Luke 4: 21-30, 1 Corinthians 12: 31 – 13: 13
May my words inspire and encourage us to experience God around us and amongst us Amen.
Vincent Van Gogh. What comes to mind when you hear the name of this famous artist? Vincent Van Gogh… is it images of sunflowers or perhaps his masterpiece entitled ‘Starry night’? Such images have been reproduced on postcards, t shirts, posters or even tea trays. We could say that such art becomes every day and looses its initial ‘wow’ factor. Certainly it makes it difficult for us to see the passion and sensational details when our culture determines the way we experience such amazing creations. And this can happen for us in church culture. When going to a Christmas morning service just last month, a little girl when asked to come forward to hear the Christmas story said: “aahh no thanks I know the story, I heard it last Christmas…. been there done that thank you very much!” When I was first told about this I laughed – thought it rather cute and funny - but then as I reflected on what our church culture is doing, I realised that we too can experience such a response when we come across God stuff in our every day lives; ‘Ahhh thanks but no thanks…we have heard it all before!’ Like Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings or hearing our Christmas story yet again, we become accustomed to such works of amazement and beauty and inspiration that we cannot see the big picture - within or beyond it.
And may be this too was the case when Jesus comes home to his people in Nazareth. In our Gospel reading today Jesus is in the church of his small hometown. He is given the privilege, that was given to visiting teachers, of reading from the Holy Scriptures and giving a short explanation of its meaning.
The Scripture was from the book written by Isaiah about 700 years before. Jesus reads these words: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of the sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
He then says to the people – his people "Today this is happening right here and now." This calls for an immediate response. They were to respond not with some kind of tinkering with their ideas, not with some small tweaking of how they did things. They were to believe that Jesus was the one who Isaiah was talking about, and just as importantly they were to become people of action like Jesus - who were to anoint, preach, proclaim, offer freedom, recovery, sight and release to all people.
And so after such a revelation by Jesus there were a number of responses. One may have been: "Wow! Isn't he the best, the wisest you have ever heard?" And another: "Who's fulfilling what around here? Isn't this the carpenter's son? He's Mary and Joseph's son….Come on. He watered our donkeys. He cleaned our yards. No way he could be a prophet. How can this Jesus-guy come back and be even more than a prophet, the Messiah? Not little Jesus of Nazareth. Not the little Jesus boy that we used to go fishing with and swimming with and hiking with. How could God come in such a common and ordinary way as to come through Jesus of Nazareth? Jesus certainly doesn’t measure up to our expectations of what it means to be a messiah.”
They did not want to accept Jesus because he was one of them, but also because of what he was saying.
The rest of the story seems like Jesus just intentionally irritated them, egged them on, tried to get them upset with him. He says things like ‘A prophet is not accepted in his own home. That was true of the prophet Isaiah and the prophet Elijah and the prophet Elisha. They could do no miracle in their regions because the people didn’t believe in them. They had to go elsewhere to find true faith’. And likewise Jesus was saying to his people something like: ‘I don’t see any true faith in this room. You are more interested in “in just doing religion” than in justice. You are more interested in my popularity and publicity than in the poor, blind and lame. You are more interested in religious celebrations than the struggles of life. You substitute ‘doing religion’ for being open to new ways and each other’. Just imagine how we might have been feeling if Jesus said such a thing to us.
The people were mad at Jesus. They took offense at Jesus. That is the key word of the text: offense. In Greek, it is “skandalon” from which we get the word, “scandal.” Scandalon also refers to “stumbling block”; a scandal being something that blocks or prevents the people from seeing beyond the appearances. Like with Van Gogh’s famous works of art, we cannot see beyond the postcards. And the people could not see beyond this ordinary man standing before them. They were so offended that they ran him out of the city, right up to the edge of a high cliff and were going to kill him. That is pretty serious!
But what's going on here? Where is that great love that our Corinthians reading for today speaks about: love is kind, gentle, and all the rest of those things? In our Gospel reading Jesus is shocking and quite harsh! But if we look beyond the appearances may be he is also loving in a shocking way. His technique appears to be about shocking his people into a new way, but that new way is one of love and caring for all people – and especially those who are considered less fortunate or worthy. He is also challenging his people to look beyond themselves – to see the bigger picture – to be broader.
Had Jesus decided to make Nazareth famous by staying there, making it a shrine for himself, we would never be sitting where we are today. Jesus is not just a hometown person; he is for all people. His message is for the people of Judea, Samaria, and the uttermost parts of the earth.
The people there that day were offended by the Incarnation, that God actually became a human being and that God was interested in the bigger picture and all people. That was the scandal, the stumbling block.
So is Jesus still our stumbling block? We can believe in the face of God behind the universe. We can have deep spiritual experiences during some wonderful worship time. We can believe in the divine moral law of the universe. A God of the universe, of spirituality, of morality seems more plausible for the mind. But to believe that God could come to us through a human being seems to be much harder work. And that is what so deeply offended the people; that is what was, and still is the stumbling block for people today. The Incarnation: that God would come in the flesh of a human they knew, a human by the name of Jesus from the town of Nazareth.
So do we still find this offensive or a stumbling block? Well I would say that there are things that are stumbling blocks for us in the Christian faith; things that get in our way of faith in God. In the text for today, Jesus talked about his listeners having little faith. So what are some of the things in the Christian faith that make it hard for us, or for others, to believe? The obvious to begin with - Suffering. Why do good people die? That offends us. That upsets us. That often forces us to question our faith.
Or another stumbling block. God invites us to go and love our enemies. But how many of us really demonstrate such love. Another stumbling block in our faith centres around the important Christian doctrines and Biblical Interpretations. How we read and interpret the Bible determines how we live and understand our calling – and it keeps evolving and changing. How past leaders have interpreted rules and regulations can cause us to stumble and get in our way of interpreting it for us today.
Each of us may have stumbling blocks that get in the way of our deep faith in Christ. Jesus invites each of us to mature and grow through the stumbling blocks that weaken our deep faith in God.
But I would like to take it a step further. I would suggest that God comes to us so commonly that we don’t hear God. God comes through a person or persons as near to us as …our family members, or closet friends or actually often our closest enemies. And most of us would respond by saying – ‘oh that is just so-and-so ….. She doesn’t sound like God. She doesn’t look like God. She doesn’t act like God’. But consistently, God speaks to us through those people who are with us every day, and sometimes the people we find the most challenging. But we don’t always hear God’s voice. Instead, we are looking for the divine creator of the universe or the moral laws behind various cultures, or something spiritual and beyond humanity.
God speaks to us and comes to us in the face of children and adults who are poor and starving. Sometimes it is hard to believe that Christ is really present and really speaks to our lives when we see someone who is experiencing great poverty and starvation. When we see those people from Haiti on our tvs do we simply say to ourselves, ‘We have seen it all before’, or do we respond with positive action?
God comes to us through the Word and Sacrament, through the Bible and sermons and studies, through baptism and Holy Communion. When we have the eyes of faith, we see God and hear God everyday through God’s Word and Sacraments. And my list could go on…
The very exercise of ‘learning to look’ at something so familiar and experience God is what I am talking about. Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo are filled with passion for ideas, evangelism, and visual invention. Before painting he pursued admission to a theological college. He was a man of faith and brilliance, and now we only know him in the postcard reproductions. And we have the potential of making the Christian faith into something that is so ordinary and so predictable that we loose the awesome power and action of Jesus; a power that transforms everything. So, may we never say, ‘ahhh I know this story – been there done that!’
May we see anew the passion and love and challenge that God offers us every day. May our eyes be open to see and hear and feel God’s presence in all things and in everyone we meet. Amen.
