The passage: On the sabbath, as was his habit, Jesus stood up to read in the synagogue at Nazareth, where he grew up. He was handed the scroll of Isaiah and read the place that says the Spirit of the Lord is on him to bring good news to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, free captives, restore sight to the blind, release the oppressed, and proclaim the Lord’s year of favour. He closed the scroll and sat down, every eye on him, and said: “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:14-21.)
The Sermon on the Mount reads like an expansion of these words, and might have followed this reading had Nazareth been willing to listen. And the evangelist’s wording matches neither of the differing originals behind the English and Greek versions, which alone should end the crude, spiritually shallow idea that Scripture is inspired word for word.
Where the Lord stops reading is telling. He closes the book, leaving unread “and the day of vengeance of our God” (the Septuagint has “the day of recompense”). God’s vengeance is as holy as his love, indeed is love, since God is love and not vengeance. But he evidently did not want the word in his announcement: his hearers would hear it as vengeance on their enemies, not on the selfishness of those who refuse to be their brother’s keeper.
He did not begin with Nazareth, or even Galilee. “A prophet has no honour in his own country,” he said, and began where he was likelier to be heard. At Cana he worked his first miracle only at his mother’s request, and did not begin teaching there. He went first to Jerusalem, drove the dealers out of the temple and did other notable things John mentions; his former neighbours in Galilee had seen this and were ready to listen. The Nazarenes, who knew him best, kept the most prejudice: he was from their own city, and they had known him since childhood! Those in whom familiarity with the high and true breeds contempt are low indeed; they are already judged. Such was his fame that even they would hear him and judge his claim, but their judging eye was not clear, and they were full of darkness. If they could be satisfied that he was the great Prophet, they would eagerly claim the glory of producing him; he was that Prophet, and within minutes they would have killed him for Israel’s honour. In ignoble people even love of country is largely ignoble.
The Lord began his mission by driving dishonest dealers from the temple, a shadow of God’s hateless vengeance and his first parable to Jerusalem. To Nazareth he comes with the prophet’s sweetest words of hope, good news of healing, sight and liberty, and announces that he has come to fulfil them. That day the scripture was fulfilled in their hearing. It was foretold that he would save his people from their sins; here he announces what they would grasp more easily: he has come to free people from sorrow, pain, ignorance, oppression, everything that makes life hard and unfriendly. I imagine women heard it most gladly: they had hardly been heard before he came, and things have been improving for them ever since, and still are. He is the refuge of the oppressed, freeing the world from sin and woe through its very woes, like bitter medicine, and he keeps at the cure though the sick, mistaking the symptoms for the disease, blame their physician. “What power can heal the broken-hearted?” they ask. It takes a God, and the God is here! In better words than the prophet’s, he says: “Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.” He has come to free us from everything that keeps life from being pure bliss; no other gospel would be worthy of the God of humanity.
Everyone, I presume, has some misery. Its apparent source may be this or that; its real source is a dislocation of the joint between the created life and the creating life. This primal evil breeds countless others. Under their weight the arrogant person rails against life and misuses it, while the child looks around for help, and who can help him but his father? The Father is with him all along, though it may be a long, troubled time before the child knows he is in his arms. Doubt may hide the Light of the world and failure baffle his hope, but now and then the blue of a great sky breaks through, and gradually he can imagine a world where every thinkable good is real. Best of all, the story of the one who is himself God’s good news grows easier for his heart to believe, and helps him in his struggle and in his trust that a living Father hears his children cry. The gospel according to this or that expounder may repel him beyond words; the gospel according to Jesus Christ draws him most strongly and keeps its hold. When a priest, scribe or elder accuses him of self-sufficiency for refusing their teaching, he answers: “This is life or death to me. I cannot take your gospel; believing as you want me to would mean losing my God. Your God is no God to me, and I would rather die than believe in him. I reject your gospel in the true God’s name, because believing it would wrong the one in whom my only hope lies.”
