Jesus
Page 13
During our pilgrimage, this facet of Jesus’s public life was made clearer after seeing the close confines in which he worked. His base of ministry was the small town of Capernaum, on the northern end of the Sea of Galilee. In and around Capernaum, Jesus performed many miracles, among them the exorcism of a possessed man in the synagogue and the feeding of the multitudes. Just outside the town today, on a sidewalk along the shoreline of the Sea of Galilee, sits the Petra Haemorroissae, the “Hemorrhage Stone,” a waist-high granite monument that commemorates Jesus’s healing of a woman with a hemorrhage, a story that appears in all three Synoptic Gospels.3 On his way to a synagogue official’s house, Jesus is stopped by a woman “who had been suffering from hemorrhages.” All she wants is to touch “the fringe of his cloak.” She does so, and she is healed instantly.
This story is often taken as a representation of the variety of individuals healed by Jesus (the daughter of a synagogue official and a desperate woman) and of Jesus’s great power (the woman needs only to touch his clothing). But the story also shows his astonishing magnetism. He is on his way to one healing when someone clamors for another one. It reminds me of the scene in the film Jesus Christ Superstar where crowds of people desperately stretch out their hands and sing, “Touch me, touch me, Jesus!”
Near Capernaum, in the rocky hills overlooking the sea, is the Eremos Cave (after the Greek word for “hermit”). In a rough opening in the hillside, where there is barely enough room for a person to stretch out, tradition says that Jesus took refuge from his popularity.
But Jesus wasn’t always popular. Immediately after his time in the desert, he returns to Nazareth. And this story of unpopularity speaks to me in a special way.
WITH DECEPTIVE CALM, LUKE begins the story of Jesus’s return to Nazareth. After his stay in the desert he goes back to Galilee “filled with the power of the Spirit.” News of him (phēmē, “fame”) spreads throughout the surrounding territory, and he begins teaching in the synagogues in Galilee, where he was praised by everyone. (For our purposes, let’s assume that there was some sort of gathering space—either indoors or outdoors—which I’ll call a synagogue. The word means, after all, “an assembly.”)
Then he returns to Nazareth, “where he had been brought up.” One day he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, “as was his custom.” Luke portrays Jesus as an observant Jew, a pious believer who frequents the synagogue. Nothing out of the ordinary here.
His presence in the gathering would have been quite ordinary. By age thirty Jesus must have been well known in the small town as not only a pious man, but also a reliable tradesman, perhaps like his father Joseph. When they saw Jesus stand up in the gathering on the Sabbath, some of those in attendance in Nazareth may have thought, There is my friend Jesus. I wonder what he’ll say. He always has something interesting to say about Scripture. Or, I wonder where Jesus has been for the last few weeks. Someone said something about the desert. He’s probably thinking about joining the Baptist—he’s always been devout. Or, There is Mary and Joseph’s son. I remember him when he was a little boy, and even before, when there was all that trouble over his birth. Or perhaps, There’s my carpenter. I haven’t seen him for a few weeks. I wonder when he’s going to start that job! (Remember that in the Gospels people in the area refer to Jesus more frequently as “the carpenter” than they do “the rabbi.”)
The carpenter follows the standard practice of the day for Jewish men: he stands up to read a passage from Scripture and then sits to comment on it. At that time the Sabbath services included a reading from the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) and then from the Prophets. The chazzan, or attendant, in the synagogue would have passed Jesus the scroll. Then again, Crossan and Reed in Excavating Jesus wonder if Nazareth would have been wealthy enough to afford scrolls. Perhaps, then, we can assume that Jesus read from a piece of text before him or recited it from memory. But again, nothing out of the ordinary.
Jesus reads aloud a passage from the Book of Isaiah that might have been well known to the people in his hometown as a prophecy of the coming Messiah, though this was a somewhat ambiguous term in Jesus’s day. (In general, the Messiah was the one sent by God to usher in a new era of God’s powerful rule.) Talk of the Messiah was in the air. Jesus reads these words: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”4
Then Jesus rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant, and sits down. “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him,” says Luke. Why? Were they simply waiting for him to comment on this passage or anticipating something especially inspiring? Perhaps they had heard of Jesus’s reputation as a kind of holy man. Their later reaction, however, shows that they weren’t expecting what he would say at all.
What he says is extraordinary: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, “I am the fulfillment of the Scripture you just heard.” “Today” is an important word for Luke. The breaking into human history of the reign of God is not happening in some far-off time, or in some distant land, but right now, and as Jesus is saying, not in some distant land, but before your very eyes. Today and here.
