Daily Lesson for May 6, 2019

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Luke chapter 4 verses 20 through 30:

20And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’22All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ 23He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ 24And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. 25But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;26yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. 27There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ 28When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. 29They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. 30But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Jesus’ exposition of the Hebrew Bible is fantastic, yet also disruptive. He takes old and familiar stories — the healing of a leprous enemy general and the feeding of a foreign woman — and posed disruptive questions. “Were there not also many lepers and widows among our own people in those days?  Yet the prophets went to the foreigners?  Why?”

The questions are indeed disruptive.  They are unsettling. Now the folk in Jesus’ hometown synagogue call him a “troubler of Israel” just as King Ahab called Elijah. It is not a compliment. 

Jesus is now in trouble. But it’s good trouble. It’s holy trouble. For troubling questions call into question the status quo.  They cause us to see the past, as historian Jon Fea says, not through the lens of nostalgia but actual history. And they expand the borders of our understanding of God’s work in the world. 

When Jesus raised his troubling questions the Scripture says the people were filled with “rage”?  Why? Because suddenly they could now see their own blindness?  They could now see their nation’s indictable history. They could now see that the prophets had passed judgment. They could now see these things; but they didn’t want to look.

We have to think on these things now. What questions about our own history as a nation enrage us? What questions about our own people’s past do we not want to hear or answers do we not want to see?

These are troubling questions indeed. But it’s good and holy trouble. It may be disruptive to the status quo. But the disruption is probably exactly what we need to see ourselves and our history more accurately.

But in order for these things to happen we must welcome the prophet into our own hometown — and that is a mighty daring choice.