Sermon 4th January 2015

Today, one of our Lay Readers, Trevor Tayleur, introduces us to a new study series, beginning with a look at the Gospel of Luke. The reading is from Luke 4: 16-30

Running Thread

May 7^th 2015 is only just over four months away. It will be the day of destiny for the main political parties. Who will govern the country for the next five years? It’s a very hard election to predict, according to the pundits. And soon all the parties will be putting out their manifestos to try to persuade us to vote for them. The party manifestos will set out their agendas, their promises for government and what they hope to do if they win the election.

Theologians sometimes describe the words of Jesus we have just heard in our Gospel reading, the words he spoke in the synagogue, as ‘the Nazareth manifesto’. It is a public statement setting the agenda for Jesus’ ministry and his promises for his ministry. The Nazareth manifesto tells us what Jesus is going to do. In modern parlance it could be described as Jesus’ ‘mission statement’. And as we start a new year, it seems very appropriate to be looking at the Nazareth manifesto, Jesus’ mission statement.

The New Year also brings us a new series for both adults and Children’s Church. We’re all following the Scripture Union materials for four Sundays, starting today, and we’ll be looking at some passages from Luke’s Gospel. Jesus challenged the people of his time with some radical demands, and we’ll be wrestling with what those demands mean for us today.

We’ve just celebrated Christmas, the birth of Jesus. And indeed the birth of the Son of God is cause for great celebration. But I fear that many people have left Jesus in the manger and have conveniently forgotten that he grew into a man who challenged the society of his time – and also challenges society today.

In the synagogue in Nazareth Jesus overturned people’s understanding of who he was. And if we come to this series with open minds, we may find our view of Jesus is being turned around. The carpenter’s son became a preacher and claimed the power that only God has, to forgive sins. He treated Mary Magdalene as a disciple – not too shocking for us, but unthinkable that a first-century rabbi would include a woman in the circle of disciples. Jesus was – and is – challenging to be around.

The Gospel writers do not always put events in chronological order, so we cannot be entirely sure when the events in the Gospel reading took place. Both Matthew and Mark record similar incidents, which may well be the same event, although they do not record what Jesus said in the synagogue. The fact that Luke puts this here, near the beginning of his Gospel, is significant, as he is emphasising the importance of the Nazareth Manifesto for Jesus' ministry. In it Jesus was setting his agenda.

When Jesus lived, it was a time of great expectation for the Jewish people so far as the Messiah was concerned. At the heart of all these expectations, there was the idea that the Messiah would be a military leader who would rescue Israel from their hated Roman oppressors. He would be a great king who would re-establish Israel as a powerful independent kingdom. And the people of Nazareth would have shared these expectations.

So let’s take a closer look at our passage. There are three parts to it. The first is Jesus’ sermon, the second is the response to the sermon and the third is Jesus’ further explanation of his sermon.

On the Sabbath, Jesus went to the synagogue, which was his regular routine.  Following the usual custom, he stood up to read a passage from the Hebrew Scriptures, and then sat down to teach. Jesus deliberately chose one of the Servant Lord passages from Isaiah chapter 61. The Servant of the Lord was a mysterious figure, someone who was predicted in the OT, someone who was going to come and put things right, someone who would bring about God’s Kingdom, justice and peace. His listeners would have understood it as referring to the Messiah. And Jesus said, in verse 21, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” If you want to know whom the prophet was writing about, look at me. I am the one!

So, how did his listeners react? Actually, there is some uncertainty about their initial reaction. The translation in the NIV suggests that initially they responded favourably, but some scholars suggest that the NIV doesn’t capture the meaning accurately, and that their comment, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”, shows that their response was disparaging right from the start.

But whatever the case, the crucial part comes with Jesus’ explanation of his comments to his hearers. Jesus sensed that they hadn’t really got his message, that they were ready to taunt him with proverbs such as “Physician, heal yourself!”

Then Jesus quoted two examples from the Old Testament involving the great prophets Elijah and Elisha. Verses 25-26 describe a story from Elijah's time – the 9^th Century BC (1 Kings Chapter 17) - when there was a drought and a famine. God told the prophet Elijah to go and stay with a woman from Sidon - a foreigner. This woman, a widow, had almost run out of food and she expected that she and her son would soon die of starvation. But during the time Elijah stayed with her, her supplies of food and drink did not run out.

Now, Elijah was a great prophet, revered by the Jewish people, and the point that Jesus was making is this: God sent Elijah to help a widow – but not an Israelite widow.

Verse 27 describes an event from Elisha's time. Elisha succeeded Elijah, and he was also revered as a great prophet. Naaman, who was the Army commander of Israel's enemy, the Syrians, contracted leprosy. Naaman’s wife had an Israelite servant girl who said that there was a prophet in Israel would be able to heal him. And God used that prophet, Elisha, to heal Naaman. Elisha was sent to heal one leper – and the leper was the commander of the enemy army.

So why did Jesus choose these two stories?   In both these stories, the hero (or heroine) was a foreigner, not an Israelite. And God rescued both of them miraculously. It’s probably not surprising that the people of Nazareth reacted so negatively. They were, after all, waiting for God to liberate them from their pagan enemies.  Some Jewish texts from that time record a longing that God would condemn the wicked nations and destroy them. Instead Jesus pointed out that when the great prophets were active, it wasn’t the Israelites who benefited, but the foreigners.

