In Your Hometown

Everything was going so well. Jesus makes his proclamation, preaches his nine-word sermon, and the applause rains down. I know, that isn’t the way you remember the story. Wasn’t he rejected? Didn’t they say he was just a hometown boy getting too big for his britches? Well, not exactly. Not at first. Look again. “All spoke well of him.” They thought, “Wow! A hometown boy made good. He’s one of us! He’s ours. Aren’t we special? Aren’t we cool?” That little phrase at the end of verse 22 wasn’t disparaging; it was pride. “He’s like us.”

If Jesus has stopped there, it would have been a glorious homecoming. They would have slapped him on the back, invited him to dinner, and talked about the good old days when he was a boy and things were so much better back in the Nazareth that used to be, once upon a time. Jesus would have been a minor celebrity, and they’d all wave to him in the Walgreen’s parking lot and want to sit by him in the bleachers at the high school basketball games. He could have done well back there in the little town.

But he didn’t stop talking. He had a bigger vision than one small town in the hill country of Galilee. So, he says, “I know you want me to settle down here, because here is where all the people that matter are. I know you don’t understand why anyone would want to leave Nazareth and go on to other towns and other countries. But you don’t need me here. You won’t hear me here.”

Wait, he said that? “No prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.” Different translations have us remember those words in different ways. But what does it mean? Why did he say it? Because he knew what was underneath their approval. And he knew they didn’t want to hear what he came to say. He came to say they were important - that much they heard. God is going to get the kingdom going right here, in Nazareth. That’ll show the folks down the road, in the next county, in the next country. God’s kicking things off right here! Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Yee haw. He came to say that they were important, but that they weren’t the only important ones in the world. He came to say that God thinks even the stranger, even the foreigner, even the enemy is important—important enough to save, important enough to love.

This has been God’s plan from the beginning, Jesus says. You remember Elijah? You remember that story of the widow? God thought she was important, saved her, blessed her, loved her. She wasn’t one of us. You remember Elisha? You remember that guy, that foreign general guy, with the skin problem? That guy was an enemy, a conqueror of people like you. God healed him. God blessed him. God loved him. Get this, he was Syrian.

Syrian? Wait a minute here, Jesus. A refugee from Syria? He might want to hurt us. He might hate us. He might tell us he’s running for his life, but maybe it is just a plot to catch us with our guard down. Maybe he isn’t really sick. Maybe they aren’t really refugees. Maybe they haven’t lived their whole lives in fear for their lives, surrounded by war and killing and living in an unjust system that doesn’t value them as human beings but as pawns in a terrible game of power. Maybe we should protect ourselves first and think of ourselves first.

How dare you, Jesus, tell us to love even those who are different from us. Heck, we struggle to love the others in our pew; don’t go asking us to love across the boundaries that are there to keep us safe. No wonder they got angry. No wonder they turned into a mob. You can’t blame them, really. Jesus was inconveniencing them something awful. Asking them to make accommodations, to change ingrained habits, to think differently about who and what a neighbor really is—that’s crazy talk. So, they drove him out of town; they wanted to toss him off a cliff. But he left. He had places to go, a Word to proclaim, a world to save. He went on his way.

That is perhaps the saddest verse in the whole Bible. It’s evidence that God doesn’t force us to change, to grow, to love as Jesus loves. God doesn’t demand that we become something more, something riskier, something with the potential to change the world for the better; t be more like it was supposed to be in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth and said it was good! It was good. We don’t have to be a part of making it good. But Jesus isn’t hanging around. He says follow me, and he goes on his way.

He leaves them all. Except us, we think. Except me. We don’t want to hurl him from a cliff. We’re hurling ourselves, one another, those unlike us, the enemy, the bad seed, the outsiders. We’ll toss them aside. We’ll shout them down; we’ll rise in anger. And in so doing, we grab him by the lapels and, in our anger, him to the edge. And maybe if we’re lucky, our eyes will open enough to see him, face bloodied by our hatred, and we’ll stop ourselves and try it his way. When we see the pain in his eyes and hear his whispered words, “Are there none who will not hate?” And we respond, “None of them,” except ... will we? Can we be the exception in a hate-filled world? “None of them, except ____.” Fill in the blank. Please? Before he goes his way and leaves us to it.