Jesus: The Bridge Builder Between Us and Them

Luke 4: 21-30

January 31, 2016

Christ Mosaic
Hagia Sophia, Turkey
12th Century

Jesus preaching in his home town part 2.

If you missed part one,

Jesus has just been baptized,

tempted by the devil

and then he want to his hometown to preach

in front of his childhood friends and his aunts and uncles and cousins, 

and probably his mother and father

and sisters and brothers for all we know.

Jesus read the scripture from Isaiah:

“God has anointed me to

bring good news to the poor.

release to the captives

recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

and to proclaim the Year of the Lord’s Favor.”

It’s the beginning of Jesus ministry and

stands in Luke as kind of a mission statement.

Then he gives his very brief sermon:

“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus is saying that just because people heard it

come out of his mouth, it is done.

That could be seen as a bit gutsy for a hometown boy,

Still, at this point, everyone is pretty impressed

with Jesus and the “gracious words”

that have come out of his mouth.

They all say, “My isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
In other words, we know him, he’s one of us.

 And wouldn’t you think that then with that

Jesus should just have stopped,

let them ooh and ahh over him, buy him lunch,

he could heal a couple of people,

do his laundry at his parent’s house and

then just move on to Cana or wherever he was headed next.

But Jesus doesn’t want to leave it at that.

Like a lot of young people who come home for the first time

after being away, Jesus wants to start something.

He tells them “Prophets are not accepted in their home town.”

In other word, they will not be accepting him.

They will not be his followers, he knows this.

He tells them because they will expect him to just

come and serve his own people.

The people in his hometown will expect him

to help family and friends before he goes out and helps other people.

“Physician heal yourself.”

“Do for your family what you’ve done in Capernaum.”

And that would have been the inclination

of most people in Jesus position at that point in time.

Family relations were everything in Jesus time.

You owed everything to your family, immediate and extended:

gifts, favors, special attention.

You stayed with them, you didn’t leave for the most part.

Family was first and second and last

 and not always in a good way.

People were restrained by their family obligations

as much as they were protected by them.

People were obligated to serve their  own

and build up walls for other people.

There was a lot of talk of “us” and “them.”

At the very least, it was expected that Jesus

would be sent to the people who shared his

heritage and belief system.

But Jesus comes to the next part,

which is what throws the hometown people into a rage.

He says, “there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah,

when there was a severe famine yet Elijah, the prophet

was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.

And there were also many lepers in Israel in the time Elisha,

and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

Elijah and Elisha were of course well known prophets.

But the widow at Zarephath in Sidon was a gentile.

And Naaman the Syrian was a gentile.

Not Jewish. Not family at all.

What Jesus he’s saying is that

Elijah and Elisha could have gone out and helped

their own people, they could have helped only

friends and relatives or at least only Jewish people.

But God sent them outside-  to strangers

The God of Israel was working with and through

people of other faiths and no faith at all.

Elijah and Elisha were not sent to the people inside

they were sent to the people outside.

Jesus is making this dramatic point in this story

and Luke includes it in there to make a dramatic point

to us today about Jesus life and ministry.

Mission statement number one:

God is going to reach you and me and all of us through the

poor the prisoner, the blind and the oppressed.

Number two: God is going to start this work, not in here with “our” people,

but out there with all of “them”. Whoever you’ve been referring

to as “them” in that derogatory tone,

that’s who God will be working with and through,

and if you want to follow God, go there.

So God is not in here with the people we like, and feel comfortable with.

God is out there with people we’re not comfortable with,

and probably even people we don’t like.

Jesus ministry is about God breaking down boundaries that we’ve made

in order to reconcile the world to one another.

This got Jesus chased out of the synagogue and almost

thrown off a cliff.

I like to think that this wouldn’t elicit that response

in the people here today.

I’d like to think that Christians would be

accustomed to this understanding.

But this does run contrary to main stream today.

In our consumer based society,

we fall into the trap of just wondering “What’s in it for me?”

And the “us” and “them” ideology which seems to dominate lately.

and which American Christianity has often fallen into this trap too.

We have people that go to church

only wondering what’s in it for them.

And consequently, we have major branches of Christianity

today that are very popular and full on Sunday mornings

who tell us that the meaning of the cross is

that God wants us to live comfortable, prosperous lives.

So when people are looking for a church they only ask,

am I comfortable? does the service make me content?

do I enjoy the worship experience?

Do I like the people I’m worshiping with?

Does it have programs that my kids enjoy? 

Do I feel good after being there? Does it feed me? Do I feel comfortable.

Which are some questions to ask,
But that’s just the beginning of the questions to ask about a church.

The primary question that Christians should

not be does this church make me feel comfortable,

but does this church sometimes make me feel uncomfortable?

Does it stretch me? Does it challenge me to

encounter people I might not have met before?

Does it help my children love people who are different

from them and not fear them?

Without those kind of things, we are just a social club and

not a church of Jesus Christ of Nazareth in Galilee

who was almost thrown off a cliff by his own people.

The people in Nazareth, Jesus home town

had one main misunderstanding, they identified Jesus as Joseph’s son.

A child of theirs.

But Jesus knew and we know that Jesus

was not mainly the son of Joseph,

Jesus was the son of the living God,

the father of all people, not just some.

And the good news is that in our baptism, we are the body of Christ.

We are the children of the God of all people.

We belong to a family bigger than what we know

bigger than our home town.

We are insiders called to be outsiders to welcome those outside in.

And  if we are insiders who are always called outside

then where is inside and where is outside?

Christ is the bridge between people

of all class, and race, and age, and economic status,

and every religion and belief system.

The good news is that

in Christ there is no inside and outside.

In Christ we are all one.