So, what was the essence of Jesus’ message – the Nazareth manifesto, the point that the people of Nazareth missed? When Jesus said that he had come to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, to give sight to the blind, to set the oppressed free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour, the people of Nazareth thought they were the poor and the oppressed and that they deserved God’s favour. “We’re good moral people,” they thought. “We come together each week to hear the Scriptures. We try to do our best to obey God, but we are under the thumb of a foreign power – idol worshippers, pagans. Yet some day the Messiah will come, and he will lead the good people to victory over the oppressors.” So when Jesus told them that they had got it all wrong, they were angry and wanted to kill him. They had missed the point; they thought they were the poor and the oppressed who would, according to Isaiah’s prophesy, be delivered by the Messiah. But they didn’t understand who the poor and the oppressed really were.

Jesus said he had come to bring good news to the poor. So, who are the poor that Jesus was referring to? There is a lot of debate about whether Jesus meant the spiritually poor or the actually poor. I think he meant both: the Gospel is for the spiritually poor, but especially the actually poor. 

Jesus came to those who are spiritually poor. In his explanation of the Servant Lord passage, Jesus referred to two people, the widow from Sidon and Naaman, the Syrian general. One of them, Naaman, was rich. He didn’t choose two actually poor people as examples. You don’t have to be literally poor to receive salvation, and being literally poor doesn’t mean that you’re automatically in. But what Naaman and the widow had in common was that they were spiritually poor, and that they realised it. From the perspective of the Israelites, they were religious outcasts, moral outcasts. Naaman, although rich, was willing to listen to his wife’s Israelite slave girl and to humble himself, after a bit of encouragement, before an Israelite prophet. He realised his spiritual poverty.

Jesus’ message in Nazareth was that he was coming to those who were spiritual outcasts, to those who knew they could not bring anything of value to God. Jesus was contrasting the people in front of him with the spiritual outcasts to whom he had been sent. He was in effect saying, “I haven’t been sent to people like you, but instead to people who realise that they are spiritually poor.”

The problem for the people in Nazareth was that they didn’t realise their spiritual poverty. They thought they could get to God through leading a good life. If they did what the Hebrew Scriptures told them to do, if they worshipped regularly, then they would be fine. They thought that they could control God. If they tried hard enough, God would owe them a good life, he would have to answer their prayers. But it’s not like that. God doesn’t owe us anything.

So who are the spiritually poor? They are people who are willing to look below the surface. If we look on the surface, then we can all find things that we’ve done well. For example, we love our parents, we love our children, we’ve helped people in need, we’ve tried hard. If you don’t look below the surface, you will be tempted to think that, because you’ve tried hard and have done some things well, God owes you a good life. 

But the spiritually poor person will look beneath the surface and realise that that is not enough. God owes us nothing, and we can only be saved through God’s grace and absolute mercy. We can only find God through what Jesus did on the Cross. And as we come to Communion today, let’s use that as an opportunity to reflect on what Jesus did on the Cross.

Only those who are realise that they are spiritually poor, no matter how they may look on the surface, can understand the good news that Jesus brings. It’s very easy for us to criticise the people of Nazareth, for failing to see the truth, but we could easily fall into the same trap. Do we think we can reach God by being good? Do we think that because we’re good people God should bless us? Or do we realise that we are spiritually poor – that we are totally dependent on God’s grace and mercy?

Jesus came to bring good news to the spiritually poor – but especially to the actually poor. If we read the Bible carefully, over and over again, when we have a poor person and a powerful person, a woman and a man, a racial outsider next to the racial insider, it’s almost always the person without power, the person on the outside who gets it – who understands what the good news is about. In the resurrection accounts in the Bible, it is the women who are first convinced that Jesus has risen from the dead, while most of the men were originally sceptical about the resurrection. In the story of Naaman, it was an Israelite slave girl who saw the way things were, not the great general. Over and over again, it is the outsider who understands the good news, not the insider.

We can only receive Jesus by realising that we are spiritually poor. People who are successful in worldly terms run the risk of thinking that they’ve got to the top through their own work, through their own merits. So they don’t see their spiritual poverty. But the outsider, the marginalised person, is much more likely to see their need.

The people of Nazareth, so sure of their own 'most favoured nation' status with God, rejected God's messenger, indeed God’s son.

Jesus was saying to them, if you want to be part of God's kingdom, you have to show the same kind of faith that the Sidonian woman and Naaman demonstrated; you need to acknowledge your spiritual poverty. But the people of Nazareth were not willing to listen to this message. Those who were supposed to be God's people could not see God at work. And in their anger they tried to kill Jesus.

In the next few weeks we shall see how Jesus put into practice the Nazareth manifesto. No broken promises for him! We shall see how he reaches to the outsiders and the outcasts, how he brings the good news to the poor and the oppressed. And as we move into the New Year, for us the Nazareth manifesto remains very much alive: Jesus still wants to forgive the unforgiveable, welcome the unacceptable, embrace the unembraceable and teach the unteachable. Are we willing to follow him?

Let’s pray. Father, help us to acknowledge our spiritual poverty, our need for God’s love, mercy and grace. Help us all to share in bringing the good news to those who are on the margins of society. In Jesus’ name.

Amen.

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[i] 4 January 2015