Luke 4:21-30 The Prophet Jesus Not Accepted

Have you ever wanted to scream at the top of your lungs “Why me?!?” or to the opposite effect “Why not me?!?”

Life is full of these questions.

Why did my dad have to die?

Why did I not get the job?

Why do they get all the breaks?

Why did God choose to heal them and not my loved one?

Imagine being from Nazareth, Jesus’ hometown. You know the kid. He was Joseph’s, the carpenter’s son, whom he so graciously took into his care despite that he was not the father.

That annoying little brat that the entire family had to turn around for that one year to go retrieve from Jerusalem because he got lost. That kid.

Now, you’ve heard about him going all around Capernaum healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, performing miracles all over the place and what has he done for you, his hometown? Who does he think he is not taking care of us, his family, his community but instead going off to other places and doing great things for them. Why not us?

I may not be the most sympathetic person in the world, but I laugh because this is still the story of today. How many times I have heard people complain about children who go off to fancy schools, or even graduate from WVU or Marshall to become doctors and then they go off to some other place to practice medicine.

How about the life and times of Rick Rodriguez? Oh, the anger when he left you. You who raised him, educated him, and supported him and then he goes to far off places. Serves him right that he failed and came back huh?

And, how was he treated? With suspicion? Ridicule maybe?

No, I am not comparing Rich Rod to Jesus… okay maybe I am but not in a blasphemous sense. In the sense that the village who raises someone, feels like they own them. If they are going to do awesome things in the world, they need to repay the debt they owe to those who raise them. Their hometown.

I might add here that this is the theme of many horror movies and psychological thrillers. Where the mom raises a child and thinks she owns them and then tries to poison them or gaslight them into thinking they cannot go anywhere but that the child still belongs to her.

Jesus’ life is so full of stories we don’t like to hear, isn’t it? Remember the wedding at Cana? Where Jesus turned water into wine and referred to his own mother, Mary, with the socially disengaged term “Woman?” Perhaps I may have mentioned this was going to come into play again but this might be sooner than you expected.

Parents do not own their children. They are stewards of their children. Their job is to raise them to the best of their ability until they can function more or less on their own and then their original owner, God, who claimed them in Baptism, really before but we like to stress the importance of parents being willing to accept this fate of non-ownership of the child they gave birth to not being their own.

I just want you to feel the position of the community of Nazareth for a minute. Think of all they probably went through together raising a divine child. Constantly annoyed with Mary’s child who does not sin while their imperfect children go about being normal human beings. But all the energy they expended shaping him and educating the Son of God and then not only does he leave them but he doesn’t heal their sick, feed their hungry, clothe their poor, eradicate injustice in Nazareth but goes to Capernaum and performs miracle after miracle.

Imagine if your niece or nephew grew up to be a doctor, came home to visit and refused to answer any of your medical questions, or became a top-notch lawyer and refused to represent your child, who was their best friend growing up, in court when they were wrongly accused. How would you feel?

Usually, when I preach on this passage, I talk about how we refuse to let people change. All too often we treat people we grew up with as if they were still the immature hellion we came to know and love even if they’ve grown up to be a perfectly respectable adult. But the opposite also happens.

Sometimes those immature brats we know, grow up to be someone truly amazing and then they don’t serve us.  We feel slighted. We feel like we deserve more out of them. After all, we were the people who put up with them and helped them get to where they are. We deserve something for that right?

Nope. No, we don’t.

In this life, we don’t get what we deserve, and we should be eternally grateful for that. Even with my best efforts, I whole-heartedly admit I deserve worse than to be driven out of town and hurled off a cliff. I cannot even begin to count the number of things I have done and left undone. Not helped when I could have helped. Not noticed someone else was hurting because I was too wrapped up in my own feelings and perspective. Not given someone I loved the space to change, the space to be who they are, and the support to make it happen when I could have.

I thank God every single day I don’t get what I deserve.

So, if someone else’s mother is healed and mine is not. If someone else gets a job and I do not. If someone else appears to have the perfect marriage and mine has a flaw or two. If someone else appears eternally blessed in every way shape or form, capable of doing amazing things that I am not, makes twice the salary I do with half the education or none of the experience, I must accept and embrace not a lack of my deserving but to love them that they are deserving of it. Love that God has blessed them in such way. And, to not lose sight of the vast multitude of ways which I have been blessed.

Those people from Nazareth got to not just watch but take part in the raising of the God-child. How amazing is that? All those years we know nothing about that are not recorded in any of our Gospels, all those miracles they have ignored or forgotten along the way, they got to be there for. They were blessed with.

God walked among them! God grew up and learned from them to be human. Talk about missing the blessing and not seeing God at work!

They busy shouting “Why not me?” and I’m thinking “Look, at you who are so highly favored!”

Jesus cured many yes but did not cure all. It doesn’t make them any more or less favored it just means that wasn’t their blessing to receive.

We can choose to believe they received other blessings or we can get our noses out of other people’s business and not worry about what other people do or do not receive but trust that God is watching over us and will give us what we need. Our time will come when others will be jealous of us. I pray for you it passes without notice. I pray for you that you are celebrating others blessings with them.

I pray for you that while Jesus walks for you, your focus is on what he does not on what he does not do. You see only your perspective. You have no idea how that person got to where they are. You have no idea what they have been through. You cannot understand their perspective not can you possibly understand God’s whose perspective is far more vast than yours could ever hope to be.

Why not me? Why should it be you? Who do you think you are? What makes you believe you deserve more than what someone else has?

I really wanted to include a song by the Judd’s here but it seemed slightly inappropriate to the venue. But that’s our reality. We don’t have a monopoly on Jesus, we don’t own him, he can go perform his miracles wherever he wants, to whomever he wants but we get is a relationship with him. That is ours. A relationship that is everything we need in this life and the next.

May, the Lord bless you and keep you;
May the Lord make his face to shine upon you
And be gracious to you;
May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you
And give you peace