Luke 4:21-30
“Too Hard to Hear”
January 30, 2022
It’s amazing how quickly a crowd can turn on you, isn’t it Jesus?
On that cold winter’s day, much like this one, we found our seats in a large college classroom with about a few dozen others. We were all there for an in-service training required of all the supervisory Housing and Residential Life staff at the University of Delaware where I had started working as a Hall Director just 5 months earlier. The undergraduate RAs or Resident Assistants were encouraged but not required to attend.
Our speaker had made the trip east all the way from a college in California.
On our predominantly white campus with a staff that was about 80% white, we were looking forward to what Dr. Donald Cheek was going to share with us but few there had actually read his book, the title of which was also the topic of his talk. Its name Assertive Black…Puzzled White piqued our curiosity and we settled in, many of us hoping to heighten our understanding of communication and how we could more effectively work with black students and colleagues.
Dr. Cheek was a warm and engaging speaker and there was plenty of nodding of heads and smiles all around. That was, until, for the first time in my life and that of almost all of my white colleagues, we were labeled racist by someone who did not know us.
Dr. Cheek worked hard to explain that our racism was not because of anything we as individuals had said or done but by virtue of being in the race of power, a power that we also had done nothing to earn except to have been born with white skin.
That’s when the temperature in the room took a dramatic turn. Hands flew up, tempers flared, there were even tears as some of folks started challenging him, shouting out things like, “You don’t even know me” and “That’s not fair” and “Isn’t it racist to think that?” Dr. Cheek’s program ended earlier than planned and the grumbling and arguments and anger lasted long after he was escorted to the airport.
Why is it that the truth can sometimes be harder to hear than a lie?
Jesus was with his hometown crowd. They knew him and thought he knew them which meant that he would reinforce what they believed about themselves.
He starts out with those 2 proverbs:
“Physician, heal yourself.” and
“No prophet is acceptable in his own country.”
Jesus’ Nazareth neighbors are blinded by their own privilege, and they are resentful that Jesus had taken God’s favor to others beyond Nazareth.
It must have really angered them to think that he had shared God’s favor with the folks in Capernaum where a significant part of the population was not Jewish.
Jesus here is evoking well-known Scripture in making his case.
Both Elijah and Elisha also took God’s favor to non-Jews – the form of a widow and a leper.
Bottom line is we tend not to want God to love the people we hate.
How can our enemies or the people that we absolutely have no use for or want to be anywhere near are also loved so profoundly?
One wise writer describes it this way:
“No matter how hard we try, we cannot seem to get God to respect our boundaries. God keeps plowing right through them, inviting us to follow or get out of the way.
The problem is not that we are loved any less.
The problem is that people we cannot stand are loved just as much as we are, by a God with an upsetting sense of community.” (Barbara Brown Taylor, Home by Another Way, 45)
There are multiple paths to the truth. One of the great things about church is that while we spend a lifetime searching and asking questions and then feeling like we’re making some headway but then going backwards. We may get a gentle nudge or maybe a more aggressive shove with some insight from a fellow seeker here or maybe learn from someone with a very different take on God. We inch toward truth during the finite precious days of our earthly existence.
What we are seeing in so many hurting parts of our nation and the wider world is that when the truth becomes too hard to hear because it challenges the very foundation of a belief system, sometimes the only response one can muster is made of anger and violence.
There are some who when faced with an uncomfortable truth about a long-held belief or tradition, all they can do to defend themselves is to go into attack mode.
As the great theologian and writer Fred Craddock put it,
All of us know what it is to be at war with ourselves, sometimes making casualties of those who are guilty of nothing but speaking the truth in love.” (Interpretation: Luke, 63)
As we will witness more than once in Luke’s Gospel, the tension that so often is assumed to be between Judaism and Jesus or the synagogue and the church is not that at all.
The tension lies between Judaism and its own Scripture.
God had already demonstrated God’s grace toward everyone as early as in the covenant made with Abraham. (Genesis 22:18)
Jonah deep desire not to preach to the Ninevites who he had such a problem with came out in his address to God when he said, “I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.”
(Jonah 4:2)
Stoning someone and throwing them against stones was considered the same form of punishment.
So how does Jesus, the truth teller finally get away?
He escapes by going down the middle.
He will not take sides.
He won’t be on the Nazareth team and against the Capernaum team.
He isn’t rah-rah Jewish side and boo the Samaritan side.
Jesus is sharing a love that breaks through the boundaries we create that separate us.
Hard to hear? Yes, but also such Good News for every single one of us, all of us.
Amen.