DELIVERANCE TO THE CAPTIVES

Luke 4:14-24

January 21, 2007

First Presbyterian Church ~ Owensboro, Kentucky

Rev. Jonathan E. Carroll, Th.M.

Written by a physician to someone named “Theophilus” (which means “lover of God”), Luke’s Gospel is thorough, detailed, specific, and highly-structured. It reads like a history textbook in some places, a genealogy in others, and a diary in others. In Chapter 1, Luke begins by saying that so many others have undertaken the task of compiling an account of the life and ministry of Jesus, and, well, here is my shot at it. He begins with John the Baptist’s birth being foretold alongside the foretelling of Jesus, thus linking these two prophets in an remarkable way. He tells soon the story of Jesus’ birth that we all refer to on Christmas morning, with the shepherds, the angels, and the stable. Then he tells a brief story about Jesus – as a young boy of 12 – got left behind at the temple, where it was (3 days) later discovered that he had been listening to and asking questions of the teachers in the Temple. Chapter 3 has Jesus being baptized in the River Jordan, and the start of Chapter 4 has him thrown into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. He emerges from the desert being full of the Holy Spirit only to go from here to there teaching and preaching; and Luke says that everyone was praising him.

With the rumors of his greatness spreading, Jesus returns to his hometown, and what happens next – after only 3 short chapters – changes the way the world around him made sense of who he was and what he said; what happens next is the beginning of the end.

 As was his custom, Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He stood up to read. And just then the scroll that contained the words of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and thumbed through it until he found these words:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news

to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim deliverance to the captives and recovery

of sight to the blind; to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

            And, Luke says, he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. But he was nowhere near done. In good rabbinical fashion, having stood to read the holy writ, Jesus now sits to teach, to preach, to illumine, and to convict. And everyone was watching, waiting, and listening to experience what would happen next.

            Remember, Jesus is in Nazareth where he was brought up — there he had been circumcised, dedicated, nurtured, and loved. He is in the synagogue, “as was his custom,” says Luke. His chosen text — words from the prophet Isaiah — was as familiar to them as Luke 4:14-21 is to us. Here is no outsider or rebel; here is one of their own reading a text of their own. When the congregation exclaims, “Is not this the carpenter’s son?”, there is nothing in the story to indicate that they are sneering or expressing contempt. They are perhaps expressing delight: Here is one of our own, reading so well our own texts! Jesus, yes, young Jesus, Joseph’s and Mary’s boy, home from school for spring break. It’s good to have him back. We’ve heard of his accomplishments in Capernaum. We know him. Or did they? Why did the folk at Nazareth not know him?

Luke wants it understood: The problem with Jesus is not between the new him and the old, between the known and the unknown, but between the people of God and their own memory. Between the known and the known. Jesus, hometown boy, Joseph and Mary’s son, addressed Israel from her own scripture, her own past, her own authoritative texts, the familiar prophets, a text they already knew.  “The Day of the Lord is here!” he announced. “Amen!” they shouted. There was an excited stirring among the Chosen People at Nazareth. “Amen!” All of our waiting for deliverance, is over at last. The Lord is coming! At last he is coming to redeem his own!

People lifted up on their crutches, old men wept for joy, the oppressed raised their faces filled with hopeful expectation. “Amen!” Jesus continues, “Now, when the Lord came earlier, as I recall, there were lots of poor hungry women in Israel, but God chose to help a foreign widow, instead. You know that story.” says Jesus. There was silence. “And speaking of old, familiar stories,” continued Jesus, “You all remember the one about how Elisha healed an army officer, a Syrian — rather than all those poor deserving lepers in Israel.” And you could cut the congregational silence with a knife. When the Lord came to deliver us, Jesus says, remember that he came to human need beyond the bounds of the Chosen. It’s in the Bible, Jesus said. You know the story of Isaiah, Elijah, Elisha. And what was a chorus of “Amens” becomes a thunder of silence. It is the silence of judgment, when an exciting, new sermon suddenly becomes recognized as an old story we already know and wish to God we could forget.

