[Propertalk] Fw: PREACHING RESOURCES FOR JANUARY 31 - Luke 4:21-30 - Part 2A

[Joe Parrish]

Subject: PREACHING RESOURCES FOR JANUARY 31 - Luke 4:21-30 - Part 2A



PREACHING RESOURCES FOR JANUARY 31 (7 of the 70 plus preaching resources available at GoodPreacher.com for this Sunday):

THEOLOGICAL THEMES: Luke 4:21-30

If the previous verses (vv. 16-21) recount a fulfillment of messianic expectations, these verses are an account of the fulfillment being nevertheless rejected by the primary bearers of messianic hope.1 Jesus has been charismatically teaching in the synagogues of Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and, having come to Nazareth, has read from the scroll of Isaiah and proclaimed that its promise of good news to the poor and oppressed is being fulfilled. After achieving seemingly immediate acclaim from this message, Jesus is subject to questioning about his origins in Nazareth, and this prompts him to launch into a diatribe against those who appear “closest to the action” with respect to God’s redemptive activity­from the “hometown” folk of the prophets to the people of Israel in general. As a result, the furor of “all in the synagogue” (v. 28) is incited, and Jesus narrowly escapes an impromptu execution at the hands of an angry mob.

Joseph Fitzmyer argues that the accounts of Jesus’ teaching in the synagogue, along with its positive reception, and the cutting dialogue which immediately ensues are in fact drawn from two different stories and are placed alongside each other by Luke in order to make the theological point that the fate of Jesus’ charismatic, Spirit-inspired ministry and teaching is severe opposition­indeed, rejection­on the part of some who appear most likely to be prepared to receive it.2 But what is especially interesting about this fate is the theological standing of those who do the rejecting. It is not as if Jesus announces the coming of the kingdom and then the responses fall out just like one would expect them to: those on the fringes scoffing and the chosen remnant embracing it. Rather, Jesus’ twin examples from the ministries of Elijah and Elisha line up disconcertingly with the story that unfolds in real time here. Expectations are inverted­those who have theological standing as participants in the covenant find themselves outside of its graces.

The text gives no explanation for why this should be the case. A tempting theological rejoinder to the story is to say that the Nazarenes, like the implied Israelites in Jesus’ two examples, didn’t have the requisite faith for sustaining the covenant relationship, so that its benefits have had to be distributed elsewhere. Other episodes from the gospels seem to imply a warning about the fragility of faithfulness, which may support this response. But of course there are some difficulties. Doesn’t this view make the human response of faith the prerequisite for God’s gracious intervention in our lives? That is, does it not make the presence or absence of faith the determining difference between grace and judgment, acting as a kind of sorting device to separate the “condemned” from the “saved?”

American theologian H. Richard Niebuhr once noted that, in the Christian view, God’s judgment is never free-standing. Rather, it always operates in the service a wider “order of graciousness.”3 To view a person’s or a people’s lack of faithfulness either as a sign or as a means of their complete rejection by God verges on the Manichaean, and implies that God’s grace is constrained both by human choices and by an inner compulsion to, as it were, end the story. Could it not be that the faithlessness of the Nazarenes (and, by extension, of the “Israel” of Luke’s polemic here) is exposed in this text as provisional (i.e., as not the end of the story)? They reject him, as hometown folk have always rejected their prophets, but he does not thereby reject them. Rather, when they take him to the cliff, there is no final confrontation, but simply an escape.

If this is so, then another possible rejoinder surfaces. Perhaps those with theological standing are pushed aside simply so that those without standing may be brought near. Faithlessness is not a constraint on God’s grace or a wedge between God’s grace and God’s justice, but a tool by which Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom may resonate more widely. In a gospel irony, the near are pushed afar so that those who are far away may be brought near. If we read the story this way, we may find parallels in Paul’s treatment of the problem of Jewish unbelief in Romans chapter eleven. There, Paul’s complex argument concludes with an affirmation that God “has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all” (Rom 11:32, NRSV). The point here is not to insinuate a creeping universalism, but it is to insist that rejection is never the end of the story of God’s dealings with people whom God has brought into the sphere of grace. The chosen people, whether they be Jews or members of Christian churches, never quite succeed in hurling Jesus off the cliff, but instead live to quarrel with him another day. Meanwhile, the good news spreads, taking forms the chosen people would not have allowed, and choosing new people along the way.

Thomas A. James

Notes
1. Joseph A. Fitzmyer, The Gospel According to Luke I-IX (New York: Doubleday, 1970), 528.
2. Ibid. 
3. H. Richard Niebuhr, “War as Crucifixion,” in War in the Twentieth Century: Sources in Theological Ethics, ed. Richard B. Miller (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), 68.


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