Edge of the Cliff

Edge of the Cliff

Luke 4:14-30

June 30, 2019 • Mount Pleasant UMC

“Going home” can be a surreal experience. About a month ago, we went back to Rossville, where I graduated from high school (34 years ago), for my niece’s graduation party. It’s a different experience to be “home” when you’re not “from there” anymore. Life has taken you in different directions and suddenly people you’ve known all your life feel a bit like strangers. A couple of times, I have “gone home” to preach at my home church. Let me tell you, that's even stranger, and it’s a bit intimidating. Those people knew you when you were the kid in the front pew, west side, timing the pastor’s prayers with your cool new digital watch. They knew you when you were the kid who acted up in Sunday School. They knew you when you were the kid who talked back to his parents and who drove the beat-up blue pick-up truck on the senior paper drives and who worked at the IGA grocery store. They know the rough edges, the good and the bad, the times you’re proud of and the things you’re not—but it’s also true that one definition of "home" is that it's the place where people know all about you and love you anyway. The few times I’ve been back to preach at Rossville Church, the people have all been very kind. Not once did they try to do to me what Jesus’ home synagogue tried to do to him. When Jesus went “home” to preach, they tried to push him off the edge of the cliff.

This morning, we’re beginning a new sermon series, going through the Gospel of Luke. Luke is sometimes called the “Gospel of the Nobodies.” He’s more concerned than the other Gospels about those who are on the fringes of society, those who are left out, or, as we’ve put it in the title of this series, Luke focuses on the least, the last and the lost. I want to encourage you to read through the Gospel during these five weeks, and we actually began that reading last Monday. Don’t worry, if you didn’t get started then, you can just jump in where we are right now and catch up later. But it will help a lot if you’re reading along because we won’t have time to cover everything in the Gospel. I’m also blogging through the Gospel during the week to cover some of the things we won’t get to on Sunday morning. My hope is that, for the next five weeks, we’ll immerse ourselves in Luke’s world and get a glimpse of the Jesus he wants us to see: the Jesus who loves the least, the last and the lost.

First, though, we need to know a little bit about Luke. He wasn’t one of the original twelve disciples, so he was not a direct eyewitness to the work and teachings of Jesus. He actually tells us that in the very beginning of his Gospel; he tells us he investigated everything in order to write his Gospel, what he calls an “orderly account” (1:3). He was a companion of the apostle Paul; we know that form the book of Acts, and his name tells us he was a slave. When someone bought a slave in those days, they would give them a new name, often a shortened form of their own name. “Luke” is a short form of Lucius, and here is where it gets really interesting. Paul had an associate, maybe a relative, named Lucius (cf. Acts 13:1; Romans 16:21), so it has been suggested that Luke was a slave who had been freed and then sent with Paul as his personal physician. Oh, yes, did I mention Luke was a doctor? Paul calls him that in Colossians, and contrary to the way we think of such professions today, it was the norm in the Roman Empire for slaves to be doctors. Think of them as “personal physicians,” and since Paul had a condition which he called a “thorn in the flesh” (a lot of scholars think it was an eye condition brought on by malaria), Luke might have traveled with Paul to care for him. Even more evidence of Luke’s background as a slave: when you read his Gospel, you can’t help but notice how he is always attentive to the slaves and others on the underside of life (cf. Card, Luke: The Gospel of Amazement, pgs. 16-17).

As you read Luke, you may also think in some places, “Haven’t I read this before?” Matthew, Mark and Luke have a lot of overlap; we call them the “synoptic” Gospels, a word that means “seeing with one eye.” In other words, there are many ways in which they tell Jesus’ story in the same way; they “see” things the same way. Most scholars today think Mark was written first, then Matthew and Luke relied upon Mark’s Gospel as source material. Today, we would call that plagiarism, but it was a normal practice in the first century. But Luke does not just copy Mark. There are also has many unique pieces to it. Without Luke, we would not have the birth narrative, we would not know about the time Mary and Joseph almost lost Jesus, and there are a lot of parables we would not have (including the parable of the prodigal son, which is only in Luke). We would also not have the story of the Emmaus Road. There is a lot that is unique to Luke, and so in these weeks, we’re going to focus a lot on those stories, including the story we read this morning: the story of Jesus coming home.

