Jeremiah -
Michelangelo, 1511
The Sermons at Calvary
By Father Richard Humke
HEARING THE TRUTH
February 1, 2004, 4 Epiphany C,
Calvary Church
Jesus
said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's
hometown." Or in the more familiar,
and less leaden, words of the King James Version: "No prophet is accepted in his own country."
Jesus
has returned to his hometown of Nazareth in our Gospel today, and he has
surprised them by what he had to say in their synagogue on the Sabbath, those
startling words, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your
hearing." In other words, I am the
person the prophet Isaiah was speaking of.
This
familiar saying of a prophet not being accepted in his own town has passed into
our common parlance because every generation since that time has found that,
more often than not, it was true. Those
who come from somewhere else are much more apt to be heard than those who live
right around the corner.
Bring
your consultants in from New York. No
matter that you may have some who are just as good here in Louisville and you
won't have to pay plane fare and they only ask $1000 a day instead of $5000 a
day. But those others -- they come from
New York -- they know so much more!
Well, maybe they do. But you
know what? Maybe they don't.
Jesus
had all the disadvantages of being the hometown consultant. They knew too much about him -- or so they
thought. They knew the house he grew up
in. Not very impressive! They knew his parents. His mother was a nice lady, perhaps a little
too religious. And there had been some
rumors about her at the time of this man's birth that Joseph wasn't his
father. And Joseph had died a long time
ago and hadn't been particularly successful.
"What ever happened to that carpentry shop, by the way?"
So
now Jesus, seemingly caught up in religion like his mother (they think), is
back home in Nazareth. It's not at the
crossroads of the world, by any means, but it's a nice town, and people like
the fact that they live away from the hustle and bustle of Jerusalem, or even
Capernaum. So what if others think they
are hicks. That's all right with
them. They know better.
We
understand that, don't we? I mean,
anyone from Kentucky gets the point. We
know they think we're hicks, too, but we don't fret about it. "It don't matter, you know."
To
understand today's story we really need to recall last Sunday's Gospel because
it comes immediately before today's reading.
And the problem there is that most of us were safely home reading the
paper last Sunday because of the ice, and so we didn't hear the Gospel. It told us that Jesus went into the
synagogue at Nazareth "as was his custom," and stood up to read from
the prophet Isaiah, who says that he is sent to bring good news to the poor, to
bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to release
those in prison, and to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
Jesus
probably read it in Hebrew first and then a second time in Aramaic, which was
the vernacular. (By the time of Jesus,
you see, Hebrew had largely dropped out of daily use and had become a
liturgical language, one to be used only in worship, as Latin was for many
centuries. It is really only within the
lifetimes of many of us here that Hebrew has once again become a living
language in modern Israel.) Jesus said,
in effect, "Those words of Isaiah apply to me, and these are the things I
have come to do."
They
were surprised, we are told, but pleased that a local boy should be so
smart and so respected in other places.
But their pride in him turned very quickly to hostility when he spoke
further and gave some examples that are undoubtedly cryptic to most of you here
today. In our Gospel he talks about
Elijah and the widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
And he talks about Elisha and Naaman the Syrian. The significant thing you need to hear in
these two examples is that the widow at Zarephath in Sidon and Naaman the
Syrian were not Jews. And yet God,
through God's prophets, blessed them.
What
Jesus was really saying in those two examples was that, when God chose to act
in the times of those stories, God chose to act, not in Israel among the Chosen
People, but with some Gentiles, with persons in Sidon and Syria, with those who
were outside the covenant with God, with those they looked down upon as
unclean. That's what Jesus is
saying in those two examples, and that is why they became angry with
him.
But
do you hear what he is really saying?
He is really saying, God is God and will do whatever God choses. God does not belong to you. God is larger than your understanding of
God, and God sometimes will choose other people among whom to work. God does not love you or your country more
than others. God doesn't belong to
you.
And
all those people who just a few moments ago were slapping him on the back and
saying, "That was a great sermon, Joshua," now drove him out of town,
to the brow of a hill, where they would have liked to push him over. But he managed to escape.
Now
that's the story. It's a story about
racial pride. It's a story about
religious pride. It's a story about
religious arrogance. It's a story about
people's wanting to hear only what they had been used to hearing, but not the
truth. When Jesus spoke the truth, they
turned on him. When Jesus spoke the
truth, they forgot what they had thought about him just a moment before and
looked for ways to get rid of him.
You
see how relevant the Scriptures are without having to be taken literally at all
times? They tell us about God, but they
tell us about people, as well. And
people aren't all that different now from then. Those people didn't want to hear bad news. They didn't want to hear anything that might
suggest that they would have to think differently about things. They didn't want to hear anyone tell them
that they didn't live in the greatest country in the world, the country that
God loved above all others. They didn't
want to hear that they weren't any more important to God than other nations and
other people.
And
we don't want to hear those things either!
They
were perfectly happy in their little town of Nazareth where they had all the
problems of the world worked out to their satisfaction. And here came someone to tell them
differently, and what made it bad was that he was one of them. "He can't tell us anything -- unless,
of course, he tells us what we want to hear.
Then we will want to hear more."
You
see, truth-telling has never been popular.
And that's why Jesus gets into trouble all the time: he tells the truth. And for that reason we see the cross, ever
so slightly visible, in today's reading.
Did you see that hint of the cross in today's Gospel? You should have seen it because it's there,
rearing its ugly head ever so veiled in the background. That's one reason, I believe, that we read
this Gospel as we approach the Lenten season and the season of the
Passion. The Gospel says, "They
got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which
their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff." That, at the very beginning of his
public ministry, is the hint of the cross which lies ahead.
What
people never understand -- never understand, then and now -- is that the
hard words are often the words of grace because they are the words of
truth. The words we don't want to hear
are often the words we 1 to hear, words that may bring us a whole new
way of thinking and living. Think about
your own life and see if it isn't true that there were times when the hard
words, the words of truth, the words you didn't want to hear at the time, made
all the difference for you.
Jesus
told the people of Nazareth things they didn't want to hear. He told them things that would rearrange
their lives if they really paid attention to them. He told them things that their own rabbis never, ever told
them. And our Gospel says, "They
were astounded at his teaching, because he spoke with authority."
What
if they had listened to him? What if
they had allowed Jesus' truths to touch their hearts? What if they had moved out of their usual mind-sets and opened
themselves to a new challenge? What if?
We'll
never know because the story goes in another direction. The story goes in the direction of Jerusalem
where the passion and the cross lie before Jesus, though still a year or more
away. But the truth is that the people
of Nazareth had a chance to see their world in a new way, in a larger and a
more generous way, in a way that would force them, however, to rearrange their
thinking -- and they chose the old.
They chose the comfortable. They
chose the familiar. They chose to live
with the old prejudices that they had been taught and that they were not
willing to examine when new challenges came along.
Are
we any different?
Remember
this story the next time you hear something you don't want to hear, something
that threatens to change your thinking and, perhaps, your acting. It may be exactly what you need to hear. It may be a passing moment of grace for
you. And you may choose to embrace it
-- or you may choose, figuratively to "hurl (it) off the cliff." The decision is always yours.
Richard
H. Humke