“But to believe in such a man,” he might go on, “as the New Testament shows him, is life from the dead. I no longer live by the idea of self but by the life of God. I give him the creature he made, to live in and develop as he intended. I accept his ways for me, trust him, and try to obey. I look to see his will clearly and be freed from the prison of my limits, the bondage of finite existence; for the finite that lives in the infinite, and in which the infinite lives, is finite no longer, and those who are children in this way are little Gods, the divine brood of the infinite Father. Mere rescue from the consequences of sin would be no gospel to me. Nothing less than a holy heart’s liberty, the Lord’s own freedom, will satisfy a human soul. Father, set me free in the glory of your will, so that I want only what you want. Your will is both your perfection and mine. You alone are deliverance, absolute safety from every trouble that ever was, is or can be in your universe.”
But the people of the Lord’s town, to whom he applied the prophet’s gracious words, were the wise and prudent of their day. In effect they cry: “These things are good, but they must come our way. The promise to our fathers must be fulfilled: we, the chosen children of Abraham and Israel, will rule the world. We want to be free, run our own affairs, live in plenty and do as we please. Only liberty can cure the woes you speak of. We don’t need to be better; we are well enough. Give us riches and honour, keep us satisfied with ourselves, and you can be the Messiah.” They may never say this, but their minds often run this way. What will they complain of if God gives them their heart’s desire? When it closes in on them as torturing slavery, when they find that what they took for their own will was a prompting from they knew not where, when they find that life is not good yet they cannot die: will they not turn and beg their maker to save them his way?
Let us try to understand the evangelist’s brief account of what happened in the Nazareth synagogue.
“Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” said Jesus, and went on with his divine talk. I trust we shall yet learn what the “gracious words” were; surely some who heard them still remember, for “all bare him witness, and wondered.” How did they bear him witness? Must the narrator not mean that their hearts bore witness to the power of his presence: that the light of truth in his face lifted even those who did not know the truth, because the true something common to all hearts answered words that had found a way to the divine in them, so that they thought, “Never man spake like this man”? So they were drawn to him, all but ready to accept him, on their own terms, alas, not his. For a moment he seemed a true messenger, but his truth was not theirs; had he been what they took him for, he would have been no saviour. They were well disposed toward him, partly by mistake, and with a growing sense of being honoured by their tie to him they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”
But the Lord knew what was in their hearts: the false notion on which they were almost ready to declare for him, and the final test their wisdom and prudence were about to put him to. He did not look like a prophet, having grown up among them with no credentials; they had a right to proof positive! They had heard of wonders he did elsewhere: why not first before their eyes? Who had a better claim, or knew him well enough to judge? His words were gracious, but words were nothing; he must do something wonderful! Without such proof Nazareth at least would never acknowledge him.
They would gladly have the honour of a true prophet as their townsman, as the son of Joseph might turn out to be; the credit of producing him would be theirs, and they would stand up for him before the world! That he was the Messiah was sheer absurdity: did they not all know his father, the carpenter? But he might be the prophet so many of the best in the nation were expecting. Let him do something wonderful!
They were not a gracious or good people, and the Lord saw that their thoughts were far from his. His mighty works were not meant to convince them of what they could not understand or accept: those who will not believe without signs could never believe worthily with any number of them, and none would be given. The works were to rouse the love and strengthen the faith of the meek and lowly in heart, people ready to come to the light and show they belonged to it. He knew how little the Nazarenes made of the words he read, and how low their hopes of the Messiah were even when they longed for him most; they did not hear the prophet while he read the prophet! A few little wonders, nothing to him, would prove him the Messiah they wanted, and they would cheer and rush to be his officers and soldiers in a triumphant campaign to drive the accursed Romans from their sacred land. Their Messiah would make the nation the Lord’s redeemed, themselves his favourites, the tyrants of the world. Salvation from their sins was nowhere in their thoughts. They had heard him read his commission to heal the broken-hearted; they would rush to break hearts in his name. He would have no followers on false conceptions, whom wonders would delight but not improve. They were not yet people who needed just one change to be his. He had come to help them, and until they accepted it, they could give him none.
