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WITHOUT HONOUR IN HIS OWN COUNTRY

Luke 4:16–30

So Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up; and, as was his habit, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read the lesson. The roll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He opened the roll and found the passage where it is written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring the good news to the poor. He has sent me to announce release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who have been bruised, to proclaim that the year which everyone is waiting for has come.’ And he folded up the roll and handed it back to the officer and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed intently on him. He began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears.’ And all witnessed to him and were amazed at the words of grace that came from his mouth. And they said, ‘Is this not the son of Joseph?’ He said to them, ‘You are bound to quote the proverb to me, “Physician, heal yourself; we have heard about all that happened in Capernaum; do the same kind of things in your own home country.”’ He said, ‘This is the truth that I tell you. No prophet is accepted in his own home country. In truth I tell you there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months and when there was a great famine all over the earth. And to none of them was Elijah sent but he was sent to Zarephath, to a widow of Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel in the times of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was healed; but Naaman the Syrian was.’ And the people in the synagogue were filled with anger as they listened to these things; and they rose up and hustled him out of the town. They took him to the brow of the hill on which their town is built, to throw him down; but he passed through the midst of them and went upon his way.

ONE of Jesus’ very early visits was to Nazareth, his home town. Nazareth was not a village. It is called a polis which means a town or city; and it may well have had as many as 20,000 inhabitants. It stood in a little hollow in the hills on the lower slopes of Galilee near the Plain of Jezreel. But a boy had only to climb to the hilltop above the town and he could see an amazing panorama for miles around.

The biblical scholar Sir George Adam Smith vividly described the scene from the hilltop. The history of Israel stretched out before the watcher’s eye. There was the plain of Esdraelon where Deborah and Barak had fought; where Gideon had won his victories; where Saul had crashed to disaster and Josiah had been killed in battle; there was Naboth’s vineyard and the place where Jehu slaughtered Jezebel; there was Shunem where Elisha had lived; there was Carmel where Elijah had fought his epic battle with the prophets of Baal, and, blue in the distance, there was the Mediterranean and the isles of the sea.

Not only the history of Israel was there; the world unfolded itself from the hilltop above Nazareth. Three great roads skirted it. There was the road from the south carrying pilgrims to Jerusalem. There was the great Way of the Sea which led from Egypt to Damascus with laden caravans moving along it. There was the great road to the east bearing caravans from Arabia and Roman legions marching out to the eastern frontiers of the Empire. It is wrong to think of Jesus as being brought up in a backwater; he was brought up in a town in sight of history and with the traffic of the world almost at its doors.

We have already described the synagogue service, and this passage gives us a vivid picture of it in action. It was not a book that Jesus took, for at this time everything was written on rolls. It was from Isaiah 61 that he read. In verse 20 the Authorized Version speaks misleadingly of the minister. The official in question was the Chazzan. He had many duties. He had to take out and put back the sacred rolls of Scripture; he had to keep the synagogue clean; he had to announce the coming of the Sabbath with three blasts of the silver trumpet from the synagogue roof; and he was also the teacher in the village school. Verse 20 says that Jesus sat down. That gives us the impression that he was finished. In point of fact it means that he was about to start, because the speaker gave the address seated and Rabbis taught sitting down (cf. our own phrase, a professor’s chair).

What angered the people was the apparent compliment that Jesus paid to Gentiles. The Jews were so sure that they were God’s people that they tended to look down on all others. Some believed that ‘God had created the Gentiles to be fuel for the fires of hell.’ And here was this young Jesus, whom they all knew, preaching as if the Gentiles were specially favoured by God. It was beginning to dawn upon them that there were things in this new message the like of which they had never dreamed.

We must note two other things.

(1) It was Jesus’ habit to go to the synagogue on the Sabbath. There must have been many things with which he radically disagreed and which grated on him – yet he went. The worship of the synagogue might be far from perfect; yet Jesus never omitted to join himself to God’s worshipping people on God’s day.

(2) We have only to read the passage of Isaiah that Jesus read to see the difference between Jesus and John the Baptist. John was the preacher of doom and those who heard his message must have shuddered with terror. It was a gospel – good news – which Jesus brought. Jesus, too, knew the wrath of God but it was always the wrath of love.