This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 1/26/24, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 4:14-30. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
The Gospel of Luke tells us that after his baptism by John in the river Jordan and by the Holy Spirit in the form of a dove, Jesus spent forty days in the wilderness, where he was tempted by the devil. After this time of testing, he returned to human society. Luke says he returned to Galilee and began to teach in the Jewish synagogues there. Luke says that everyone was quite impressed with him.
Jesus had grown up in Galilee, so naturally he made his way back to his hometown of Nazareth. Nazareth was a tiny village, a profoundly unimportant place. The region of Galilee was already considered a backwater by most Jews of that age – perhaps like we here in California might think of Mississippi or Louisiana. The village of Nazareth was a backwater within a backwater!
But this was Jesus’ home, the place where he had grown up. His visit to the synagogue in Nazareth was not just one more preaching engagement. Far from it: As Luke constructs the story here, this visit to Nazareth was effectively the beginning of his ministry. To put it in terms that might be particularly relatable for us today, Jesus’ sermon at his hometown synagogue was sort of like his inauguration speech.
Jesus had just received power from on high; he’d been clothed with the Holy Spirit out beyond the river Jordan. He’d been anointed by God as the long-awaited messiah – the true king of Israel. He’d been through the wilderness journey, and now here he was, back at home, ready to begin his work. Ready to inaugurate his administration, so to speak.
Now Jesus wasn’t any ordinary king, and this wasn’t any ordinary inauguration. Like I said, Nazareth was the middle of nowhere. No king had ever been born there, much less inaugurated there. Jesus had moved from the margins of society with John the Baptist, out into the deep desert, and now he was returning to Nazareth, perhaps the most unimportant place within the land of Israel. Jesus here is acting more like a secret agent than a king, more like Elijah than David.
But Jesus is a king, nonetheless. He’s clear about this in his inaugural speech. Jesus symbolically begins his ministry by telling his friends and neighbors, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” What is Jesus saying here? “The Spirit has anointed me.” This is kingship language, and a radical reinterpretation of kingship language at that. The kings of Israel were traditionally anointed with oil by prophets like Samuel. But Jesus is saying, “God himself has anointed me. I am the promised messiah, the great king that you’ve been awaiting for generations. I’ve arrived, and I’m here to begin the work of my Father’s administration.”
Here is the greatest of kings, inaugurated not by prophets or supreme court justices, but by the very Spirit of God. God dwells in this king. This new ruler is God’s living presence on earth. In Jesus, the Word has become flesh and dwells among us.
And where does he go first? To the armpit of Galilee – to the middle of nowhere! This is highly unexpected, to say the least.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me,” Jesus says. What has God anointed Jesus to do? What is his kingly administration to be all about? What’s the mission statement? To bring good news to the poor. To proclaim release to the captives. To give the blind their sight. To liberate those who are oppressed. To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
Jesus’ mission statement is Jubilee. If his supporters had set out yard signs, they wouldn’t have said, “Make Israel Great Again” or “When We Fight, We Win”. If Jesus had had campaign yard signs, they probably would have said: “Jesus of Nazareth: The Year of Jubilee.”
In his inaugural sermon, Jesus points to the ancient Jewish tradition of Jubilee, laid out in Leviticus 25. It is a holy year in which all debts are cancelled and slaves are set free. It is a sabbath year, in which the land is allowed to rest and a fresh order is established. The Levitical Jubilee is like hitting reboot on the entire society; it’s an opportunity to clear away all the social, cultural, and economic injustice that has crept in over time.
This is great news. This is something the people of Galilee want to hear. Because the present system is deeply compromised. The people of occupied Roman Palestine are ready for a big change, a Jubilee, a global reset that will set things right again. And so it’s no surprise that everyone Jesus has been preaching to so far have been praising him. Jubilee is a popular message to people who feel that everything has turned against them. The people of Galilee are ready for God to perform a factory reset on their society.
So when Jesus starts preaching at his hometown synagogue in Nazareth, he gets a similar reception to the one he’s received throughout the region. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Wow, what a guy! He’s going to make Israel great again. He’s going to lead us into a battle, and when we fight, we win! And how amazing is it that the messiah is coming from among us, the people of Nazareth. I mean, we’ve known Jesus since he was a kid! “Is this not Joseph’s son?” Incredible stuff! God bless Israel! God bless Galilee! God bless the people of Nazareth!
