[Propertalk] PREACHING RESOURCES FOR JANUARY 31 - Luke 4:21-30 - Part 1

[Joe Parrish]

PREACHING RESOURCES FOR JANUARY 31 (7 of the 70 plus preaching resources available at GoodPreacher.com for this Sunday):

EXEGESIS: Luke 4:21-30

Beginning with 4:21, Luke clarifies a crucial aspect of the meaning of the mission to announce and represent the Realm: God is now reuniting Jewish and gentile peoples as part of the universal restoration (see Acts 3:26). This mission is prefigured and authorized in the gospel of Luke and fully developed in the book of Acts. Welcoming gentiles into the church is a partial realization of the divine realm.

According to Luke 4:22, the congregation at Nazareth initially responded very positively to Jesus’ words. When Luke says they were amazed, he uses one of the words that sometimes describes the congregation’s response to a miracle. When the crowd says, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they exhibit pride in the hometown-person-made-good. “He’s one of us (and his success makes us feel like we did something right in raising him and increases our sense of self-perception”).

The plot changes direction in Luke 4:23. The proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself,” does not intimate that Jesus is sick but is a typical folk challenge for a leader to show that she or he can deliver the goods. The same thing is true of the admonition to do in Nazareth what Jesus had done in Capernaum. The crowd in the synagogue wants a demonstration of the realm-program of Luke 4:18-19.

In Luke 4:24, the author draws on a strand in Jewish thinking to explain not only what happens in the synagogue in Nazareth but throughout Jesus’ ministry and that of the church in Acts. A prophet is seldom accepted in the prophet’s hometown. The purpose of the prophets in Israel was to name imbalances in the life of the community and to call the community to bring their life more closely into conformity with God’s purposes. When the community drifted into idolatry, injustice, exploitation, false alliances, and violence, the prophets called the community to repent. Community members were sometimes so invested in the temporary rewards of violating the covenant (for example, money and power) that they resisted the prophets (e.g. Acts 7:52). The congregation in the synagogue at Nazareth responds that way. Other crowds and Jewish leaders respond similarly to Jesus in the gospel and to the church in Acts.

Luke uses two examples of God going to gentiles to draw out the implications of the realm. The first one is the story of God caring for the gentile widow of Zarephath through Elijah in 1 Kings 17:8-24. The second story is of God healing the leper Namaan through Elisha in 2 Kings 5:1-19. Namaan was not only a gentile but was a general in the Syrian army, which was sometimes an enemy of Israel.

On the one hand, these two stories show that God’s concern for gentiles is as old as the prophets. The church’s gentile mission is only the most recent manifestation of this historic emphasis. The God of Israel is the universal God who seeks restoration for all. The preacher might help the congregation ask, “Who is the widow of Zarephath in our time? Who is Namaan in our setting? Who are gentiles in our social worlds? How can our congregation join God in reaching out to them?”

On the other hand, Luke states that while there were many widows and lepers in Israel at the times of these incidents, God did not send the prophets to the Israelites but to the two gentiles. Luke implies that the people of Israel had been unfaithful in the days of Elijah and Elisha, prompting God to turn away from the people until they repented.

As the story ends, the crowd turns into a vigilante mob who seeks to put Jesus to death by throwing him off “the brow of the hill.” They abandoned their own established Jewish legal principles and practices. Furthermore, they were on the verge of creating more difficulties for themselves because only the Romans had the power of capital punishment.

However, just as God delivered Israel at the Red Sea, God opened a way. Jesus “passed through the midst of them” and went safely on his way.

This passage is a pastoral warning to Luke’s congregation that they can expect the same kind of resistance to their ministry that Jesus experienced in the synagogue at Nazareth. Luke wants them to be prepared for those difficult encounters. People are often so entrenched in the old age that they resent efforts to change their circumstances. They know the rules in the old world. They even profit from complicity with the present evil age. The new world means new rules, a change in status, and other uncertainties.

At the same time, the passage is pastoral encouragement. When faced with uncertainty about the implications of the realm for their own lives and with vicious opposition, the congregation should recognize that just as God’s providential care delivered Jesus from the crowd-turned-vigilante-mob, so God’s care is over the congregation. Even when they are persecuted and suffering, God will be with them. In the very act of dying, Stephen looked into heaven, beheld Jesus as the right hand of God and yielded his spirit to God in the manner of Jesus (Acts 7:59; Lk 23:46). A congregation living in the awareness of such providence should be prepared to press ahead with its witness to the realm.

Preachers today sometimes ask their congregations to identify with the crowd in the synagogue who reject God’s initiatives to bring the realm through Jesus. While this approach has some hermeneutical cachet, it runs the risk of reinforcing Luke’s stereotypes of Jewish people. The preacher whose congregation and context call for such identification needs to help contemporary listeners recognize and reject Luke’s polemical characterizations.

Ronald J. Allen 



-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://stsams.org/pipermail/propertalk_stsams.org/attachments/20100125/c20b3428/attachment.htm>