To Those Who Receive Him
The Word of God comes to announce the Word is now fulfilled. It seems like that would be sort of important, if you understood what was happening. Those in the synagogue thought it was important. They just knew it had big implications for them. They were ready to see what Jesus was going to do for them. We want Jesus to do things for us, many things! Jesus doesn’t quite put it this way, but it seems to me that he’s also asking, one way and another, what we are willing to do for him. If you’re like me, the answer too often turns out to be not much. God, please do for me . . . and I’ll get back to You about that other thing!
“All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. ‘Isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ they asked” (4:22). This verb amazed is always a yellow flag: we need to be alert here, look and think carefully. All amazement, at heart, suggests some kind of incomprehension. Their senses cannot deny, or their feelings cannot deny, or their reason cannot deny that something big and good is happening right there among them, yet some combination of senses, feelings, and reason is denying, will deny, must deny, because the truth is too much. The French scientist, mathematician, and philosopher Blaise Pascal was onto something when he wrote that “too much truth bewilders us.”[1] Along similar lines, the nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson said, “the truth must dazzle gradually.” Jack Nicholson’s character in A Few Good Men was right: people “can’t handle the truth.” It seems, more often than not, people manhandle it. Just look what they did to Jesus.
The people in the synagogue notice a difference, a strange change in Jesus. He is Jesus, yet not the Jesus who left to go down to the Jordan and out into the wilderness for a time. There’s something new, something more, something . . . else. They can’t quite put their finger in it, can’t name it exactly, although Jesus has just told them: he is among them with the Spirit of the Lord upon him to proclaim good news. The living Word has come among them to help the Word come alive in them, and for them.
That’s nice, they think. They think he’s behaving a little strangely, though.
Then Jesus makes his big mistake. He says more. Why not just stop with good news for the poor and freedom for the oppressed? We can all get on board with that much, I think. All there in the synagogue with him that day could give a collective nod of approval, think that’s grand, go home and back to their labors the next day. But no, Jesus has to go and say stuff, acting like he knew what they were thinking, like he knew their hearts, knew what they wanted most from him. If people want God at all, what do they want from Him? What do they want Him for? So much trouble, just in those questions.
“Jesus said to them, ‘Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum’” (4:23). Poor, chained, blind—who? Us?! Save your teachy words for yourself! Who are you to judge? Don’t judge! Have you ever encountered resistance to Jesus, brothers and sisters? It always surprises me, though I know I shouldn’t be surprised. Somehow, I still am; I always am. Old, entrenched habits of rejection. Much resistance to Christianity and Christians supposedly arises out of this notion that Christians just live to judge others. Not a whole lotta judgin’ goin’ on around here, unless it feels like I do a lot of judging, from Mr. High & Mighty’s pulpit. If you do feel that way, please, let’s sit and talk. Name the place and time. I’ll buy the coffee.
People don’t want Jesus because they don’t want salvation; not on God’s terms, anyway. I don’t believe I’m judging when I say that. Salvation—the word, the idea, seems silly to them. It offends their senses, offends their feelings, offends their reason. Healing? They can go to a doctor—we have highly competent doctors! Sight? Excellent eye doctors, up there in Houston—world-class! Forgiveness? From whom? For what? Peace? I get peace at the lake, or when I’m at home and nobody is bothering me. Jesus can’t give it, and they don’t need it, don’t want it, from him. They don’t want to believe something different from what they already believe or do things much different from what they’re already doing. They want change, sure—but not that change! It’s not as if we can’t comprehend where they’re coming from. We love the love; we just know love is truth, but when Jesus comes to remind us that truth is also love . . . we’re not so sure. Love feels like truth, but truth doesn’t always or even often feel like love.
What does truth feel like?
There in Nazareth, people are growing a little impatient with Jesus. If you’ve come to do some good things, then cut the talk and get to the action. I get the sense, from what Jesus is saying to them, Jesus who knows hearts, minds, and souls, that what they want most is the power, the blessing of the power. They haven’t understood that the Word is power, that if they receive the Word, if they live by the Word, through the Word, they will know the power and have the power of the Word: this is blessing and to be blessed. The Word is power, beloved, and the Word was there among them that Sabbath day, but they wanted the power, the blessing, rather than the Word, the blessing not the covenant—God, please do for me . . . and I’ll get back to You about that other thing! But the blessing comes through the covenant, in covenant. God is not a happy add-on to our happy lives. God in Christ re-calls us into covenant relationship.
