Rev. Dr. Les Martin

Ecce Homo! (cropped) by Mihály Munkácsy (1896)

Epiphany 4 2025
Rev. Dr. Les Martin
Luke 4:21-32

Isn’t this Joseph’s son?.

Luke 4:22b

In the Name of the Living God: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen

Our Gospel reading today picks up where last week’s reading left off. Let’s just walk through it for a start. As you remember from last week, Jesus read from the prophecy of Isaiah about his messianic mission, and gave a very short and powerful one sentence sermon: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read.” The people marvel at this proclamation of grace, and say the one thing they know for certain about Jesus: “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” They are correct, even if not biologically so, but that’s really about all they can say. It seems they have missed the importance of the “Today” that Father Doug reflected on last week. Jesus is Joseph’s son, we know him. But “Today”? The very fulfillment of the promise of God? Or even a prophet- as Jesus suggests in verse 24- they can’t really say that about him. If we think about it for a minute, we realize they can’t say much about him or about what has just happened at all. Only that he is Joseph’s son.

After the service, Jesus takes his proclamation a bit further. There is grace, yes, but not perhaps in the way that the worshipers at Nazareth would have thought.

Joseph’s son? I get it. I’m from here. Probably makes it hard for you to see just what’s happening when you can remember me as a little boy with smudges on my face. That’s how it was with the prophets, too. Elijah wasn’t listened to during the famine in Israel, the only one who got fed was that widow in Sidon. And although there were plenty of lepers in Israel in the time of Elijah, it was only a Syrian solider that saw the truth and got healed.

In saying these things, Jesus is speaking the truth, but he’s also become very provocative- so much so that the people of his own hometown tried to kill him. His assertion is that the believers in Nazareth are missing the truth of God’s anointed one and the Kingdom because, well, he’s too familiar to them. He likens it to the all-too-easy and comfortable way that Israel ignored Elijah, and so relief during the famine was only brought to a foreigner, an enemy citizen who nonetheless had eyes to see. He reminds them of Naaman, the Syrian commander who was healed of his leprosy because he can perceive what God is doing through the hand of Elisha, when God’s own covenant people cannot. He is suggesting, none too subtly, that God’s covenant people can become so familiar with the God of the Covenant that they miss their “Today” altogether. He’s not just Joseph son, but they aren’t looking for anything else.

The ancient Greek storyteller Aesop is often credited with coining the phrase “familiarity breeds contempt.” It express the idea that a close long-term relationship with a person or situation brings about feelings of boredom or lack of respect. I think that’s part of what’s going on here- the people present in the synagogue of Nazareth are so familiar not just with Jesus, but also with Isaiah’s prophecy, that they can see nothing new. Certain of their ethnic identity, their moral superiority, and the excellence of their religion, and so settled in their own interpretation of the Scriptures, they are missing the inauguration of the Kingdom in their midst.

Familiarity breeds contempt- or if not contempt, at least a dulling of our sense of expectation. We can fall victim to it as well. When you’ve been a Christian for a long time, the wonders of our faith can begin to seem so ordinary, so routine. We know the stories of the Bible so well. The same liturgical pattern, year after year. Knowing how the story goes, it can become commonplace, the liturgy rote. Like a favorite song from our teenage years, we can listen with the ears of nostalgia for what we already know we will hear, muting even the possibility that what we hear might be something new. So this morning, I want to suggest some ways that we might see Joseph’s son with “fresh eyes,” ways that can hopefully shake off the familiarity that can breed an unwarranted level of comfort, control, and yes, contempt of our living and active God.

We need to start with the most basic truth: God is a person, not an idea. Elementary, yet we forget it so easily. As Father Doug reminded us last week, “It is not my knowledge of this truth that rescues me. It is Jesus Himself.”

By the time of the Second-Temple Judaism of Jesus’ day, the religion of the Israelites has become quite complex. In addition to the Torah, the Wisdom literature, and the Prophets, there is now a growing library of rabbinical commentary on the same. There are the synagogues, as well as the priesthood and the temple. And also many, many traditions and rituals. None of this is bad in and of itself- as Anglicans, we could hardly say that. However, what has been lost is the immediacy of the presence of a living God in their midst. The God who names himself “I AM ”, who personally delivered Abraham’s descendants from slavery in Egypt has, by and large, been systematized. This personal God- and a personal relationship with him- have grown to be less important than the ideas about that God and about that relationship.

We can fall victim to this as well. For the first time in my life, we live in an age where the Bible and Christian culture more generally are experiencing a resurgence of interest. Formerly atheistic academics, looking at the chaos of the world and bemoaning the loss of our cultural foundations, are taking a fresh look at Christianity. Some are even going so far as to convert, although many are also being quite clear that what they are converting to is a project to reclaim Christian culture, not necessarily Christ himself. Popular media personality Jordan Peterson has been making waves with his psychological lectures on the Bible, using the texts as a means to talk about Jungian archetypes, our inner lives, and the implications for young men in our society. Let me be clear: all of this is fine. However, let me also be clear about this: it is not the same thing we are doing here. For practicing Christians, the center of our faith is a real relationship with a real person, neither an academic exercise nor a cultural restoration project. Jesus is not an ideology, he is a person. As Fr. Lincoln Harvey, Associate Dean of St. Mellitus’ College, reminds us:

Because God is who he is in revelation, what you see in Jesus Christ is what you get… Jesus is really God addressing us.

If, when we consider Jesus, we begin to understand that he is a person not an idea, we are also immediately confronted with the fact that as a person he is free. Uniquely free, despite living in occupied land under the yolk of Roman oppression, despite his suffering and death at the hands of the authorities. In John 10:17-18, Jesus says:

For this reason the Father loves me, because I lay down my life that I may take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have authority to take it up again.

Authority even over death and life- now that’s freedom! Yet, it is precisely the freedom of Jesus that gets him in trouble in Nazareth today. You see, in referencing God’s saving action among not just the Gentiles, but the enemy Gentiles of the people of Nazareth, Jesus is saying that God’s freedom is not limited by human preference. And his hometown neighbors want to kill him because of it. The prophet Isaiah proclaimed in Chapter 55:8-9 that God would have us remember that:

“My thoughts are n...