Last week we saw Jesus give us his mission. He stood up in his home synagogue, read from Isaiah of being anointed to preach good news to the poor, freedom to prisoners, sight for the blind, release for the oppressed and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Then Jesus told his hometown folks that Isaiah was writing about him.
So last week, we talked about Jesus’ mission – what he is here for, and, by association, what the church is here for. To the original readers of this passage, last week was about who Jesus says he is and what he’s going to do. People from that time and place would know what Jesus was saying. He said, “I am the savior of Israel, and messiah of the people.”
So, last week was about Jesus. He stands before the people he grew up with and he offers them salvation through him. This week is about their response, …and it’s about our response.
This is their response. First off, they spoke well of him. “Didn’t he do a fine job!,” they said. “Joseph’s son is a good speaker.” He spoke words that were written hundreds of years ago. They are words of hope and salvation. They are good words, nice words. The people who have gone to synagogue have known these words all their lives. And this young man did a good job delivering them. He had an unusual sense of authority in reading this passage.
It’s as if it didn’t quite sink in, that Jesus had told them that they were fulfilled in this time, …in him.
If you see what has just happened, you can understand Jesus’ next response. This is what has just happened. Jesus has just offered his hometown their salvation. The messiah has come, and he’s willing to start with them. But their reaction is something like, “Oh, isn’t that nice.”
It is so far removed from their expectations, that they can’t even hear what it is that Jesus is offering them. He is the messiah, and he is offering them their salvation. It’s as clear as day to us. We know the good news. We know the rest of the story. We know the miracles and the dying on the cross and the resurrection to new life. When he gives the good news to the poor, we know that is us, and that is our good news, our freedom and sight. We have an idea who this man is. Or we should, from our perspective of looking back.
But the people in Nazareth, they know him a whole different way. They know him personally. It seems like they like him. But when he says that he is there to be their messiah, they don’t even hear it, they don’t even understand what he’s saying. It doesn’t fit in their parameters. He offers them salvation, and they don’t get it.
There are many responses to Jesus, to when he’s preached and offered as messiah and Lord. I would say that people just don’t get it is the most common response. It is so far out of the realm of the way they see the world, they just don’t get it. I think people are looking for a savior. But they don’t recognize the kind of savior Jesus is. People are usually looking one of two places.
First, people look inside themselves. We are a culture of people who are taught to save ourselves. “Oh, if I can just believe in myself, I’ll make that goal.” I think it was Veronica who told me of listening to the radio the other day when somebody called in, supposedly quoting scripture, saying that “God helps those who help themselves.” First of all, that is not in scripture. Secondly, it is completely antithetical, completely the opposite of the gospel. God doesn’t help those who help themselves. God helps those who trust in him to help them. We are not our own saviors.
That thinking of our culture is insidious. It creeps its way into our church, our theology, and mostly into our hearts. We think that everything is about us, about what we do, about what we can accomplish, about what we can make ourselves to be. Ultimately, when we think that way, we are thinking of ourselves as our own saviors.
There is a book going around, and it is a great book. I recommend it to everyone, and I know a number of you have read it already. And I’ve had some good conversations about it with some of you. But there is one thing in it that I think can get easily misconstrued in a way the author didn’t intend. It comes from the very title, “The God Chasers.” It can be too much about us. We can think that if we’re chasing God, then we’ll be saved. The truth is a little more along these lines. God is the one doing the chasing and the catching. All we need to do is see him, look at all that work he’s done chasing us down, see His love and faithfulness, and surrender to it.
But there is something else that keeps us from surrendering to Jesus. It is the expectations we have of what a savior is like. We have all sorts of images of saviors in our culture, just as they did back then. I have to tell you, a homeless vagabond is not one of them in either culture. Where I grew up, there was two or three different images of savior. One was of the doctor who could keep you looking beautiful. Surgeries, diets, magical healing and feel good drugs – they were the stuff you needed. Another was of the star-friend. My sister was a tennis player, and she practiced a lot when I was young. My mom would have to wait for her, and I, as the young little brother, would have to wait for her too. There was a lounge at that club. And in that lounge, John Wayne hung out. He’d be there sitting around smoking some big ol’ stogie playing cards or chess. I was so young, I hadn’t seen any of his movies, yet. I didn’t recognize him that way. But I knew, based on what my parents had said about him, and the way I saw everyone treating him, that this was a magnetic man. He was big and powerful and a huge laugh and dominated the room. Everyone was his follower and just wanted to be close to him. Now this is what a savior would be like – John Wayne.
