Homily for the 4th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The gospel excerpt from Luke that we have today is a continuation of last Sunday's extract. Jesus is giving his first sermon in his own synagogue, addressing his own neighbours for the first time. It fact today's gospel overlaps with last Sunday's extract: At the beginning of today's excerpt, we read, "He won the approval of all, and they were astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips." That is the sentence which also ended last Sunday reading. But, as we saw last Sunday, these gracious words were soon forgotten. By the end of the sermon, they are enraged, and they are chasing him out of the town, intending to throw him off a cliff.
Two factors in particular infuriated them. First, he was overstepping the cultural norms of his day: in the Mediterranean culture of the time, you took the male child too on the trade of his father. According to the cultural norms of his own day, Jesus was destined to spend his life as a carpenter. But here he is now, standing up and preaching in the synagogue in his home town. They have no problem with the manner of his delivery. In fact they are more than satisfied. 'They were astonished with the gracious words that came from his lips.' But the problem lies elsewhere: Here is a carpenter playing at being a Rabbi. 'Is not this Joseph's son' they whispered to one another. We have here an element of small-town jealousy.
Jesus reacts strongly against this narrow parochialism. Apparently, the people have heard that Jesus had done great things in Capernaum, a near-by town with a large non-Jewish population. The unspoken accusation here of course is, 'Look, you go off and work miracles and wonders among gentiles and strangers; then you come here among your own people, Jews and neighbours, and you merely talk a good game. It's all old guff.' Jesus quotes them the proverb: 'A prophet is never accepted in his own country.' We would say today: 'Familiarity breeds contempt'. Jesus is always trying to expand the limits of Israel's religious consciousness, forcing them to recognise that God is a universal God, not a tribal God.
Jesus defends his actions by referring to Elijah and Elisha, both of whom also, like Jesus, had ministered to non-Jews, to a Sidonian widow and a Syrian leper. Like Jeremiah in the first reading, the mission of Jesus is not merely to Israel but to "the nations." Jeremiah is told: "I have appointed you as prophet to the nations," not just to Israel. This is the tradition in which Jesus stands. The outreach to Gentiles first by Jesus, and later by the Church, results in conflicts with the authorities. In the gospel, this conflict will escalate to the crucifixion; in Acts of the Apostles, the Church will make a definitive break with the Jews because of its mission to the Gentiles.
Luke is of course the writer who recorded the growth of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles. Here he anticipates these developments in a solemn saying of Jesus, "no prophet is accepted in his native place." To find a hearing, Jesus and the Church will have to move beyond their "hometown crowd."
Appropriately, the call of Jeremiah recounted in our first reading, rejection is anticipated but provided for: Jeremiah will be like a fortified city, an iron pillar, a brass wall able to stand against the whole land. God's final words to Jeremiah ("They will fight against you, but not prevail over you, for I am with you to deliver you") apply perfectly to Jesus. Indeed, this Sunday's gospel ends in just this way, with the townsfolk ready to hurl Jesus over the hill, but he manages to escape. Luke is of course writing here with hindsight: the implication is obvious: as Jesus escaped the clutches of the Jewish crowd, the gospel must escape the limiting clutches of Jewish culture if it is to become 'the good news of salvation for all the nations'. In more general terms, the gospel must never he hijacked of monopolised by any age or culture. Because if the gospel is not itself free, it will have no power to liberate us.