History and Hometowns (Feb 2)

Readings, Jeremiah 1:4-10 and Luke 4:21-30
Image, Margaret Adams Parker, Cherry Trees - In the Snow (Woodcut, 2007)
 
Jesus, having proclaimed that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him, sits down amidst his hometown congregation, who are amazed at his gracious words.
 
What a happy story, unless your Bible has subtitles, in which case you know this scene began with “The Rejection of Jesus at Nazareth” – and you’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop. Well, drop it does. Jesus begins to speculate that those among him will ask him for the wonders he performed in Capernaum. Which, one thinks, is fair enough. If he is claiming the Spirit of the Lord is upon him, then one is within their rights to presume he might do such works here, amongst those who raised him. But instead of performing signs and wonders, Jesus speaks on, and at the end of his little history lesson his hometown congregation, his neighbours and kin, attempt to murder him.
 
What is it in Jesus’ words that moves them from genial amazement to mob violence? Jesus recalls two stories from the scriptures. The first is that of Elijah who in the time of famine was driven by God not to one of the widows of Israel but to one in Sidon; and it was she (rather than one of their own) who experienced the miracle of God and kept the great prophet alive. The second is that of Elisha, who is not noted for cleansing any leper of Israel, but Naaman the Syrian.
 
Jesus invents nothing in either story. He merely notes details in their history which demonstrates that the care and activity of God’s prophets do not always conform to national lines, and that God’s own people have not always shown their prophets proper welcome. The widow of Sidon received and Naaman of Syria sought the prophet of God, while the homes of Israel’s own widows and the skin of Israel’s own flesh remained untouched.
 
Overtaken with rage the people drive Jesus out of the town in order to hurl him off a cliff. Why? Considering the two speeches Jesus offers in the synagogue the one claiming the words of Isaiah are fulfilled in their hearing seems far more incendiary than in his little sermon on Elijah and Elisha. And yet people can be sensitive about their histories. And while these stories are well known, Jesus upturns their easy retellings.
 
In our book club on Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, we discussed a section where the narrator recounts the story of Saint and martyr Maria Goretti. In school she learnt the story of Maria as a young girl who refused to commit a mortal sin when her cousin sexually assaulted her. Maria was praised for the purity in her refusal and capacity to forgive her killer. As she gets older the narrator revisits the story and considers the untold aspects of the history. Before the fatal attack the cousin had tried to assault Maria twice, but she had been unable to tell anyone out of fear of getting into trouble or being presumed guilty. Told one way the story emphasises the virtue and grace of Maria, told another it reveals a systemic, cultural, and familial failure, which, if addressed, would have made Maria’s saintly virtue and grace unnecessary. As I grew older, the narrator reflects, I grew confused as to why martyrdom was never just called ‘murder.’  
 
History is never simply reportage of events as they happened. There is always interpretation, always choice and emphasis, always the bias and experience of historian and reader. And yet, we can cling to a particular telling of history as the thing itself no matter how many other tellings come across our path. This can be for histories big and small – family histories, histories of communities and institutions, the nation and world. The challenge laid to familiar tellings by different emphasises and interpretations can all to quickly be heard as threat and lead to dramatic efforts to silence their speaker.
 
This is the very issue many of God’s prophets faced. Exodus begins with a new Pharoah rising in Egypt who did not know Joseph and what he had done for the nation. Thus he resists and detests the words of Moses, who declared that the Hebrews were God’s people, and not Pharoah’s. Elijah was called a “troubler of Israel” when he opposed King Ahab’s worship of Baal, which forgot the history of God’s covenant and promises. Jeremiah feared reprisal and scorn for his prophetic duty to pluck up and pull down, knowing that those in power preferred a false peace over true charge. John the Baptist lost his head for reminding Herod that his family history rendered illegitimate his new marriage. Paul reproaches the Galatians for allowing false teachers to renege on the history of the early church’s inclusion of the Gentiles; remarking, have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth? And Jesus, here as elsewhere, faced persecution and rejection for his reminder that his people’s ancestry would not preserve them from the judgment of God, or that Rome’s history of glory and splendour would not preserve it from being overturned by the coming kingdom of God.
 
The rigidity of our hold on history, our unbending commitment to a particular telling, can become a barrier to receiving the news that God is doing a new thing. Because a new thing is not only about opening the future, but receiving the past renewed. The New Testament is filled with the apostles wrestling with how the history of their people needed to be reinterpreted and reframed in light of the death and resurrection of Christ. The welcome of the Gentiles rests on a creative rereading of the scriptures which emphasised trajectories of openness of God’s history with the world. The Reformation was fought along many lines, key of which was the re-examining of history of the church in light of the conviction and experience of the Reformers. One might say similar things about so many of the church’s shifts along the lines of membership, ordination, and inclusion, which orbit consistently the question: is our history able to be read with a different set of emphasise, different interpretations, an openness that recognises God’s capacity to do a new thing?
 
The rigidity of the synagogue in Nazareth is all the more understandable as the new thing they were asked to receive was proclaimed by the son of Joseph the Carpenter. Jesus is right, it is much more difficult to honour and receive the prophetic challenge of those closer to home about histories closer to home. And yet when we shut down, and seek to shut up the messenger, we risk shutting down and shutting up the signs and wonders of the new thing God is doing. We risk viewing as wanton destruction and disregard what is actually the plucking up and pulling down that precedes the building and planting. This is not easy work, and we often feel unready, but the promise and hope to which we hold dear is that amidst the challenge of change we are not left alone nor flung out into a void of meaninglessness. God is with us, and God shall strive forward with us into a future both prepared and becoming. For the one who wrought such anger with his teaching, is also the one who has (for generation on generation) sustained and fed the church through the changes in history with his own word and body on the way toward the promised end.