Now, Mark does tell part of this story, in his chapter 6(:1-6), but Luke includes the crowd’s reaction to what Jesus does there and Luke’s setting is somewhat different. In Luke’s telling, Jesus has just begun his public ministry. He’s been baptized (a story we looked at a couple of weeks ago) and he’s been tested by the devil in the wilderness, down south in Judea. Now he is headed home, to Galilee in the north. I believe after forty days in the barren, dry and dusty wilderness, he was longing for the lush green of the northern part of Israel. (I remember on one of our trips to Israel, one of our group commented that they didn’t expect any part of the country to be so green, but Galilee is lush and beautiful.) So Jesus goes home to the little town of Nazareth, as Luke puts it, “where he had been brought up.” Nazareth was a town that wasn’t well known; it does not appear on the lists of towns that exist from the first century (Hamilton, The Journey, pg. 15). It was “Nowhere-Ville,” “Nobody Town.” In John’s Gospel, when Nathanael is introduced to Jesus, he says, “Nazareth! Can anything good come from there?” (John 1:46). That’s probably pretty typical of the attitude most people had about this tiny town on the hill. It was the place where nobodies came from. Nothing good came from Nazareth, and it was certainly not the place you go to launch a major ministry. It’s interesting to watch as political candidates carefully choose cities and venues from which to launch their campaigns in this run-up to the Presidential election. It’s all about the “optics” and where they can secure the most support. Nazareth would not have been in anyone’s top choices in the first century, but for Jesus, it was home, and that’s where he goes to, in essence, launch the public part of his ministry.

So it’s the Sabbath, Saturday, the Jewish day of worship, and Jesus goes with the rest of his village to the synagogue, the place of teaching and learning. The synagogue wasn’t simply the Jewish equivalent of “church.” It was a cultural center, a community center, and on the Sabbath it’s where you went to hear the Scriptures read and taught. Worship took place in the Temple in Jerusalem; learning and religious discussion took place in the synagogue. In Nazareth today, you can see a replica of the first-century synagogue, and it wasn’t a large place. It didn’t need to be. It simply needed to be an open room with a place for at least ten men to sit, listen and discuss (cf. New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Vol. 5, pg. 416). Most synagogues weren’t open to women, though in Capernaum, where Jesus lived during most of his ministry, the synagogue appears to have had a second floor where, it’s thought, perhaps women were welcome to sit in on the service in the balcony. But this is Nazareth, with most likely only men in the gathering, including Jesus. The service would have opened with the recitation of the Shema, sort of Israel’s mission statement, from Deuteronomy 6: “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (6:4-5). Then there would be a series of prayers, followed by Scripture readings. First, they would read from the Torah, what we know as the first five books of our Bible, and then they would read from one of the prophets. After that, there would be teaching or instruction, and in those days the teacher sat down while the listeners stood up. How do you think that would go today? After the speaker finished, there would be a benediction and people would go on their way (cf. Bock, Luke, pg. 88). Did you notice that the thing we put so much attention to and the thing we often argue a whole lot about—music—wasn’t part of Jesus’ worship pattern? Food for thought.

It was apparently during the reading of the prophets that Jesus was invited to read and comment if he wished. Any young man of the community might be asked to do so (Card 69), and Jesus was the “hometown boy superstar.” Luke says he was being praised all over Galilee (4:15), so now Nazareth gets a chance to hear from him. He reads from Isaiah 61 (mostly), which was probably providentially the assigned text for the day. Because this is critical to what happens next, let’s hear again the text Jesus reads: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free [that line is from Isaiah 58], to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (4:18-19). Then Jesus sits down and he says, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (4:21). In other words, just as they recited their mission statement at the beginning of the service, now Jesus has given them his mission statement. These few lines are what Jesus’ ministry will be all about.