Not all first-century Jews believed in the coming of the “messianic age,” when God would usher in an era of peace. But this belief and hope were in the air. Among those who did believe, there was general agreement that the age would arrive through an individual: the Messiah (Mashiach in Hebrew, “the anointed one”; in Greek, the Christos). And the selection that Jesus read, describing God’s promises to his people—the nations will cease warring, the sick will be healed, captives will be freed—was, as Amy-Jill Levine notes, associated with the messianic age.5
All this is associated with the “kingdom of God” or the “reign of God,” to which most New Testament scholars point as the crux of Jesus’s teaching.6 This sometimes surprises people who assume that his central message was loving your enemies or offering forgiveness or helping the poor. But though all of those are central to his message, they are not the central message: the reign of God was.
IRONICALLY, TWO THOUSAND YEARS after Jesus introduced this message, scholars are still unclear about precisely what he meant. For one thing, the phrase more or less originated with Jesus. It appears in very few places in the Old Testament. For another, Jesus seems to have described the reign of God in some places as a future event, in others as already present.7
So when, where, and what was this reign of God?
On the one hand, the reign of God is already realized in Jesus’s own presence among the people; on the other, it’s not completely here because, as anyone can see, vengeance, injustice, and suffering still endure. Theologians refer to this idea as the “already but not yet.” But even that elegant phrase cannot encompass Jesus’s idea of the “time” of the reign. In Jesus’s day, most people delighted in paradoxes, so there was no reason for Jesus to have to specify any particular time. E. P. Sanders writes:
It may help if we think of Jesus—or any other first-century Jew who wished to talk about God’s rule—as having the option to combine in various ways here, there, now and later. . . . There is no difficulty in thinking that Jesus thought that the kingdom was in heaven, that people would enter it in the future, and that it was also present in some sense in his own work.8
Nor did Jesus have in mind a clear-cut definition. The reign of God (“reign” is a better translation of the Greek basileia than “kingdom,” which implies a geographic place) encompasses many realities: the reversal of unjust suffering, the pouring out of rewards on the faithful, and the joyous participation of believers in the heavenly banquet.9 But exactly where, what, how, and especially when, were obscure to Jesus’s listeners, and remain obscure to us. The reign of God is a reality that cannot be grasped fully, nor can it be contained in the language of a strictly worded de
finition. This is why Jesus used poetic means to describe it—called parables, as we shall soon see.
But in Nazareth, as Luke describes the event, Jesus is saying clearly: “The reign of God is here, because I am here.”
IT TAKES A MOMENT for his words to sink in. The experiences of those in Nazareth that day may be similar to times in your life when an astonishing statement takes a while to register. After a few seconds of shock, you say, “Did she say what I thought she said?” When I first told a few college friends, over dinner at a New York restaurant, that I was leaving my job at General Electric to enter the Jesuit novitiate, they paused for several moments before speaking. “What?” said a friend. “What?” When the waiter came to take our order, he asked, “Do you need more time?” My friend said, “Yes, a lot more time.”
Initially, those in the synagogue appreciate what Jesus says. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” says Luke. The Greek is beautiful: ethaumazon epi tois logois tēs charitos. Literally, they marveled at the words of grace.10 Some are amazed that the local tektōn knew so much. “Is not this Joseph’s son?” they ask.
In Mark’s version, written closer to the original events, the amazement among the people in Nazareth is even more pronounced. Mark’s vivid account, which occurs later in Jesus’s ministry, after some of his miracles, recounts questions that indicate a rising astonishment: “Where did this man get all of this?” What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands!” Then comes almost an explosion of shock: “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?” In Matthew, the questions are similar, though Jesus’s identity is changed to “the carpenter’s son.”
In both cases, the people are thunderstruck. How can someone like this—like us—say these things?
Mark’s and Matthew’s versions, then, explain something that Luke omits, for in Luke the mood suddenly shifts without explanation. Matthew and Mark, however, say, “And they took offense at him.” The Greek is eskandalizonto: literally, they stumbled on this. The root word is skandalon, a stone that one trips over, from which we get the word “scandal.” They cannot get over the fact that someone from their hometown is saying and doing these things. They move quickly from amazement to anger. Jealousy may have played a role as well.
Jesus anticipates their desire for miracles and predicts their inevitable reaction. You will tell me, he says, “Do here also in your hometown the things we have heard you did at Capernaum.” (This is somewhat confusing in Luke, since Jesus does not move to Capernaum until later, so perhaps Luke has moved this story farther ahead in his narrative of Jesus’s life.) “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” Jesus seems to be quoting from a popular saying as well as drawing on what his townsfolk would have known of the fate of the Jewish prophets.
Mark’s earlier version is more poignant—you can almost feel Jesus’s sorrow in having to say what he is about to say. In Greek his words could be translated as “A prophet is not without honor except in his native land (patridi), and among his relatives, and in his own house (oikia).” Imagine the combination of sadness and pity he must have felt uttering those words before his closest friends and his family.
