Have you ever been sure you know a person then realise you don’t? I was visiting someone poorly in Sawley. Her address was Church Farm. I found Church Farm and knocked the door. A lady answered. She was the lady I wanted to see … at least I thought so. We chatted for twenty minutes. Then I spotted some post on her dining room table. The name on the post was not her. I knew this wasn’t Christine! She looked just like her. I said not wanting this dear soul to think I hadn’t intended visiting her “where does Christine live?” “Next door” she said. Next door was also Church Farm. It turned out Christine was out. I said goodbye to the lady and left after a nice if unscheduled visit. I then bumped into Janet from the chapel. She told me when I told her my wrong door story I’d just visited Christine’s sister who looks just like her! I’d got the wrong person. You have to remember folks that mostly ever since I’ve arrived here I’ve seen my flock in face coverings!
Do we know people as well as we think we do?
This Sunday is the third Sunday after Epiphany. The Epiphany is in most people’s minds just the story of the coming of the magi to visit the Christ child. But it’s actually a season in the church year which lasts until Candlemas, 2 February. Epiphany literally means a manifestation, a showing, something made clear. The readings in these early weeks of the year give us lots of information about the nature of Jesus.
Imagine you are sitting in your local synagogue. It isn’t in Bishop Monkton or in Dallowgill but you live in Nazareth. Today’s preacher is the local lad you’ve seen grow up in the carpenter’s shop, the son of Joseph and Mary. It’s his first time in your pulpit, if the synagogue has one of those. You know him well. He’s now about thirty. It’s going to be a nice service. He had been among them growing up learning the faith with the rabbis so it was a big day that he was old enough to read to them. They knew those words from Isaiah, words of promise about the Messiah to come. How nicely he read them, they were so proud of him. Well done, Jesus, well read.
But wait a minute, what did he mean “Today, in your very hearing, this text has come true?” If you read on, there was a stirring in the pews, muttering amongst the elderly, huffing and puffing – and he talked about how they would be saying “Doctor, cure thyself,” a Jewish proverb which would mean in our language, charity begins at home – and he spoke about Capernaum and all the exciting things that had happened there, and that a prophet is not accepted in his home town, and how Elijah the prophet had to go off to Sidon, and Elisha too went off to Naaman, the Syrian leper.
The normally reverent place of worship became very uneasy, especially at the mention of these other places and what he was implying. But Jesus wasn’t going to be put off by people’s presuppositions and he wasn’t there to court popularity. In fact, he seemed to asking for trouble by sticking to his own agenda. There was no doubt the situation was getting nasty.
They kicked him out of the service, he didn’t last long in their world. He had upset their religious life, their cosy Sabbath routine where they met with their God. They wanted him out of town too, and tried to drive him over the edge of a cliff. But he turned round and looked at them and they faltered, and then he simply walked through them, and no one dared touch him and he was gone…
Maybe we can imagine what might have been said in the town and around the synagogue for days afterwards. Who did he think he was, talking to us like that! We thought we knew him but we don’t at all. He isn’t claiming to BE the Messiah, is he?
This is the first public sermon of Jesus. Some people do funny things when the sermon begins. I had a church in Bishop Auckland, where when they came into church, would line up on the ledge of the pew in front of them, a row of sticky sweets. When the sermon began, the first sentence, there was a commotion of rustling paper as the sweets were opened and put in the mouth.
Why does a sticky sweet get you through the sermon? Why does the proclamation of God’s word have to be something to be got through? The congregation in the synagogue were waiting for Jesus’ words with expectation – what did he say to them and to us today? The message was urgent. The good news of God was being fulfilled today. Now was the hour of grace. Now was the moment of opportunity. Will we accept it, or will we drive it out so we can get on with being the church? We need to be open to the moving of God’s Spirit. As I said atthe beginning, this is the season of Epiphany. Epiphany is like one of those detective series we watch working out where the clues are, like Vera or Line of Duty or Father Brown. Eventually the penny drops and the mystery of the killer or wrongdoer is solved.
