The Inaugural Address – Part I

Luke 4:13-30

Years ago and even now in some smaller churches, there is a custom that when a visiting preacher suddenly shows up, he (it is usually a “he”) is invited to preach. I recall such a preacher coming to our church when I was a boy. He spoke on the end times. He had some wild things to say. He never came back and I don’t think he would have had such a welcome at his second coming.

In Jesus’ time, Jewish boys grew up trained in the Rabbinical teachings of the Scriptures. It was common for them to be called upon in Sabbath meetings after a certain age to read from the appointed passage in the scrolls and to elaborate on the text. As these men visited other synagogues, they would be treated in the same manner.

Jesus had already begun traveling around, in the custom of an itinerating rabbi or teacher. So far, he’d been getting high praise for his efforts. Young speakers often are, listeners being impressed with the ability and wisdom in one so young.

I remember when I was in my early twenties and speaking at a church where they knew my family and they’d known me as a wee lad. The pastor gave me such high praise at the end of the service I was turning red-faced. At a minister’s meeting a few weeks later, he raved on again. Another slightly more cynical minister asked him what I’d shared, to which the pastor blanked. He couldn’t remember. I wondered if he’d even heard what I said.

The folks who praised Jesus as he traveled may have only been half listening. They were taken with something about this young man and were caught up in the moment of it. There was something very powerful about Jesus’ words, but not everyone heard him preach in the same way.

We see this mix of reactions when Jesus comes back to his hometown. He’s been out preaching and now he returns to Nazareth where he grew up, where they knew him like no other village did. At first they only half listened. Nice boy, this Jesus Josephson. He’s a home town boy and we’ve always produced the best.

But wait, what is that he’s saying? And the more they listen the more they turn on him, until they are ready to kill him – literally. What a dramatic change in the crowd. People are like that, fickle. One minute you can do no wrong. The next you can do no right. People also tend to be all either-or. No in between. Objective evaluation is trumped by emotional response every time. Expressiveness beating substance in the guise of anointing.

For years we lived in a large city in Northwest China. Foreign (non-Chinese) Christians would visit our city on prayer tours. A funny thing about their responses. Their sense about the spiritual condition of the city was all too frequently related to the weather. They would say, this is a spiritually dark city – and I’d note the gray gloom of pollution and dust hiding any semblance of bright. Or they’d say, this is a surprisingly spiritually vibrant city and I’d observe the rare brilliant sunny day and nearly blue sky. I’d wonder about their spiritual discernment.

Jesus was speaking in the anointing, the empowering of the Spirit. That has already been established by Luke. The people of Nazareth were not warmed by that anointing. Likewise they were not turned off by anointing or any lack thereof. They were taken in by their own inclinations, lost in their own world of biases and closed circuit thinking.

Jesus went on to say that prophets are welcomed everywhere but in their own hometown. Familiarity often breeds predetermined “understandings” blinding us to the truth.