Jesus Reveals God's Love For Everyone
Luke 4:(14-20) 21-30
Epiphany 4C – February 3, 2013
St. Mark's, Waukesha
But it's not just her old toys of course. It's having to share her Mama and Dada too. It must be a tough thing to be the first born – used to having all of your parents' attention, and then having to adjust to having a new little person around who needs a lot of time and attention himself. So it's not so surprising that from time to time, our dear daughter finds herself overwhelmed with frustration and jealously – and we find her throwing a temper tantrum, crying and yelling and lying down on the floor. I know you all know what I mean.
The people of Jesus' hometown of Nazareth remind me of Norah. You see, there's a sense that they understand themselves as Jews to be the firstborn of God. That's a core part of their identity – they are God's chosen people. But more than that, they seem to understand themselves as God's only people. Much as Norah really had no clue all through my pregnancy what lay ahead of her and the changes she was about to experience, even though we tried to tell her about her little brother on the way, the people of Israel don't seem to have a clue. It is as if they think that God's love is theirs and theirs alone, and it never enters their minds that they might have to share God with any others outside of their faith, even though it's all through the Hebrew scriptures, starting way back with Abraham and the covenant God made with him, that God's love is not limited just to them.
And so when Jesus comes home for a visit and shows up in the synagogue that sabbath morning, they listen intently, curious about what the hometown boy will have to say. And he reads from the book of Isaiah these marvelous, powerful words about how God has sent him to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, about how he is the fulfillment of these words. And they're amazed. Until...
Until he knocks them out of their preconceived notions about being the firstborn and only children of God. Until he speaks these words about how prophets are not welcomed in their hometown. Until he recalls the stories of Elijah and Elisha from our Old Testament – stories that we may or may not realize pull the rug out from under the Israelites' feet. In a time of great famine and need, God sends Elijah not to any of a number of Jewish widows, but to a Gentile. Elisha is sent, not to heal the Jewish lepers, but to Naaman, a Syrian – and even more shocking than that – he was the commander of the enemy army! Underneath it all, Jesus is saying to the friends and neighbors who saw him grow up – God isn't concerned about only you and your people. God's love goes beyond the boundaries and borders you think are set. When God is in action, it's not always to the people you expect. And what these firstborn children of God see is that God is rescuing the wrong people! Jesus is reaching out to and healing and sharing good news with outsiders. The Jewish people find themselves having to share their God unexpectedly with unwanted younger siblings, and we see the temper tantrum that evokes. They drive Jesus out of town and up to the top of the hill so they can try to throw him off a cliff. That's how enraged they are at that thought that God's love and mercy and blessings could be given to anyone beyond their own people.
But of course, that kind of thinking isn't just confined to the people of the Bible. The stories in the Bible are our stories. We find ourselves in them. And we are not so different from the ancient people of Nazareth. We have a hard time with the idea of sharing God's love with outsiders too. Whether we talk about it or acknowledge it or not, all of us have individuals or groups who we assume to be outside of God's love, people who are not deserving of God's grace or mercy or forgiveness. They're the Osama bin Ladin's of the world. They're the evil ones who shoot up theaters or schools filled with innocent people. But it's true even on a less extreme scale, in the normal ordinary events of our every day lives. We mutter and fret about illegal immigrants. We complain about those we consider “takers” in our country. We demonize those who have different political views; anyone who seems to stand in opposition to what we want or believe. We want to think that God is on our side and against those who aren't. We want to be God's one and only children and if we're honest, it ticks us off when we start to really understand what Jesus is saying and doing – in this passage and all through the Bible.
Because no matter how much we might want to keep God's love all to ourselves and the ones we love, what we see in scripture, both in the Old Testament and the New, is that God is always on the move to redeem and reclaim and restore the whole world and everyone in it. Throughout all of humankind's history with God, we have wanted to claim God's mercy for ourselves and God's fierce judgment on everyone else, but what we see Jesus saying and doing in Luke's gospel is just the opposite. Jesus comes, God in the flesh, to reveal God's love, not just to the Jewish people, not just to those who think and believe like us, but to all people. Jesus' message, his whole life is to meant to share the truth about God's grace, the free gift of God's love, extended to everyone, even people who we think God should find it impossible to love! This is hard to accept - and we can lie down on the floor and throw a temper tantrum about having to share this love, or we can fall to the floor in awe and thanksgiving that we are included in it. Because God's love doesn't come in limited quantities with only so much to go around. Norah is learning that there will always be enough love for her – that our love as a family only grows as our family grows. And if that's true of us, and of your families, how much more is it true of God? There is always enough love to go around. It's a Love that was fierce enough that it was willing to die, even for those who want to keep it for themselves. It's a Love so powerful that it overcomes hate and fear and shame and rises from the grave, never to die again. It is this Love that lives in us, that calls us into new life, life where we grow beyond our selfish 2 year-old ways and go to invite and welcome our new siblings into God's family, whoever they may be, even and especially when they are those we would least expect. Thanks be to God!
Amen.