Epiphany bible readings are a series of clues, we behold the glory of God in Jesus, we see him affirmed in baptism, we see him give us a sign of his abundant generosity at a wedding in Cana, we today see him set out quite clearly to his home synagogue, to people he knew well, the heart of his message and programme, good news to the poor, freedom for the oppressed, liberty for captives, sight to the blind, and the herald of a new age of God’s reign. Believe me, it isn’t easy to preach to the church you grew up in. Igrew up in a small village church where everyone was related to me. So preaching there, and I went on note as a local preacher aged 18, was horrific. My late mother who was my biggest critic used to hide under the pew and then when we got home she’d say “why did you pick that hymn?” and “what did you say that for?” and “you went on a bit long!” I wasn’t exactly hurled over a cliff but it wasn’t a very happy experience. Much easier to be honest and challengingto people you don’t know.
God is working his purpose out – there will be good news for the poor, sight for the blind, release for captives, freedom for the oppressed, the breaking in of God’s time, whether we are part of it, or not.
The danger is we have no time to see God’s Spirit moving or we are too exhausted to see it! That Nazareth assembly didn’t like it and they kicked Jesus out.
What about us? Do you want Jesus manifesto at your heart or will you boot him over a cliff. I don’t know where the nearest cliffs to here are, but we could go there.
I like what Tim Baker has made of this passage in the Vine at Home material for today: Jesus says he will stand for: - Good news to the poor - proclaim release to the captives - recovery of sight to the blind - the oppressed go free - proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. That last one, perhaps the most poetic, has been translated a whole range of different ways, including ‘this is God’s year or this is God’s time’, but there is also a hint of the Old Testament idea of the ‘jubilee’ here: the idea that there is a time when all debts and injustices are wiped away. A time of equity and equality. In which case, all five of these ‘manifesto statements’, these ‘strategic goals’, are about social justice. Jesus is committing to a transforming of the social order – a transforming that begins with the prophets of the Old Testament, and which he comes to continue, to update and to renew. A reminder that his ministry – indeed all God’s ministry – needs to include good news to the poor, the possibility of people’s potential being fulfilled, a hope for and a working towards a better time.
But, crucially, Jesus doesn’t stop there. He says his five points, about social justice, but he is actually reading from the scroll of Isaiah. Many of his original audience would have already known all these words. Perhaps they were mouthing along with him. Perhaps a few groaned, muttering to themselves, ‘not another one on this passage, surely’. Perhaps a few lent forward, thinking, ‘I wonder what this young rabbi makes of this passage, it’s one of myfavourites…’ And this is when Jesus says a sixth thing. ‘Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’ It’s a bold and a brave statement. But it is also the most important, most exciting moment in this gospel passage – and for us, the most relevant. It might even be the single most important thing Jesus says in the whole of his ministry. Today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. And in that moment, what was word, becomes flesh, what was old becomes new, what was law becomes relationship, what was dead has come to life. Jesus hasn’t just reminded people of the principles Isaiah was writing about thousands of years before, he’s embodied them, brought them to life, moved them out of an ancient scroll and into the world of people who are living, moving and breathing. Can he do the same for us today?
I think this quote from the Lutheran pastor John Stendahl brings all I have tried to share with you from this challenging episode to a close:
“As we visit Jesus in Nazareth, as Jesus visits us here, ought we perhaps to understand his impatience and perhaps even feel it ourselves, this irritation with old suppositions and preoccupations? We live in a strange culture in self absorption is dominant, a culture in which our churches participate and cater to please. It may need a voice of anger to lead us into action. We shall perish if we cannot see a larger world and understand what we are doing to this world and to people beyond the compass of our lives. Do we feel the restlessness of God’s stirring, or can we at least hear it from him with getting too scared or taking offence?”
Today, like worshippers in Nazareth of old, we have come to meet God together. We have heard God’s word. How we respond to it from here is up to us…
When we think we know who Jesus is, my friends, he will challenge us and surprise us. When we think we have him sorted, he will unsettle us and remind us of the nature of God. In our church, when people are searching, may we show by our life and our words, “today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
