January 31, 2010 Jeremiah 1:4-10 Luke 4:21-30

“Offended by the Message”

Dr. Ted H. Sandberg

As part of my education to become a minister, I worked for 2 years as a Minister-in-training at the

First Baptist Church of Branford, CT. The first year at Branford, I worked under Dr. Reuben Jeschke
who’d become pastor there after he’d retired as president of our American Baptist, Sioux Falls
College.
Dr. Jeschke was a very kind, very quiet, very gentle man. He was so modest and unassuming that I
don’t know how he was ever able to serve as a college president. I found out long after I’d left
Branford, that Dr. Jeschke did a wonderful job as president of Sioux Falls. He reversed its downward
slide and helped it become a very successful college. Dr. Jeschke was so loved and respected by the
College that they named their wonderful performing arts complex after him.
As I said, Dr. Jeschke was a very kind, gentle man, very soft spoken. I remember once following
some kind of church gathering, Dr. Jeschke came up to me and asked if we could talk for a few
minutes. I can’t remember all the details of our talk, but basically what he told me in his soft way was
that he felt it would be a good idea if, when I did the Pastoral Prayer during worship, I wrote the
prayer out before I prayed it, or at least outlined what I wanted to pray about. He said that some
people had mentioned to him that they thought my prayers didn’t flow smoothly enough. Dr. Jeschke
thought that perhaps if I wrote them out for a while I’d be able to correct this.
As I’ve already said, he told me this in a very kind manner. He said that it wasn’t that I was praying
poorly, or for the wrong things. It was that my delivery wasn’t as smooth as it could be.
No one could’ve given me more constructive criticism in a kinder, gentler form than Dr. Jeschke did
that Sunday evening. Yet, I can still remember becoming angry with him as he talked with me. “How
dare he tell me how to pray! How dare he suggest that a Baptist write out a prayer!” I didn’t say that
to him. In fact, I didn’t argue or talk back to him. I received what he had to say without saying much
of anything to him, but I was hurt that I wasn’t praying “properly,” and out of that hurt came anger.
In my own defense, I will say that later that evening or maybe the next day, when I’d cooled down and
thought about what he had said to me, I realized he was right. I began to write out the pastoral prayer.
I did that for a number of years, and found it to be a very good prayer discipline.
I share this because often when I hear or read about people becoming angry when they’re criticized, I
think of this incident with Dr. Jeschke. I’m sure that in our little talk, Dr. Jeschke shared positive
things as well, but it’s the negative that I still remember. Even while one part of me was saying,
“Keep cool, Ted. He’s doing this to help you,” another part of me was getting mad and saying, “What
right does he have to say this to me?” – even though as my senior and teaching pastor he had every
right, even the responsibility, to say that to me. It’s just that it’s probably embedded deep within our
human nature to become angry when we feel attacked or hurt, even when the attack is justified. If the
truth ever hurts, then we can count on the truth also making us angry.
Essentially, that’s what happened in the verses from Luke’s gospel that we’ve read this morning.
When Jesus got a little too close to the truth, the people of his home town became angry.
Understand, things didn’t start out badly. Just the opposite. Nazareth didn’t have the best of
reputations for some reason. People looked down on the town. So when Jesus started making a name

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for himself in the surrounding communities, the people of Nazareth were probably very pleased. “He
looked like a new prophet, or at least his preaching had bowled over congregation after congregation
in the synagogues of Galilee. ‘A report about him spread through all the surrounding country,’ Luke
reports, and he ‘was praised by everyone.’ It was no doubt particularly pleasing for the folks in
Nazareth to learn that Jesus had caused a stir in the nearby rival village of Capernaum. We can almost
hear the conversations in the market at Nazareth: ‘High and mighty Capernaum may have looked
down on us in the past, but no preacher from Capernaum ever turned their heads like our boy Jesus!’
“So when Jesus came home to Nazareth, the local synagogue was surely packed. They handed him the
Isaiah scroll, and the congregation beamed. He read the words ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon
me . . . ,’ and the congregation glowed with pride. He sat down and began to preach, [which by the
way didn’t mean that he was done, but rather that he was ready to start commenting on the text. The
custom was to stand to read the Scripture and then sit to comment on it], he sat down and said, ‘Today
this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,’ and the flock was abuzz. As Luke puts it, ‘All spoke
well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came out of his mouth.’ Already they were
imagining a new city limits sign, ‘Welcome to Nazareth. Hometown of Jesus.’”1 But then Jesus went
too far.
For Jewish people living in such a gentile world, the situation was much like that facing modern-day
Palestinians living in the Gaza strip. Daily they had to remind themselves of their identity. They
needed to be Jewish to the core and so they always struggled with any compromising tendencies to
make accommodations with the Gentiles in their midst. Their dream – reinforced in songs, dreams,
prayers, ritual, and Scripture – was for the day when they would see their land returned to the people
of God and the Gentiles driven out. They abhorred anything Gentile.
People in Nazareth knew the dream of restoration by heart as it was presented in Isaiah: “The spirit of
the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to
the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the
prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor – ”2 It was their dream, recounted in Isaiah, that
God would send a Messiah, a Christ to save them. It was their dream that this Messiah would bring
good news and bind up the brokenhearted. It was their dream that the Messiah would proclaim liberty
to the captives and release to the prisoners. It was their dream that they would finally enter the year of
the Lord’s favor. It was their dream that – but Jesus didn’t finish their dream. Jesus didn’t finish
reading from Isaiah’s scroll. Jesus put down the scroll and didn’t read the next line from Isaiah’s
prophecy, the line that finishes “to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favor” by saying, “and the day of
vengeance of our God.”
That line that Jesus didn’t read was gospel to the people of Nazareth living in that oppressed land.
Jesus didn’t read the line from the prophet Isaiah that declared there would be a day of vengeance of
our God. “He stopped too early,” they must’ve thought. “He missed the best part, the part about the
vengeance of God.”
But no, it wasn’t a mistake that he stopped before reading the about God’s vengeance. While Luke
doesn’t specifically state what Jesus was doing, it’s clear that Jesus began to explain why he wasn’t
proclaiming the day of the Lord’s vengeance. He proclaimed this in the 2 illustrations he used. So
1 1. Long, Thomas G., “God’s Saving Power,” February 1, 2004 Pulpit Resource
– Online: 32.1

