In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus heads back to Nazareth for the first time after being baptized in the Jordan River and spending 40 days in the desert with no one but Satan for company.
Since then, Jesus, filled with the Spirit, has been teaching and healing throughout Galilee and, Luke reports, is praised wherever he goes. The hometown folks must have been buzzing with the news as they crowded into the synagogue that day. It was customary to ask a man from the gathered community to go to the front of the room, read from the scrolls, and deliver his thoughts on Scripture. So it’s not surprising that they would have asked Jesus to take his turn that week.
The relationship of those folks to Scripture was a living thing, different in many ways from our relationship to the Bible today. The stories they told and retold–of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Joseph and Moses in Egypt, King David, Elijah and the other prophets–seeped deeply into their bones. In those stories, the past and present and future came together. Yahweh came to them over and over in different times and places, but always the same: forgiving their lousy behavior; rescuing them from slavery, imprisonment, and hardship; offering bread and water to those who were hungry and thirsty; promising new life and fulfilling those promises. They made sense of their lives through those stories. They expected prophecies to be fulfilled in the past, in the future, and perhaps in the present. In Jesus’ time, for example, they are actively looking for the Messiah who had been prophesied for thousands of years.
So I think that maybe they crowded into the synagogue that day precisely because they wondered: could this boy, the one they’d known all their lives, be the one?
So what is it about his words–about Jesus himself–that leaves them silent, staring, speechless, and (spoiler for next week) then fills them with doubt and rage? If you were there, sitting on a synagogue bench that day, what would you think about his choice of Scripture? What would you feel as he silently returned the scroll to its place, sat down in his seat, and then, with everyone’s eyes fixed on him, announced that he was the Scripture, sitting there beside you?
In today’s first lesson, Paul implores the Corinthians to see each of the many and diverse gifts of the community as equally important to the whole. The Corinthians—like every human on earth ever—have been jockeying over who is most important and having a difficult time honoring people whose gifts they see as weak. I wonder if Jesus is facing this kind of skepticism as well, both because of his humble roots and because he’s claiming the weakest and the poorest–not the hometown folks sitting in the synagogue with him–are God’s priority.
Also…suppose the Corinthians really start to believe that everyone with their different gifts is essential to the whole and that it’s their life’s work to use those gifts together, one body, drinking of one Spirit. Suppose the people of Nazareth really start to believe that Jesus, son of Joseph the carpenter, is the Messiah, announcing release from the way things have always been, beginning with those even worse off than they are. Suppose I really believed those things. Suppose we believed them together. What happens then?
Sunday Morning Words 