I’ve always found this next part confusing. Because Jesus could have just left it at that. He could have taken the praise, he could have stoked the excitement. He could have built up his movement and enlisted a whole crowd of young Galileans who were ready to join the revolution. But here in Luke 4, Jesus goes in an entirely different direction. It seems like he actively sabotages his own winning message. Jesus says to the adoring crowd:
“Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land, yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”
And when Jesus’ friends and relatives and fellow townspeople heard this, it says that all of them were “filled with rage.” They were so angry that they formed into a lynch mob and tried to throw him off a cliff. In about thirty seconds, Jesus’ hometown went from wanting to coronate Jesus to wanting to murder him. What on earth just happened here?
It seems to me that Jesus got a bit upset with his childhood friends and neighbors. It seems to me that he was concerned that they were getting his message all wrong. Perhaps, when Jesus announced the good news of the Jubilee, everyone assumed that this was not just good news for Nazareth and Galilee and Israel, but that it was at the same time bad news for all of Israel’s enemies.
But that’s not the way it’s going to go this time, Jesus told them. In fact, that’s not the way this thing normally goes. The people of Israel have been waiting all this time for a kingly savior to put them back on top, to make Israel great again, but that’s not even the way things normally work in the Hebrew Bible. Sure, you’ve got the history of King David and King Solomon. And sometimes they were good and wise, and other times they were evil and foolish. And the other kings were an even more mixed bag than those two, with some of them like Saul and Ahab ending up being positively devilish.
Despite the repeated failures of kings and presidents, we all tend to look to executive leadership as the central focus. We look to them as saviors or tyrants. We place all our praise and blame on them. We give over our agency to them and turn them into little gods that rule over us – for better or worse. But this is not the way of Jesus. This is not the pattern of the kingdom of God.
I believe that what Jesus is saying here, in his highly offensive inaugural speech to Nazareth, is that the real story of Israel is the story of the prophets. It is a story that relativizes the power and divine right of kings. The prophets show the greatness and glory of God, but not necessarily by blessing Israel and giving it status and power. As Jesus points out in this sermon that so engaged the people of Nazareth, God often favors the outsider, the foreigner, and even the enemies of Israel. Jesus reveals that the kingdom of God is not a nationalistic project, and that God is no respecter of persons. Jesus proclaims Jubilee, not to the myth of the nation-state or the Davidic kingship, but to the whole people, the whole earth, everything that breathes – especially those who are lost, on the margins, vulnerable, in need of mercy.
This is shocking. This is not what the people of Nazareth had signed up for. They were there for “Make Israel Great Again.” They were there for “When We Fight, We Win.” But they were not going to stand for any nonsense about loving their Samaritan neighbor, much less their Roman one. The idea that God might – and historically did – bless their enemies rather than them was so infuriating that they were ready to murder Jesus for reminding them about it.
This should sound familiar. This week we’ve heard an Episcopal bishop defamed because she made a plea to the new President for mercy for LGBT youths and migrant workers. She’s been called a heretic and a crazy person and much worse for saying “have mercy.”
I know that a lot of us were pleased to see a member of the Christian clergy using her platform as an opportunity to speak truth to power – to plea for the vulnerable in a time of political transition. And it’s easy to imagine that we stand with Jesus in his Jubilee gospel of liberation for the oppressed and freedom to the captives. But before we get too proud of ourselves, I want to invite you to consider the people you really hate.
Don’t fool yourself and claim that there’s no one you hate. Of course there is. All of us have people that we just can’t stand, that we truly despise. Think about those people for a minute. Get specific. Who are your enemies? Think about the things they have done or are even still doing that make them so evil.
Now that you’ve got those people in mind, it’s easier to appreciate what a scandal it was when Jesus told his kin and neighbors in Nazareth: Those people who you hate? The kingdom is for them. God’s mercy is for them. The good news is to them. Jesus has come to save your enemies, to free them from darkness and make them whole.
The kingdom of God is about blessing those who curse us and praying for those who mistreat us. The kingdom of God is about a transformation so profound, so utterly upside-down that it begins with our enemies. They are the starting place.
So now we can understand a little better why they wanted to kill Jesus. And we have to ask ourselves the question, in all seriousness: How about us? Are we living in a spirit of murder, or are we ready to receive Jesus’ message of enemy-love?
What does it feel like for us to join Jesus’ Jubilee movement to cancel the debts and liberate the captives, knowing that many of those who will be blessed are the people we most despise?
What does it mean to embrace Jesus’ message, when the good news is to enemies first?
In this time of rising danger, curdling rage, and ideological combat, what does it mean to love our enemies, and bless those who persecute us?