?  They were sure they knew him and so were not able to take him seriously.

n Mark we read about this incident that Jesus could do nothing extraordinary at home at all, except to cure a few sick people.  He was amazed at their unbelief.  What they wanted from Jesus, in order for him to prove himself to them, were a few flashy miracles like those they had heard he performed in Capernaum.  But Jesus could do nothing for them.  It was never his way to put on an act like a circus performer.  He never tried to impress unbelievers.  In this he truly revealed the heart of his Father in Heaven, who never tries to impress the hard-hearted among us with unmistakable miracles.  Jesus’ signs and wonders were only given where he sensed a certain confidence in himself.  Even if it was at the level of the man who said, “Lord, I am trying to have confidence in you, please help me to have more,” Jesus could and did work with that.  But when he faced a kind of skeptical indifference or hostility, a disregard or scorn directed towards him, and a demand for a public display of power in order to prove himself—then he simply walked away, perhaps after making a few observations on what was wrong.

hat is what he did here.  He reminded the crowd of a couple of stories from their past.  Elijah and Elisha were two of the old great prophets in Israel.  They were of Israel and for Israel—yet Israel was ambiguous about them, and it was often foreigners who perceived that God was working in and through them rather than their own countrymen.  And it was the foreigners who had confidence in their prophetic standing that reaped benefits from them, instead of the Israelites to whom their ministry was directed.  He came to His own, John says, and His own rejected Him.  As Elijah and Elisha could do nothing for people who had no confidence in their ministry, so could Jesus do no good for those who refused to believe in him.  The people of Nazareth chose by their unbelief—their lack of confidence in their own home-town prophet—to make themselves outsiders to what God was presently doing.  If Jesus’ own people, his own family, his own friends and neighbors, have no confidence in him, then all the blessings he can confer will undoubtedly go to others.  It need never have been like that.

 think we can understand all these dynamics only too well.  We can see how some in Nazareth would have thought Jesus was getting uppity.  We can see the town leaders—religious and political, if there was a difference—worrying that they would lose control of things.  We can see those for whom everything that happens always results in the same fretting that there was too much confusion and change going on.  Life was not easy in Nazareth in those days, but it was predictable—and now this Jesus threatened to stir things up and no one knew where they might lead.  All of these things we can understand.  And this is no plea for merely stirring things up, simply changing things around to annoy people who like to keep them the same.  What went wrong in Nazareth was that those people who wanted to keep things like they were, who thought they knew who Jesus was, who were determined that nothing could happen outside of markers they had already placed—all of these people lacked the discernment necessary to place them on the side of what God was doing. 

hat was the fundamentally wrong thing about Jesus’ home-town and what is so often lacking in other places we know about—like families, neighborhoods, towns, cities, dioceses and parish churches.  It is necessary for us to know each other by long acquaintance and to love each other always, sometimes in spite of what we know.  But if our knowledge of each other is satisfied when we have people pegged and pigeon-holed, it is not very useful, instead it can be quite damaging—to us and to them.  Knowing each other and living around each other ought to produce a greater awareness of the mystery that invests each of us.  Loving someone over the years ought to make us aware of the unreachable depths of their personalities, those secret places that God alone knows.  By these kinds of knowledge, we ought to be prepared for the unexpected evidences of the work of God in their lives and in our own.  In our love and care for each other, we ought to be searching for God, for His will, for the mystery of His presence.  Our familiarity over the years with each other in a small place ought to make us deeply discerning of the ways of the Spirit and open to the new ways God might want to work in us.

n Nazareth, it seems that long-term familiarity only bred contempt.  That can happen wherever people do not take seriously the mysteries of grace.  How awful to find ourselves outside of the place where God is doing his work, manifesting his blessings, because we had no confidence in him, or in those whom he gave to minister to us. 

e close the story of Jesus at home in a scene with most of the citizens of the town assembled at the edge of a little cliff on which it was built.  In their anger at Jesus’ words to them, they had meant to take their home-town boy out and throw him over the edge of it and stone him for insulting them.  Somehow in the confusion, Jesus managed simply to walk away.  Did he ever go back?  I don’t know.  I don’t know that Nazareth ever had another chance to change its mind.

 don’t know about you, but I want St Thomas Church to be the kind of place where our familiarity with each other breeds a deep respect for the mystery of the ways of the Spirit.  Where our familiarity with Jesus as our Lord and Saviour leads always to a new and deeper discernment of his will for us and more and greater confidence in his Lordship.  I would never want to think I had so figured out who He is and what He wants and who you are and what ought to be done, that I have closed myself off to some fresh inspiration of the Spirit, to some new influence of grace.  How awful to be so set in our ways that we cannot discern what it is that God Himself desires for us. 

he only way we can keep open to the Spirit, to be discerning people, is to be self-critical.  Not always, but frequently taking a look at ourselves, asking if we really have confidence in Jesus and in the presence of the Spirit, if we really are loving each other and knowing each other truly, or if we are somehow withdrawing our confidence in Jesus and placing it in ourselves and being satisfied to put people in their place instead of lovingly knowing them.  We want to be right in the center of where God is working and manifesting his blessings.  Nothing is more important than that!