Homily Odinary 4C: Preaching the gospel in season and out of season

Homily for 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C 2019 

Jeremiah 1:4-5,17-19; 1 Corinthians 12:31-13:13; Luke 4:21-30

Introduction 

Today's gospel picks up where we left off last Sunday, when Jesus gave a sermon in his home synagogue of Nazareth.  And things did not go well for him.  The people ". . . rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong." 

As a priest for twenty years now, I too am concerned about delivering a good homily and receiving a good response.  I am worried about my stuttering, my accent, even a little push-back.  But thankfully, I have never been worried about being run out of town, much less being lynched for my homily, at least not yet. 

So, what did Jesus say that really ticked off the people of Nazareth, his own townspeople that they wanted to lynch him? 

Scripture and Theology 

Actually, the initial reaction to Jesus' sermon seems to have been quite good.  After he said, "Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing" we heard that "all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth."  It is like when parishioners come to the priest after Mass and say, "great homily Father" or "good job Father" (of course sometimes they say the same thing even when it is the deacon who preached).  The difficulty arose when the people engaged Jesus further about his homily, just like parishioners might ask the priest a few follow up questions about his homily.  During this follow-up Jesus made two points that apparently insulted them personally. 

The first problem arose when they asked: "Isn't this the son of Joseph?"  They asked this question because "familiarity that breeds contempt."  They were wondering, where does Joseph's boy come off trying to teach us?  How come this local boy, whom we so coming up, perhaps whose diapers we changed, is now claiming to be God's messenger?  They presumed to know him and so presumed that he had nothing to offer that was of value. 

In response Jesus pointed out the contempt behind their familiarity with him. He told them: "Surely you will quote me this proverb, 'Physician, cure yourself,' and say, 'Do here in your native place the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.'"  In the few last weeks we have seen Jesus preaching and performing miracles all over the place, especially in Capernaum, a town about 40 miles north east of Nazareth.  And surely the word must have circled back to his home town, where perhaps people are incredulous that the carpenter's son could amount to anything like they are hearing about him, and wonder why he has not done the same at home.  And that is why Jesus tells them what is now a famous saying: "Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place." 

But surely being a local boy is not enough to rile them up so much that they want to kill him.  It is what he says after, that ignites their anger.  To make his point that "no prophet is accepted in his own native place", Jesus quotes two examples from the Old Testament, where the prophet, like him, did not work miracles among his own people, but did so among foreigners. 

The first example comes from the time of the prophet Elijah, when during a three and half year famine,  he was sent, not to the widows in Israel, but to a widow in the pagan city of Zarephath in the pagan land of Sidon.  You might recall that we read that reading last November 11th (1 KGS 17:10-16).  Elijah asked this widow to give some dinner from her very last supply of flour and oil, which she did.  And then because of her selfless generosity, miraculously, "She was able to eat for a year, and he and her son as well; the jar of flour did not go empty, nor the jug of oil run dry."  Jesus is reminding them that because Israel was so wicked, they did not deserve God's blessings; and Elijah performed this miracle, in a foreign land. 

But Jesus was not finished.  He gave the example of Elisha, the prophet who succeeded Elijah.  He said: "Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian."  Again the point is the same: the prophet performed a miracle for a foreigner, a pagan, but not his own people, because they were so sinful. 

I hope you can begin to understand the fury of the people of Nazareth, because with these examples from their past, Jesus was kind of insulting them. 

• They must have thought: "How dare he drudge up their terrible past of sin and infidelity to God?"  It would be like a preacher today dredging up the low points of our Church's history: the Inquisition, the Crusades and the sexual abuse scandal or low points from this country's history, such as the slavery and the Jim Crow period.  Nobody wants to be reminded about the morally low points in their past, and neither did the people of Nazareth. 
• But to add insult to injury Jesus is suggesting that not only were their ancestors sinful, but that now the people of Nazareth are acting in much the same way.  Again it would be like someone not only bringing up things from the past but also suggesting that people today are no better. 
• And thirdly, how dare Jesus compare them, the People of God, unfavourably with the pagans, with foreigners, who come off better in these examples of the past, and even today? 

In short, the people reacted with fury, not just because their local boy was presuming to preach to them, but especially because he was challenging them in a very pointed way. 

Christian Life 

What about today's prophets, especially those to whom Jesus entrusted the ministry of preaching?  How are they received?  How do we receive them? 

Although I have never been run out of town for my homilies, I have come close to it, especially at election time, when people of one party accost me, verbally of course, for apparently promoting the other party, and people of the other party also accuse me of promoting the party of their opponents; and yet they are all hearing the same homily.  Outside election time, they may also push back, if like Jesus, I challenge something they really like in a pointed manner. 

But my worries about my bodily health pale in comparison to the rampart attacks on my bosses, the bishops and the Popes.  Whatever they say, they are attacked by one faction or other in the Church, especially by the faction whom a particular message afflicts directly, since the job of a preacher is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. 

Pope Benedict XVI, for example, was often stridently attacked for consistently reminding us about the "dictatorship of relativism."  By that phrase he was reminding Catholics and the world, to reject a thinking that prizes opinions over objective truth, a truth to be found only in Jesus Christ.  And guess who attacked him most, it was those who rejected eternal truths, like the inherent value of life, from natural conception to natural death.  If they could, they would have driven him off the cliff of the hill, and some did try to do so metaphorically. 

And then we come to the current Pope Francis, who also has a particularly consistent message that asks the Church to do as we heard Jesus declare in last Sunday's gospel: "to bring glad tidings to the poor. . . . to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free . . ." essentially, to go to the peripheries, to the most vulnerable in society.  He also reminds us like Jesus did to the people of Nazareth, that God sometimes sends his blessings to those who are not like us like foreigners and immigrants, those who belong to a different religion such as Muslims – in fact today he begins an apostolic trip to the Arabian Peninsula, the first pope to do so.  And there are no prizes for guessing those who counter-attack him most; it is those who have closed their eyes and ears to the cries of the poor.  And just like one faction did for Pope Benedict, another faction today vehemently want to push him over the cliff, both literally and metaphorically. 

Conclusion 

All preachers, indeed all Christians, are called to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, not only in preaching the Good News, but also in accepting the often fierce responses to their preaching.  Sometimes they are able to escape the attack like Jesus did at Nazareth, when he walked through the crowds, at and other times they don't and with Jesus suffer crucifixion or some other suffering like Jeremiah. 

As for us the people of God, may we never be like the lynching mob of Nazareth, but rather the people of Capernaum who received Jesus warmly; and may we pray for our leaders that they heed the instructions St. Paul gave to Timothy his successor: to "preach the word,. . . convince, rebuke, and exhort . . .," in season and out of season (2 Tim. 4:2).