The Lord never did a mighty work to prove his mission, though he would do anything to help a growing faith in himself and his Father. He healed those whom healing would help more deeply, in whom suffering had done enough that its removal would carry its work on. He would not show his power to the Nazarenes, since it would only confirm their arrogance and ambition. Wonderful works can only nourish a faith already there; someone who believes without them may be granted a miracle. The Israelite indeed met with one: “You believe because I said I saw you under the fig tree? You will see the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.” Those who laughed at him were not allowed to see Jairus’s daughter raised. Peter, when he wanted to walk on the water, was given permission and power. The widow received the prophet and was fed; the Syrian went to the prophet and was cured. In Nazareth, because of unbelief, he could lay his hands on only a few sick people; the rest had no leaning toward the truth to make room for a miracle. They soon showed it.
The Lord saw them about to demand a display of his power, and refused before they could ask.
Let me paraphrase his words: “You will quote me the proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself,’ and demand that I do here what is said of me in Capernaum. But another proverb says no prophet is accepted in his own country, and unaccepted I do nothing wonderful. In the great famine Elijah was sent to a Sidonian, not to any of Israel’s many widows, and Elisha cured Naaman the Syrian, not any of Israel’s many lepers. Those fit to see signs and wonders are not always the prophet’s kin.”
The Nazarenes heard with indignation, and their wonder at his gracious words turned to bitter wrath. Their ugly religion rested on party spirit, exclusiveness and pride in imagining that God favoured them alone of all nations. To hint that God’s glory might be shown to a stranger, and that a stranger might be fitter to receive it than a Jew, was a gross insult, and it came from a common man of their own town! “You’re only a well-known carpenter’s son, and you teach us? Are you saying God prefers Capernaum to Nazareth?” Despised by other Jews, they only grew prouder.
The whole synagogue, notice, rose in a fury. Such a fellow a prophet! Worse than the worst Gentile, a false Jew, a traitor to his God, a friend of the idol-worshipping Romans! Away with him! His townsmen led his rejection by his own people, and would have forestalled the crucifixion by those of Jerusalem. What! A Sidonian woman fitter to receive the prophet than any Jewish woman! A heathen worthier of being kept alive by a miracle in famine than a worshipper of the true God! A leper of Damascus less displeasing to God than the lepers of his chosen race! They had seen through him! Finding it useless to pose as a prophet among people who knew his breed, he had turned to insult them, not daring to try in his own city the tricks, done with Satan’s help, that had fooled the idiots of Capernaum! Let him take the consequences! To the brow of the hill with him!
How could there be a miracle for such people? They were well satisfied with themselves, and
But misery.
He whose love wants us to trust him prizes need, the upward look, the embryonic faith that believes where it can. Whoever seeks him, not with curious questions about whether the story might be true, but ready to accept him fully if he can, will find him; doubt will not keep us from help to believe. But if the questioner would stay disobedient even with his doubt gone, the Power of truth has no interest in convincing him. Why cast out a devil so the man can do the devil’s work better? Childlike doubt, as it softens, feeds the seed of faith at its heart with all that was good in it, while wise and prudent unbelief is left to develop its own misery. The Lord could easily have convinced the Nazarenes he was the Messiah, but they would only have hardened into the core of an army to conquer the world. No miracle could have persuaded them to fight their own sins and bring their doing and desiring under the great Father’s will; hearts like theirs cannot be truly convinced. A low man cannot believe a thousandth part of what a noble man can, or anything as a noble man does. They could believe in Jesus as their saviour from the Romans, but not from their sins, which they loved. The king of heaven offered them a share in his kingdom, but they were not poor in spirit, so it was not for them. They would gladly have inherited the earth, but they were not meek; the earth was for the lowly children of the perfect Father.