But I’d say the most powerful image of a savior where I grew up was of the owner. This is the person who owned everything and everyone. They had everything in their control. They had all the trappings of ownership: the Mercedes, the boat over 60 feet long, the houses, and, if they were in the upper-echelon, the planes. They had their people. Their people would connect with someone elses people, and they would make deals to make their empire and their control even more complete. And they’ll have everyone organized, and everything in the right place, and it will all be better – a savior.
There are many more kinds of saviors. There are politicians and athletes and salesmen and the right wife with the perfect body or the right husband who will take care of you or the right friend that will love you just perfectly or on and on.
But Jesus comes to them and says, “I’m the one – today, now, here.” And whenever Jesus does that, whenever Jesus is proclaimed as savior, whenever a promise of Jesus is stated, it is also a challenge. We don’t just listen to the promises of good news and freedom and sight and peace and resurrection and say, “Oh, that’s nice. What a special young man that you think that way.” No, it is a direct question anytime we hear a promise of God. Do you believe it? Do you trust God? When you live here in the Podunk little town of Nazareth, living your life in the backwaters of the Roman Empire, do you think this young man whom you grew up with, that he’s the savior of the world? Do you believe that Jesus loves you so much that he wants you to trust him with your life? Do you believe when things get at their worst, and then they get just that much worse, do you believe then that he has good enough news for you even there? And, maybe hardest of all, when you’ve made some progress in the world’s means of salvation, you’ve gotten relatively comfortable with your life, you’re secure, healthy enough, settled enough in your marriages, finances, jobs, and churches, even there, will you surrender it all to me – that I have the very best for you. “Do you believe that I’m the messiah?,” Jesus insinuates. For that is what you do with a messiah, you drop all the other means of salvation, and you follow him.
This people are like the generation long ago, when Elijah was around. They trusted everything else but God. They were so far from trusting God that Elijah wasn’t needed as far as they were concerned. They had other prophets and means of help. So Elijah and then Elisha after him, they helped out folks of other persuasions rather than Hebrews.
Now, the people may not get the offer of messiah, but they get an insult. Now, they see all that Jesus had been saying of himself, and challenging them with. And they just don’t buy that he can fulfill all those promises. Jesus, they think, has been lying about them, and about God. And so they went to stone him. But we see who really is in control, and Jesus just walks right through the hostile hometown crowd.
Philip Yancey is a wonderful Christian writer who told of a friend of his who is a recovering alcoholic. He’s also a Christian, but has found it hard to go to church. He goes to his AA meetings and says, “Hi, I’m Tom and I’m an alcoholic.” And everyone greets him, “Hi, Tom.” But if he announced himself in church, “Hi, I’m Tom and an alcoholic, or a sinner or a wife-beater,” can you imagine the churches response? Yancey went to an AA meeting with him once. “I came away from the “midnight church” impressed, but also wondering why AA meets needs in a way that the local church does not – or at least did not, for my friend. I asked him to name the one quality missing in the local church that AA had somehow provided. He stared as his cup of coffee for a long time, watching it go cold. I expected to hear a word like love or acceptance or, knowing him, perhaps anti-institutionalism. Instead, he said softly this one word: dependency.
“None of us can make it on our own – isn’t that why Jesus came?” he explained. “Yet most church people give off a self-satisfied air of piety or superiority. I don’t sense them consciously leaning on God or each other. Their lives appear to be in order. An alcoholic who goes to church feels inferior and incomplete.’ He sat in silence for a while, until a smile began to crease his face. ‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said at last. ‘What I hate most about myself, my alcoholism, was the one thing God used to bring me back to him. Because of it, I know I can’t survive without him. Maybe that’s the redeeming value of alcoholics. Maybe God is calling us alcoholics to teach the saints what it means to be dependent upon him and on his community on earth.”” (Philip Yancey, I Was Just Wondering, p. 44f.).
Jesus stands before people who are familiar with him. And when he proclaims himself to be savior, and they are challenged to trust him or not, they have to make a decision.
What do you expect in a savior? Are you willing to let go of every other one and just follow this one?