Jesus is very clear on who he was sent to preach to. The poor. Prisoners. The blind and the oppressed. These are exactly the people who were, for the most part, excluded from the synagogue. These were the “undesirables,” the people who “didn’t contribute to society” and therefore weren’t really welcome anyway. Luke has already introduced this idea at Jesus’ birth. Who was the birth announced to, way back in chapter 2? Night shift shepherds. Matthew tells us about the Magi, the wise men, the rich and powerful coming to see Jesus, but Luke tells us about the shepherds, people whose job it was to raise sheep for the sacrifices in the Temple and people whose job made them ritually unclean and unable to take part in that same worship. The least, the last, the lost. Now, Jesus publicly declares that his calling, his mission is not to go to the “respectable religious” people. He is called to the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed. Those on the outside of society. The unwelcomed and the unloved. The religious world of Jesus’ day said if you were poor, it was because you were a sinner and cursed by God. Wealth was blessing, poverty was a curse—but Jesus pronounced God’s blessing even on the poor. Same with all those other conditions. God’s blessings are open to everyone, Jesus says, and he’s come to make that happen, to fulfill Isaiah’s prophecy (cf. Card 69). It was one thing to read about such aspirations in Isaiah; it’s a whole other thing for this guy who is supposed to be the hometown hero say, in effect, “I’m not here for you. I’m here for them, the other, the ones you neglect.”

Then there’s that line about “the year of the Lord’s favor” (4:19). Every person in that synagogue knew what Jesus was talking about: the Jubilee. Way back in Leviticus 25, Moses had prescribed a celebration called the Jubilee. It was to take place every fifty years, so basically once in a lifetime you would celebrate Jubilee, except there is no evidence that Israel ever did so. Why neglect a direct command from God? Because Jubilee was a threat to the established social order. You see, in the year of Jubilee, property was to revert to its original owner. Ultimately, Jubilee said, land belonged to God and it was his to give to whomever he wanted, so during Jubilee, property was to go back to the original family God had given it to. More than that, slaves were to be set free and debts were to be forgiven. In other words, the whole economy was to be reset. Jubilee was a reminder that it was not their abilities that sustained them; it’s God who took care of them. Jubilee was a year of depending fully on God. Do you see why it was never practiced, never celebrated? It requires too big a leap of faith, more trust than we are normally able to give. Jubilee was “the year of the Lord’s favor,” and Jesus says he has come to fulfill the promise of that practice. Debts forgiven. Slaves set free. A reminder that we belong to God. Jesus came to bring freedom for everyone and to help us trust in God (cf. Liefeld, “Luke,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 867; Card 70; Bock 90).

Now, here’s Luke’s point: Jesus said exactly the opposite of what everyone expected. He did not give them a nice, calm teaching with three points and a poem. He upset their world, and more than that, he made claims about himself and who he was and what he intended to do from here on out that were unsettling. He is here for the least, the last and the lost. Jesus wants the ones no one else does, and he’s not afraid to challenge our normal way of doing business. He even pokes at them in his comments after the Scripture reading. “No prophet is accepted in his hometown,” he says (4:24). Then he uses an ancient story from the Scriptures to point out that God’s concern has always been for the ones on the margins, the outcasts, the ones no one else cared about. And in that moment, their reaction turns decidedly negative. This, you might say, is when the stuff hits the fan.

At first, those gathered in the synagogue are positive toward Jesus. Look at him, reading the Scriptures like a big boy. Look at Joseph’s son, they say. Most young men in that culture were expected to follow in their father’s footsteps. When Jesus was growing up in this tiny town, most people would have expected him to become a carpenter, a handyman, just like Joseph. But occasionally someone would break out of their assigned cultural role (cf. Pilch, The Cultural World of Jesus, Cycle C, pg. 26), and at first, they seem to affirm Jesus doing that. “All spoke well of him,” Luke says (4:22), though perhaps he includes those words as a warning of what is coming. You can generally assume that when “all speak well of you,” the storm is just over the horizon. That sort of praise never lasts long; ask anyone who has won political office. It doesn’t take long before people are no longer “speaking well” of you. In only a few minutes, as Luke tells it, their praise of Jesus turns to murderous intent. Listen to the way Luke describes it: “All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff” (4:29).

