Every once in a while you’ll hear a story about a local boy or girl who becomes incredibly successful. Often they’ve become successful athletes – the local high school quarterback who gets an NFL contract, or the girls’ high school gymnastics star who is picked to participate in the USA Olympics team. The folks back home keep track of their success. Young boys will say, “I want to be just like him” – or young girls will say that they want to be just like her. When they return home, they often receive a hero’s welcome – perhaps a parade, a celebration at the high school gymnasium or stadium – and it’s not entirely unknown for a street to be named in their honor. People are tremendously proud of their hometown superstars – the local kid who made good – and they go to great lengths to display that pride.
In today’s Gospel lesson we read the account of another local boy who had become successful at what he was doing – but the reaction is substantially different. Specifically, we read of Jesus and his return to his hometown of Nazareth.
The people of Nazareth had certainly heard a lot about the local boy and the things He had been doing. In the verses immediately prior to today’s Gospel lesson, Luke tells us that “a report about him” – that is, stories about Jesus and His miracles – “went out through all the surrounding country. And he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.” From the parallel accounts in both Matthew and Mark, it’s clear that the people of Nazareth had heard all about the miracles that Jesus had been performing – not just turning water into wine, but healing all kinds of people of all kinds of illnesses and diseases. Yes, Jesus had become quite the celebrity throughout Galilee – and now the hometown boy was coming back home to the people who had known him as a child and as a young man.
At first, everything goes very well. As He did every Sabbath day, Jesus went to the synagogue, and he stood up to read from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah – reading the same words that we read today from the Book of Isaiah. But they’re not just any words – they’ve been carefully chosen for this specific day and for this specific group of people. The words that Jesus reads from Isaiah chapter 61 talk about the Messiah who has been promised to the Children of Israel. The people who heard Jesus on that day would have recognized the reading from Isaiah – they would have known what those words meant. But then Jesus surprises everyone when he says, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Or to put it in our terms, Jesus told them that He was the one that Isaiah wrote about. Jesus told them that He – the hometown boy they had known since he was a very little boy – was the Messiah.
Luke tells us that the people “spoke well of him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth.” But they didn’t “speak well of him” for very long. Immediately the devil started planting doubts. Immediately Jesus began hearing words of questioning and words of unbelief. Luke tells us only that they asked, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” – but from the accounts in Matthew and Mark, we learn that the questions got more personal – they got more probing – they became snide and nasty-sounding. We can only imagine the things that must have been said. Isn’t He just a carpenter – a common laborer? Isn’t He just the son of Mary? Until he left town to become a traveling preacher, we’d never seen any miracles. He’s no different than any other young man who grew up in Nazareth. What makes Him so special that He should be lecturing to us?
Things have turned sour pretty quickly. The crowd doesn’t want words – they want miracles. They’ve heard all about the miracles that Jesus has been performing elsewhere – and they want to see them for themselves. The people tell Jesus, “What we have heard you did at Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.” But Jesus isn’t just some sideshow performer doing tricks so that people will oooh and ahhhh at the great deeds he does. As we heard in last week’s Gospel lesson, the miracles are nothing more and nothing less than signs revealing Jesus to be the only-begotten Son of God.
But there won’t be any miracles today in Nazareth, no turning water into wine or healing people or doing anything else to point to the fact that Jesus is the Son of God – that Jesus is God Himself. Today Jesus lets Scripture do the talking – He reads the words of Isaiah that foretold the coming of the Messiah. That foretold the coming of Jesus. Words that – and this is important – foretold the rejection of Jesus.
Throughout their long and troubled history, the Children of Israel had repeatedly rejected prophets sent to them by God. Over and over again the prophets were rejected – were persecuted – and sometimes were even murdered. The prophet Isaiah even prophesied that the Messiah would be stricken, smitten by God and afflicted. The “suffering servant” described in Isaiah chapters 52 and 53 would be wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our iniquities. He would be like a lamb that was led to its slaughter. He would pour out His soul unto death.
The people who were in that synagogue that day in Nazareth knew the words of Isaiah, but they rejected those prophecies just as they rejected the man who fulfilled those prophecies. They wanted a Messiah who could do great miracles, but they never understood that the true miracle was that this hometown boy – this Jesus of Nazareth – was saving His greatest miracle for that day when he would face the ultimate rejection of His people and suffer the shame and disgrace of death on the cross. For by that death, God the Father accepted the sacrifice of God the Son – and our sins were forgiven. Then on Easter morning Jesus of Nazareth rose from the dead, signaling that death and the devil were forever conquered.
In what seems to be no more than an instant, the people of Nazareth went from speaking well of Jesus to wanting to kill him. They rejected His teachings and they rejected Him personally. They absolutely and totally rejected the revelation – the epiphany – that that this Jesus they had known since he was a boy was actually and truly the Son of God, the Messiah promised to them for thousands of years. It got so bad that they wanted to kill him – and they actually tried to push Jesus off a cliff.
But it’s not time for Jesus to die. That time will come later, and it will happen in Jerusalem rather than Nazareth. It will come after three years of virtually non-stop rejection. It will come on a day when the crowds will cram the streets of Jerusalem to cry “Crucify him! Crucify him!” It will come in the form of the most horrible death imaginable.
Today people – millions and millions of people – still reject Jesus. Some deny that Jesus was anything more than a great teacher. Some say that Jesus was nothing more than a man like any other man. Still others deny that they reject Jesus – but their words and their deeds prove otherwise.
Let me read you some actual quotes. “I was raised a Baptist and we were too hung up on traditional ways. I was sitting in church and heard that God is a jealous God. I asked, ‘Why?” Come on – let’s get over it. A ‘jealous God’ is an insecure God.”
Here’s another. “One of the mistakes that human beings make is believing that there is only one way to live. Instead, there are many paths to what you call God. There couldn’t possibly be only one way. Does God care about your heart or whether you call His Son Jesus?””
Or here’s another. Referring to the Biblical assertion that Jesus is divine, one person responded, “That would make Jesus the biggest egotist that ever lived.”
You may have heard about these words before. In fact, you may have heard them when they were first spoken on television. All of them were spoken by the most prominent afternoon talk show host in the United States – the host of a show seen by an estimated 42 million viewers each week on roughly 200 stations in the United States.
Jesus said in John 14, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father expect through me.” When you reject these words of Jesus, when you say that there are many paths to God, then you reject Jesus Himself. You reject Jesus as the Lamb of God who came to take away the sins of the world. In spite of what others may tell you, there is only one way to Heaven, one way to God, one way to eternal life – and that way is Jesus.
In Acts chapter 4, St. Luke recounts the time when Peter and John were summoned to appear before the Jewish religious leaders in Jerusalem. Peter’s confession is one that all of us would do well to remember when we hear the nonsense that’s being spread by the talk shows and the books and the countless people who think that they know more than God has revealed to us in Holy Scripture. Peter said, “This Jesus is the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”
As we proceed through the remaining weeks of Epiphany and begin the season of Lent, we will see many more instances of Jesus being rejected. And the wonder of this all is that no matter how much rejection He faced – no matter how sinful people were and continue to be – Jesus never rejected us. Jesus loves us with a love that we can never fully understand. Jesus loves us so much that he was willing to suffer and die for our sins. And Jesus loves us so much that he sends His Holy Spirit to bring us to faith – and keep us secure in the faith that Jesus and only Jesus is the way to eternal life.
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