For Mark and Matthew, the story ends there. Matthew says that Jesus is unable to perform “many deeds of power” because of their lack of faith. Mark says that he cured “a few sick people” and was amazed by their lack of faith in him. Then Jesus leaves.
Luke’s version, however, continues. If Jesus’s words weren’t enough to anger those in the synagogue, he reminds them of the story of Elijah, the prophet who during a time of severe famine and drought helps not a single Israelite, but a woman in Zarephath, a non-Jewish town. What’s more, another prophet, Elisha, cured Naaman, another non-Jew, of leprosy rather than healing a Jewish person with leprosy. In so many words, Jesus is comparing himself to the great prophets from Israel’s past and reminding people that these two prophets took their messages to outsiders.11 “Without faith you cannot expect any miracles,” he seems to be saying, “so don’t expect me to stick around.”
As if to underline his prophecy, Jesus uses the forceful term “Amen,” a version of “I assure you,” before he makes that comparison.12 Rather than relying on a verse from Scripture or another expert on the Torah to give credence to his words, Jesus presents himself as the authority. To sum up: I’m telling you from my own authority that you’re treating me just like your ancestors treated the prophets, so don’t be surprised that I can’t do any miracles here—your lack of faith is the reason. It is a challenge to the crowd.
This is the last straw. “When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.” So much so that they drive him from their midst and lead him to the brow of the hill to throw him off. But Jesus “passed through the midst of them.” You can see why he would have, probably with immense sadness, felt forced to leave his hometown.
Not far from the first-century ruins of Nazareth is Mount Precipice, where the furious townsfolk are said to have brought Jesus. The steep cliff today drops off onto a busy highway. Many scholars question the location of the actual site, but given Nazareth’s hilly terrain, almost any candidate is sufficiently dangerous. But if the site is legendary, the story is almost certainly not. As Harrington suggests about a passage in which Jesus is rudely rejected by those who knew him best, “This is not the kind of story that early Christians might invent.”13
JESUS FACED REJECTION NOT because the townspeople in Nazareth were small-minded (much less because Jews of the time were any more insular than anyone else in antiquity), but because they could not accept his words. But how was he able to pass “through the midst of them”? Perhaps when Jesus looked upon the crowd, when he recognized them, and when they saw him recognize them, they were made aware of what they were doing.
Conceivably, the people of Nazareth pulled back from doing violence to Jesus because they suddenly saw themselves as God saw them—people unwilling to listen to the voice of a prophet. Jesus made them look at a place in their own heart, and they did not like what they saw.
Jesus also saw them as beloved children of God. He saw them in their complexity, not simply as sinful people, but also as people incapable of seeing the truth, because of the human limitations that we all share. That recognition might have been too much for them. So he could pass through their midst.
ONE POPULAR WAY FOR preachers and teachers to present this passage is from the crowd’s perspective. Even when the Messiah was standing before them, they failed to see him. The people of the tight-knit village knew him so well that they couldn’t imagine someone so ordinary and so familiar as the carrier of divine grace. The usual moral is: be careful not to overlook anyone as an instrument of grace.
But here is something we often overlook: Jesus knew them. When he stood up in the synagogue building or in the outdoor gathering space, he saw the faces of people he knew well. There were his fellow carpenters; there were his cousins; there were his mother’s friends; there were his peers. Therefore, he must have known how they would respond to what he was going to say.
Imagine planning to speak to a group of friends or family—people you’ve known your whole life. Now imagine that you’re going to tell them something alarming. Let’s say you’re dropping out of college, you’re moving across the country, or you’re breaking off an engagement. If you know them well, you probably know how they’re going to respond. You can anticipate how each person will react.
Walking into that synagogue, the perceptive tektōn probably could predict how people would respond when he declared himself the Messiah. He knew that he would be rejected and even attacked, but he did it anyway.
Jesus must have expected that his controversial statement would engender strong, angry, and even violent reactions. But he seemed unbothered by the prospect of controversy. Why? Because
he was fearless, independent, and free.
Jesus also does so generously. Though he challenges the crowd, he evinces no resentment toward them. After all, he is preaching “good news,” figuratively and literally. The expression usually refers to the entire Gospel message. But in a homier sense, what he is saying is plain old good news—the blind will see, captives will be released, and there will be a “year of the Lord’s favor.”14 It’s a contrast from the fire-and-brimstone message of John the Baptist. Surely, this is good news. But the people were still angry.
Luke Timothy Johnson suggests that the townspeople were furious not simply because Jesus proclaimed himself as Messiah, but also because he declared that his ministry would not be done in Nazareth and, what’s more, that he would bring his mission to the Gentiles, the non-Jews. “He is not acceptable in his own country because his mission extends beyond his own country,” says Johnson.15 It is likely that Jesus knew how a message of openness to the Gentiles would be received in his hometown. Nonetheless, he is fearless.