2 2. Isaiah 61:1-2a
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these are inflammatory illustrations. Jesus had the whole Old Testament available to him to make his
point. He could’ve chosen from any of the great heroes of the faith: the patriarchs and matriarchs.
Maybe Abraham and Sarah? What about Moses and Miriam? Or David? But Jesus chose two figures
on the edge of the tradition. In doing this, Jesus declared the foundation of his ministry and began his
public ministry under the threat of death from his own people.
Jesus began his explanation of what the Day of the Lord is all about, began his explanation of why he
excluded the Day of the Lord’s vengeance, by speaking of the widow who lived outside of Israel.
Someone outside Israel, a foreigner, a Gentile is held up in a good light! He tells about the widow
who fed Elijah in a time of famine. “There were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when
the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;
yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.” God, through the
prophet Elijah, seemed to ignore the people of Israel and reached out instead to this Gentile widow.
Why would God do that?
But Jesus wasn’t done. The second example Jesus used is drawn from the story of the prophet Elisha
who helped facilitate the healing of a leper. “There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the
prophet Elisha,” Jesus says, “and none of them was cleansed except Na'aman the Syrian,” the Gentile.
There are all kinds of implications from this story. Not only are there all kinds of rules and
restrictions about dealing with lepers in the ritual purity laws, but this leper is a foreigner who comes
into Israel. If ever any one person from the tradition might stand as a symbol for the current
oppressors, a Syrian army general would fit the bill quite nicely. On top of that, he’s a leper! Yet
Jesus suggests that this is the kind of person his God loves. Is it any wonder his friends and neighbors
became angry? Who wants to hear that their enemies are loved by God?
“What Jesus was saying, in essence, was that in order to be ‘for Nazareth’ he was going to have to
appear to be against Nazareth, against its desire to confine and contain the work of God. It’s a hard
lesson for all of us to hear about Jesus. Jesus is for us, yes, but not just for us but for all others, too.
In fact, in order to be savior of all, Jesus will need to turn for the moment against some of us, to leave
our little hometown images of him and our desire to shape him in our local molds behind. In order to
be ‘good news for the poor,’ he’ll need to speak against those of us who are rich. In order to be a
savior to the sick and the blind, he’ll need to leave the safe streets of the healthy. In order to be a
friend of sinners, he’ll need to speak harshly to the righteous. Only by going to Jerusalem can he save
Nazareth. Only this way can he save the poor and the rich, the sick and the well, the righteous and the
sinner.”3
Tough words to hear, aren’t they, now as then. Yet because I know that I’m no better or worse than
Christians down through the ages, I know that if I’m not excluding others right now, I certainly have
the potential to do that. I have the potential to want God to be for me and against my enemies, just
like the people of Nazareth. Yet Jesus taught, and teaches, that we’re to love those we’ve been taught
to hate, love those who do the opposite of what we believe God calls us to do.
This is tough to live, isn’t it? Only through the grace of Jesus Christ can we accomplish this. Only
through the power of the Holy Spirit can we love those with whom we argue and fight and even hate.
Only through the love of God can we accept those who so radically differ from us. We want to be
right. We want to win. And yet Jesus comes before us, just as he courageously stood before his own
people, declaring the way is love, the way is acceptance, the way is forgiveness, the way is

3 3. Long,
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reconciliation, the way is community, the way is found by understanding that in Christ we are all one.
It’s so easy to point a finger at “those” people, and fail to realize that we are “those” people too.
We’re not better. We’re just different. It’s only because of God’s love that any of us find salvation.
It’s only through God’s grace that we are saved. May each of us follow Jesus’ example and through
God’s Spirit, work at loving all people, even those who may not love us.