Proximity to and familiarity with these hometown folk and their hometown stories is a privilege that also blinds, dulls, impedes. Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? We know him. “Yes” says Jesus continuing the sermon, “pagan Ninevah will get to judge this place because Ninevah repented when Jonah preached to them. The Queen of Sheba went across the world to hear Solomon, and yet, here among you is one greater then either Jonah or Solomon (Luke 11). At the judgment, you will claim your privilege as free passes, recalling the evening you had dinner with Jesus or when he preached in your town (Luke 13:26-27), My family founded this church. I have been in this congregation my whole life. But to no avail. Judgment begins with God’s own house.

When someone in his audience blessed Jesus’ mother, Jesus countered, “Blessing belongs only to those who hear and keep the word” (11:27-28). It doesn’t even pay to be a relative.

The church should listen, for like the good synagogue-going folk at Nazareth, we can be sure that privilege is perilous. We know. And sometimes our knowing is our undoing. This familiar biblical pattern of going to ones own people, preaching, being rejected, and then going elsewhere is repeated many times in Jesus’ ministry, in Paul’s ministry, and is it repeated in the church today.

            We have infinite resources for keeping God’s word at a distance. Prophets often cut so deep, not because they predict the future or tell us what we don’t know, but prophets dig in on what we already know all too well and turn that on us. And when they do, and you’re in the pew, there is a moment of dead silence, when the smug satisfaction of knowing turns to the shocked, silent recognition.

The people of Nazareth who first greeted Jesus with “Amen!” finally yelled, “Kill him!” because he painfully reminded them of what they knew, namely that God is free, alive, gracious, beyond the bounds of our willingness to know and to control. The worshippers at Nazareth knew that God had blessed an undeserving outsider through Elijah’s ministry, and they knew that God had cured a Syrian terrorist through Elisha, but it was a lot more than they wanted to know and they certainly did not come to church this January morning to be reminded that God refused before to play by the rules and might well refuse to play be our rules again.

What to do? Stone this young prophet! They failed in Nazareth, of course, but not many miles and months away, after a few more Jesus-sermons, they succeed. Like Elijah, the prophet Jesus was a troubler of Israel’s ignorance (“Father, forgive them; they know not what they do,” [23:34]) but it was not the kind of ignorance to be relieved by a trip to the local library. No, they knew him. Knowing him wasn’t the problem.

Consider Martin Luther King, Jr., who did not come preaching something new, he came shouting something we already knew, “You have said in your own Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, are endowed with certain inalienable rights.’ And I insist, that you either live by what you already know - or else be unfaithful to your own Constitution.” And he was killed; he told us what we already knew.

UMC Bishop Will Willimon tells this story about himself: “I had just preached as best I could on Matthew’s story of the Laborers in the Vineyard, the parable about how some workers came early, some came mid-day, some came late, and at the end of the day, they all were paid the same wage. Congregation files out. She lingered behind, wearing a blue usher’s robe. “Where do you get these stories?” she asked. “From growing up in South Carolina, I guess,” I replied. “Well, I was troubled by your sermon today,” she said. “What troubled you?” I asked, in my usual non-defensive defensiveness. “I just don’t think that’s fair. I believe that people ought to be paid fairly for the work they do and I....” “Wait!” I said. “That story is not original with me. That’s from Matthew.” “Matthew?” she asked. “Yea, Matthew. Like in the Bible?” “Oh, sure, the Bible.” “You’ve never heard that story before? What is your religious background?” I asked, just praying to God she wouldn’t say, “Methodist.” She had not gone to church much, a bit as a kid, that’s all. “You know,” I said, “I almost envy you. I have just preached a perfectly outrageous story and fifteen hundred people have filed out and told me it was a nice sermon. There is a sense in which you are the only one that got it, the only one to understand. Just for your information, the man who told that story was killed for telling it. Just after he told that story we got organized and killed him. You got it.”

We are all of us given gifts for ministry – all of us given this gospel to proclaim with our lives. And in that work there is a prophetic task to be done, a prophetic word to be spoken. And though it may be difficult to swallow for some, it is for others like fresh air, like clean water, like a release from the prisons of life in this world. If we say anything other than these prophetic words of good news, deliverance, recovery, and freedom; and if we do anything less than Jesus and our stories imagine that we will do,, then – based on this text in Luke – one  it makes you wonder what is so important about what we’re doing here, doesn’t it?