Like many, those there with Jesus were happy to have the blessing, showers of blessing. Yes please! So long as there’s no expectation, nothing being sought in return, no particular response, something in return, something freely given for what has been given freely: love, faith. Jesus confronts lack of faith, which is lack of love. He encounters lack of love, which is lack of faith. Faith—the response that delights, even amazes, Jesus.
“‘Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown’” (4:24). Prophets are rejected. Isaiah knew it. Jeremiah knew it. Ezekiel knew it, Hosea, Amos. John the Baptist knew it. And what is a prophet? A guardian. A sentinel. A trumpet, calling the people to assembly, to listen. A prophet makes known the Word of God: power, glory, blessing. By the spirit, a prophet reveals. Truth comes to us not through our senses, our emotions, or even our prized capacity for reason and logic. All that can, and has, led people astray, badly astray, many times, including me. Pascal astutely observed that “reason can be bent in any direction” because “all our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling.”[2] The head follows the heart, and the heart—broken, chained, blinded—is the problem! Truth is revealed. The prophet reveals the truth, stands for the truth. To reject the prophet is to reject truth. To reject truth is to reject the Spirit, who is truth. The opposite of faith is rejection.
But who rejects truth? “We all have truths! Are mine the same as yours?” In other words, I won’t judge if you won’t. In other words, don’t say things I don’t like. But there is a judge.
So, Jesus recalls two things from God’s history with His people. “I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon” (4:25-26). Why to her outside the people, outside the body? Why not to His own? Famine—we don’t know much about famine, but Scripture informs us that this sore lack of food was a sign of a deeper lack, a profound absence: the absence of love for God, love revealing itself through faithful living according to God’s standard. Famine was God’s judgment upon His own because they would not live as His own, according to His Word. God then sends His Word to those to whom He wanted to make His glory shown, wanted to make His glory known: to those who would receive Him. To those who receive Him, He makes His glory shown, He makes His glory known. To all who receive Him, He gives power to become children of God.
“And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian” (4:27). We hear much in the Bible about leprosy, a catch-all term for many sorts of uncleanness, sickness, manifesting itself in outward, bodily symptoms and signs. The law includes detailed rules for what to do about it, how to handle it, and how to bring one who had been sickened back into the community, back into cleanness before God. What we do not hear about is lepers seeking out prophets, or priests, even. Scripture does not record that any of the sick seek out Elisha for healing from God, though Elisha, if anyone, surely had been given the power, the grace, to ask it of God and to bestow. No leper among the people of God seeks out Elisha or pleads with him, pleads with him to plead with God for them. Why?
The people there with Jesus that day thought they were prepared, ready, for whatever good word Jesus was about to share with them. Thinking about human nature and Christianity, Pascal observed that “the heart [. . .] calls good that which it loves.”[3] I love it, crave it; therefore, it is good. Shouldn’t it be just the other way around? Shouldn’t we be? Pascal also considered how the human will was divided: in favor of itself, from the perspective of man, but against itself from the perspective of God, for the fallen principle “makes use of God and delights in the world” and the redemptive principle “does just the opposite.”[4] Me first. Thee, of course, certainly, always. But Me first: God for Me, My Jesus. Jesus loves me, this I know, and I do, too.
Jesus can’t do much with that mindset, that heartset, that soulset. Mark tells us that Jesus could heal only a few and that he was just wiped out by the lack of faith he encountered among his own people (Mk 6:6). God sent Elijah to far places, a man here, a woman there. One and another came from far places to Elisha, not knowing for sure if God’s man could heal or not, but wanting healing so badly, needing healing so deeply, that they were willing to risk it, willing even to seem foolish, to others and even in their own eyes, on the chance, the hope, the faith, that healing was still possible. Seek, and ye shall find, ask and it will be given to you; knock, and the door shall be opened. But if someone never seeks, doesn’t bother to ask, won’t knock?
Things were going so well there in Nazareth, until Jesus said stuff, until they heard what Jesus was saying. How could Jesus say that? Their Jesus wouldn’t, just couldn’t: where’s familiar Jesus, the one they knew and liked? When Jesus returned, they were ready to hear what he was going to do for them, ready for him to do many things for them. Jesus came to do one thing for them, for us all. Jesus also came and told them to wonder, dream, hope, and pray about what they could do for him, with him, alongside him. Jesus invites them to discover how they can become part of his Father’s business. To turn to Pascal just once more: “The right way is to want what God wants. Christ alone leads to it.”[5] May God help me, and al of us, to hear, and to follow.
And to Jesus Christ, who loves us and freed us from our sins by his blood, and made us to be a kingdom, priests of his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever.
[1] Blaise Pascal. Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer, trans. New York: Penguin, 1995. 63.
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