1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13 – Luke 4:21-30
We forget that our entire lives are a journey of change. We get wrapped up in me. I come as I am, and I am perfect as I am, because this is the way God has made me, and that’s it.
But that is pride, that is ego. So we must face the journey that Jesus calls us on with humility. And we must trust that our brothers and sisters around us will hold us in that humility, in that fragility, in that place of pain and hurt, because it does hurt to hear things and to be told that we’re not doing things as well as we could do and know that our brothers and sisters will hold us in love.
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In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Please sit.
And so we continue our gospel reading from last week. We pick up Jesus speaking in the synagogue and that wonderful sermon from Bishop Jonathan, which is on the website for you to have a listen to, and I urge you to do so.
It was a beautiful sermon, and Bishop Jonathan talked about how Jesus spoke in the synagogue. But as we continue this week, what seems like a perfectly normal event in the synagogue, Jesus reading from the scrolls that were given him and teaching. He was a Rabbi. He was a teacher. People sat and listened to him.
What on earth caused them to be so angry? Why did they go from listening to what the Rabbi was teaching and hearing the scripture and listening to what he had to say to being so angry, so outraged? It feels like it spins on a coin.
The reason they were angry is because Jesus was talking about Salvation for the Gentiles. And as far as the Jewish people who were gathered there were concerned the only thing the Gentiles were useful for and the way they talked about the Gentiles was, and the phrase was, as fuel for the fires of hell.
And Jesus is telling them that the Gentiles are going to be saved, the Gentiles, everybody will be taken up into heaven. And so all of a sudden, the Jewish people were outraged. The people of the synagogue were outraged by this.
All of a sudden, Jesus was saying that God’s love was not just for a few, but for all. And that was groundbreaking. And that meant that the Jewish people in that synagogue had to consider the other, the outsider, the person who wasn’t in the club.
To help us understand that a little bit. Let’s talk about Nazareth now.
Nazareth, when I say Nazareth to you, I imagine what comes to mind is a village. And part of the reason for that is because we think about Bethlehem as a village, which in those days it was, and we think about small groups of people in a village. But Nazareth wasn’t a village. Nazareth was a town. It was a city.
It was large. There were as many as 20,000 people living in Nazareth. This was not a small little village on the outskirts of Israel. This is a place that is bounded by three major roads that go through Jerusalem. You’ve got the main road that goes to Jerusalem that all the pilgrims are on.
You have the main Damascus – Egypt road, which all the trade goes along, and you have the main road that takes you to the sea, to the Mediterranean. And so Nazareth was a bustling large town of 20,000 people that constantly had different people coming through it, constantly had people from far away places, constantly had non Jewish people coming through it. And so the people of this synagogue had sat there and they put their blinkers on and they had said, we are set aside for God and nobody else is allowed or will be saved by God. And Jesus just in that one little line threw all of that out.
And he didn’t say to them because this feels right. He didn’t say to them because it’s a good thing to do. He argued and told them it was the right thing to do because that’s what the scripture showed. That is what the Old Testament showed, what we call the Old Testament. And he uses Elijah and he uses those great examples of the first part, the Old Testament, as we know, as the example of the fact that the Gentiles were healed and were included in Salvation. That is a really hard thing to hear.
And I’ve got sympathy for the people in that synagogue because how many times have you sat in Church and listened to a sermon or how many times have you sat in Church and listened to a piece of scripture and it has made you uncomfortable? How many times have you come to Church and you’ve listened to the pastor say something and you’ve gone, no, no, I don’t agree with that. That’s not right because it’s not nice, because it doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. And often pastors when they point to scripture and say, this is why you should do this, this is why this is right or this is why this is wrong, people will go, yeah, but it makes me feel bad. Jesus doesn’t care if you feel bad.
It’s here in the gospel. He stands in front of the people who know him best, and he tells them something deeply upsetting, something that is so far beyond the pale, so offensive that they grab hold of him and take him to the top of a hill to throw him off it.
Now, I hope that I will never stand up in front of you in this place and tell you something so offensive that you will grab hold of me and take me up onto the Chilterns to throw me off in escarpments. But you should be prepared to be made uncomfortable in Church. You should be prepared to hear things that you don’t agree with. And it’s very interesting because as most of you know, I put out a little message on Sunday mornings most days, and I put it out on Facebook and on Twitter and on WhatsApp? And I say, come to Church, be loved and come and be accepted into our family.
But this morning I put out a message that says, come to Church and hear something you don’t agree with. Now on a normal Sunday morning, my little tweet gets retweeted five or six times by different people and it gets liked 20 or 30 times. But today not a one, not one person liked it. Not one person retweeted it because people don’t like to hear things that are hard to hear, but that is what it is, part of what being a Christian is about, just as it was for the Jewish people all of that time ago in Nazareth. And how often do we judge a Church or judge a community by whether or not we already agree with what they prove?
Increasingly in our society, we think people are great when we agree with them, and we think they are evil when we disagree with them. But I urge you to be more open than that. I urge you not to caricature anybody because of whether or not you instinctively think they are right or wrong, but to listen to what they have to say. Jesus himself went to synagogue, even when it must have grated dreadfully for him when he was hearing things that he fundamentally didn’t agree with. But he went and he was part of the worshipping community, because it is that community of people rubbing up alongside one another, that worshipping community of God that forms us into that likeness of Christ, ready for heaven.
And so you will come here and you will hear things that you don’t like. But here is the rub. Jesus came and brought with him a gospel, the good news. Jesus preaches the good news. Each and every one of us has the opportunity to be saved, and that opportunity is offered in love.
Every single person is welcome through that door. Every single person, regardless of their beliefs, regardless of the life that they have led, is welcome through that door. And we will welcome every single person who comes through that door, every single pace person in Hayes, through the gift of faith, hope and love. And in that action of faith, hope and love, that person will be brought into our family, embraced. We pray that they will find Jesus Christ, that in finding Jesus Christ, they will be changed.
And that’s the bit that those of us who come to Church sometimes forget. We forget that our entire lives are a journey of change. We get wrapped up in me. I come as I am, and I am perfect as I am, because this is the way God has made me, and that’s it.
But that is pride, that is ego. So we must face the journey that Jesus calls us on with humility. And we must trust that our brothers and sisters around us will hold us in that humility, in that fragility, in that place of pain and hurt, because it does hurt to hear things and to be told that we’re not doing things as well as we could do and know that our brothers and sisters will hold us in love.
And we are changed by that action. We are changed by the love of those around us. And we must always be open to the change that Jesus Christ calls us to.
And so this week, I want you to think about who you are in this gospel.
Are you the Gentiles that Jesus speaks of that will be healed through loving him and knowing him? Or are you the people in the synagogue who are outraged at the very idea that God welcomes all?
I get it wrong regularly I fall and stumble most weeks not just on this, but on many things, but the thing about stumbling is that you generally end up on your knees and you can ask for forgiveness, you can ask for love within your faith of hope in the future that you will become more like Jesus Christ every day.
So when you stumble this week, when you fall, when you make mistakes fall to your knees and ask Jesus for the strength to be better, to change, to be Jesus in the world.
Amen.