Abstract
Rejection at Nazareth
Rejection requires risk. So do acceptance and trust.
I have been watching a young vixen this week. She slips through the front garden at about 5pm, unfortunately close to rush hour, and goes off to hunt. Later, I often see her moving like a shadow with something in her mouth. She must have a litter of cubs somewhere close. I would say she is less than a year old, and it is probably her first litter, she is so very small. And, given the traffic which builds up outside our house at times, I fear for her safety every day, and for the cubs she will leave if anything happens to her.
I cannot bear her total investment in fleeting life. For her it is what it is, without protection or guarantees, the moment, and nothing beyond.
Yet she holds nothing in reserve. When she peeks through the opening onto the road, it is a curious look, inquisitive, ‘what is out there?’ When she returns triumphant with something wriggling in her mouth, her head and her tail are up. I haven’t seen her nuzzling her young, but the care with which she carries her prey tells me she is a good mother.
We are made of the same stuff, blood and bone and skin and sinew, and yet, we are not the same. Does the vixen feel the kind of despair I do, when I hear of wars and displacement, illness or accident? Of course not. Does she worry about the kind of world her grandchildren may live in? No, she doesn’t, though she might live to see the cubs of her cubs, and vaguely know what they are and how, by instinct, they relate to her?
But what it means to be human is to experience the pain of a consciousness beyond ourselves and our own circumstances, to imagine the future and be fearful of its consequences. We cannot remain in the moment, although some people are better than others at making the moment live. Often we cannot remain in the moment because the future and the past intrude upon our present. We project things onto our future and we remember how things were in the past. Nothing for us is unequivocal enjoyment; it is usually tinged with something else. This is the human condition, which we talk about at baptism. And although baptism doesn’t, in one sense, alter the human condition, it does begin to overlay and underpin that condition with promises about the future.
Take this moment in the life of Jesus. It is an important moment in a series of major steps, stepping out. He has responded to the call of John the Baptist, waded into the water for his baptism, felt the Spirit alight on him, and known both its gentleness and its compelling force. He feels a longing for the desert—to be alone, to think, to pray, to face temptations, to identify with Israel in her wandering journey.
At Pentecost we sing a hymn which says, ‘none can guess the grace, till he become the place, wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling’. I think that is true, but the Spirit is also quietly insistent. Jesus is filled with the Holy Spirit, and driven out to wrestle and shape a ministry. And then…, and then?
The weaving of the past, and the present, and the future! He returns to Galilee and speaks there in different synagogues—to good effect, his reputation grows. Finally, he is invited, we must assume he was invited, to his home synagogue, where he attended each week when he was growing up, where he was familiar and known, ‘as was his custom’, the passage says.
He read, as we know, from the text of Isaiah, written in the past, from a passage in which the Messiah is identified for the future by special gifts and tasks. How will you know him? He will do certain things and you will see certain things (present), and then you will see the restoration of Israel (future). The text appeals to our human need to have our lives overlaid and underpinned with promises.
For Jesus it is also a shaping speech of intent as well as a formal declaration. These are his tasks, but he also intends to do them according to the Spirit, as they unfold before him.
He will carry good news to the poor, those poor both in substance and in spirit. He will also, in language drawn from the exile in Babylon, proclaim liberty to the captives. Their eyes will be opened—as though stumbling from the darkness of a dungeon—into the light. They will be free from the predations of an occupying force and all the consequent oppression, and, like in a jubilee year, will find that their debts are cancelled, and their slave indentures no longer apply—in other words, they are liberated from the dragging of past sins and obligations.
For those of us who have been following all the articles and programmes related to the 70th anniversary of VE day, this has a particular resonance. Not everyone danced in the streets at the war’s end. So many were brutalised, suicidal, starving, terrified among the ruins! If only, if only, we could end our conflicts with the dream of reconciliation instead of revenge, there would be no further acts to make us despair. When will we learn that acts of reprisal can never, ever make for peace?
In Isaiah, the passage continues with the gifts of gladness and praise brought with the coming of the Messiah. In Luke, Jesus rolls up the scroll and hands it back to the attendant. He is concerned with identifying himself for the present. The past is wiped clean, the present is stated for our investment of faith, then the future will be assured. He said to those watching intently, their eyes never moving from his face, ‘today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’. You have heard it, he was saying, today the promises become the reality of your lives.
Filled with the Spirit, he was ushering in a completely different kind of world: one in which mercy dominated and cruelty was at an end. What wasn’t so clear, to us at least, is that we would have to make that world, and go on making it, day after day after day. We have to go on believing in it, and declaring it, and living it at each present edge, forgiving the past, and then, building that future.
It is such a complicated life, this. And such an insistent spirit! So much more than we know how to give, so very much more than our wounded selves wish to give, caught between past and future—at the horizon of this moment of living.
It is 16.50. I am waiting for a glimpse of her rust fur as she steals along the hedge.
The inevitability of risk as part of living: for Jesus, for us, for all living creatures, how we hate it and need it at the same time!
Lord of the heavens and the earth,
Sometimes this world of faith and trust is too much for us. We cannot bear its weight of sorrows. We cannot hold onto its joys. Today, let us remember the frailty of others, the losses they hide that hurt as much as our own, the deep-seated threads that tie us together, for the kingdom’s sake, Amen.