Mt. Precipice, 2017

Two years ago, when we were in Israel last, I had the chance to stand on that cliff for the first time. It was incredibly windy as we walked up that hill, and the wind was noisy as we tried to take in the surroundings. But, because I want to experience everything I can when I am in the Holy Land, I had to go to the very edge of the cliff. I made a couple of people more than a little nervous, including my son (and my wife once she found out about it), but it is quite the experience to stand there and realize how far down it is to the valley floor. Down there, way down there, is where they wanted to throw Jesus. If the fall didn’t kill him, it’s likely they would have stoned him. That’s how it happened in the first-century world. I think when I was a kid, I always pictured someone being stoned as throwing that person in the center of a crowd and then everyone throws rocks at them. That’s how they show it in the movies, but that’s not how it actually would have happened. You would throw the accused off a high place, then the primary accuser would throw a large stone down on them. If that didn’t kill them, others would join in, throwing large stones until the accused was dead. That seems to be what’s happening here, though I’m not sure who the accuser would have been since the whole town seems to be upset with Jesus. Perhaps the leader of the synagogue who invited Jesus to speak in the first place, I don’t know, but the point is this: Jesus’ mission offended them enough that they were ready to be done with him, to kill him. Jesus’ call to reach the least, the last and the lost pushed these good, religious people over the edge—and they then almost pushed Jesus over the literal edge. But it was not yet his time, and Luke says, somehow, Jesus “walked right through the crowd and went on his way” (4:30). It’s interesting to note that, according to Luke, from this moment on Jesus never returns to Nazareth (cf. Card 70). They reject him, and he honors that choice.

Jesus came to give himself to and for the ones no one else wants. Jesus does do some healing in the next three years, and he does help a few blind people see and some deaf people hear. But, as I remind you often, the miracles were never the point of his ministry. He didn’t heal everyone, though he could have. He didn’t raise all of the dead, though that was in his power. He doesn’t come to give answers. He has come to give himself, and there is a sense in his words that those who know they have absolutely nothing else, who cannot depend on the world to take care of them, turn to him more easily than those of us who think we have it all together. Those of us who have resources, who have made it in this world, find it more difficult to trust him. We are the residents of Nazareth, by and large. We are the ones who don’t get what we want from Jesus. You know what I’m talking about— e pray and we tell Jesus, “This is how it needs to be,” and when it doesn’t happen that way, we push him to the edge of our lives. But he never promises to give us what we want. Instead, he gives us what we need, and what we most need is him (cf. Card 70).

But I have another question for you this morning, and I’ll tell you up front it’s a hard question for me even to ask myself. This passage, in fact the whole Gospel of Luke, reminds us that the ones Jesus wants are the ones no one else does. So here’s the question: do we have that same heart? I believe this church does. Your commitment to Celebrate Recovery ministry, to welcome in and walk alongside those struggling with addictions, those whose families have maybe written them off or disowned them, is evidence of that kind of heart. In my 26 years of ministry, most every place I have served has had some sort of addiction group that met in its building, but this is the first place I’ve been where those who attend the recovery ministry also come to worship. I was told in one location by one of the group participants that they were too embarrassed to attend worship in the same place where they admitted their addiction. Mount Pleasant is a grace place with a heart that welcomes the people Jesus wants. I also see that heart in the ministry to those with special needs and the outreach of the Friendship House. I’m excited about that launch this fall. I told you back at Easter when we announced it that it was a God thing and the way I know that is because it scared me. I see the way you’ve welcomed special needs here, but friends we also have to be honest that we’re not that great at showing up when there are events with Grace Unlimited. We’re good at welcoming, but we’re not always that good at really loving those Jesus loves and those Jesus cares about—the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed. There will be an open house and dedication for Friendship House in the afternoon of August 24 and I challenge you to show up for that.

There’s one more question this story asks us, and I know that by asking it out loud I run the risk that you might want to take me to the edge of the cliff. I’m thankful Terre Haute isn’t built on a high cliff! But here’s what I’m wondering. In this passage, Jesus upset people enough they wanted to kill him. He threatened the status quo and he challenged the way people were living so deeply that they wanted to do away with him. My question is this: have we domesticated Jesus so much that what we show of him doesn’t threaten people anymore? Have we, Jesus’ people, become so much like the culture that we don’t threaten the status quo anymore? If we, the church, don’t look any different than the culture around us, are we really the church? Are we truly practicing Biblical faith? I don’t know the answer, but I do know that in those times when the world rises up against the church, when the culture believes its way of life is being threatened by Jesus’ people, I think that’s when we are most like Jesus. When we are consumed by a passion for the least, the last and the lost, when the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed become our mission, then we are most like Jesus. At least that’s what I’m thinking about here on the edge of the cliff. Let’s pray.