Luke 4:16-30 Pastor Nathan P. Kassulke
The Third Sunday After Epiphany 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.