Luke 4:16-30
The Third Sunday After Epiphany Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke Sunday, January 26, 2025
“Can Jesus Be Too Familiar?”
I recently heard a pastor say that he is always a bit hesitant to invite a guest preacher to his church. Why? Because people might really like the change. Unfortunately, there is something to his observation. If you tell me how much you liked a guest preacher that we’ve hosted here, it does make me wonder a little bit, whether that comment has anything to do with not-so-well-liked preaching on my part. Sure, some of that concern would be due to personal insecurity, some of it selfish pride or jealousy. Sometimes, though, people just like a change. A guest preacher is new and novel, so that is special. Imagine the implications, then, of having Jesus himself as a guest preacher.
I should say, first of all, that our pastors, including any guests in this pulpit, do represent Jesus here as they faithfully proclaim his Word. In a real way, we have Jesus preaching to us every Sunday. But we don’t have the same experience of having Jesus himself visibly present in our worship service the way the people did at Nazareth in today’s Gospel. Luke shares the account of Jesus coming to his hometown and serving as the guest preacher at the synagogue there. This was an opportunity regularly afforded to traveling rabbis as they visited, but this particular visit did not turn out how people might expect.
It started well enough. People were excited. Jesus had been all around the area preaching and teaching. He performed miracles along the way. His popularity was growing. His reputation was building. No wonder his hometown crowd seemed to ready to welcome their hero.
For his sermon, Jesus was handed the scroll of Isaiah. He found chapter 61 and read verse one and part of verse 2. Jesus wouldn’t have used that reference, because that system wasn’t invented until over a thousand years later. He read the prophecy about preaching good news and proclaiming freedom. He read about the blind seeing and the oppressed being freed and the year of the Lord’s favor being proclaimed. And he rolled up the scroll and handed it back and sat down. There wasn’t a pulpit like this, so the teaching was done from a seated position in front. And you can just feel the excitement build as Luke describes how every eye was fastened on Jesus just waiting to hear what he had to say. And he said, “Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
It appears that Jesus would have said much more that day. Luke records just the very beginning of his message. But even that beginning contains the profound truth that Jesus wanted to communicate. He is the promised Messiah. He had come as the fulfillment of that prophecy and others like it. These promises were about more than physical things. While Jesus would literally give sight to people who had been blind, his greater purpose was to give spiritual sight to the spiritually blind. The freedom Jesus was proclaiming was freedom from sin, not freedom from prison or physical oppression. Jesus did not come preaching any good news. He came with the best news of all, that he would give eternal life to his people in the place of the eternal death that they had deserved.
And everything that Jesus said sounded good at first. The people were impressed. Jesus said nice things. But then the people thought about his upbringing and his earthly father. Didn’t they know this guy? Hadn’t they been around for his childhood? Their reaction changed. Were they really to understand that this hometown boy was not just a popular preacher, but he was the one their nation had been waiting for all these years?
As their reaction changed, the words of Jesus became quite pointed with them. He reprimanded them for expecting proof and demanding miraculous signs. Had they been disappointed because they heard he was doing miracles elsewhere but hadn’t brought any to them? And even worse, he compared their reaction to Old Testament times when faith was hard to come by in Israel. God showed special care to a widow in Sidon, not in Israel, during the famine. God healed Naaman the Syrian from his leprosy, not any of the men from Israel who suffered with that disease. And the suggestion, that they did not seem to miss, was that he was not performing miracles for them because they were rejecting him and his message.
So was the problem that they were too familiar with Jesus? Did they know him too well from his childhood days and from his family background to listen to what he had to say? That seems to be what is behind the axiom that no prophet is accepted in his hometown.
But the familiarity itself wasn’t the problem, was it? The problem was not that the people knew Jesus too well. The problem was they didn’t know him well enough. Their familiarity with him in a different context and a different circumstance prevented them from recognizing Jesus’ true purpose. They saw him as the carpenter’s son. They saw him as the guy who had grown up in their town. They saw him as so many ordinary things. They could not see him as their Savior, the one who would set them free from captivity to sin and spiritual blindness. I guess you could say they were too familiar with the wrong Jesus. And we ought to watch out for the same thing. It can be easy to take things for granted when we hear them week after week. It can be tempting to allow Scripture’s amazing truths to become commonplace and let them feel ordinary. To understand Jesus’ true purpose, we need to see ourselves as poor and oppressed and blind. Only then can we appreciate that he frees and gives sight and proclaims good news. We don’t need a Jesus who is on our side politically, or who makes our lives now what we really want them to be. What we need at the deepest level is a Jesus who has rescued us from hell by dying for our sins and rising again. And, thanks be to God, that is exactly who we have.
When the people of Nazareth heard Jesus’ sermon against them, they were so enraged that they went to throw him off the cliff over which their town was built. And at that moment, without their even being aware of it, those people finally witnessed the miracle they had been hoping for all along. Jesus simply walked away. He passed right through the middle of the rioting mob without them inflicting any damage on him. In doing so, he proved that he was who he was claiming to be. He preserved his life for its ultimate purpose, and he gave us the evidence that his rejection was not proof of failure. In fact, those who rejected him would fail. Christ would succeed in what he came to accomplish.
You might expect that turn of events to cause some in the crowd to adjust their thinking. You might expect that some would see this proof of Jesus’ power for what it was. They would finally see past their preconceptions. They would finally realize that they ought to listen to Jesus if he had that sort of power. However, there is no indication that anything changed.
Maybe there is an extra warning in there for us as well. Don’t let the peer pressure of those around you change your perspective on Jesus. Don’t get caught up in a mob mentality. There is plenty of mob in the world around us, plenty of support for walking away from Jesus, rejecting him, treating him as if he’s the enemy. If we stop listening to Jesus tell us about his purpose, it’s easy to get caught up in that. The synagogue worshipers at Nazareth went from enjoying his preaching to ready to throw him off a cliff. Don’t assume that you could never lose sight of Jesus’ purpose and lose perspective on what he has done.
The remedy is to never lose sight of not only his purpose but also his proof. His purpose is to forgive and save. His proof is the greatest miracle of all: he rose from the dead. He proved that his sacrifice for the world’s sins was accepted and complete and successful. Rejection of that is failure on the part of the one rejecting, not on the part of Jesus.
And when we tell others about Jesus, we may be rejected, too. Peter and John experienced it, as we heard in our Second Reading. The Apostle Paul dealt with the same things. But its never a failure to share God’s Word, the good news. It’s never a failure to proclaim the one who gives freedom to captives and sight to the blind. And that is exactly what God allows us to do as followers of our guest preacher from Nazareth, Jesus Christ our Lord. We can never be too familiar with him as long as we focus on his purpose and on the proof of his success.
The Text: Luke 4:16–30 (EHV)
16He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. As was his custom, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read. 17The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
18The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, 19and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
20He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21He began to tell them, “Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
22They all spoke well of him and were impressed by the words of grace that came from his mouth. And they kept saying, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”
23He told them, “Certainly you will quote this proverb to me, ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ Do here in your hometown everything we heard you did in Capernaum.” 24And he said, “Amen I tell you: No prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25But truly I tell you: There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut for three years and six months, while a great famine came over all the land. 26Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow of Zarephath, in Sidon. 27And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was healed except Naaman the Syrian.”
28All those who were in the synagogue were filled with rage when they heard these things. 29They got up and drove him out of the town. They led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the middle of them and went on his way.