Rage
Luke 4:21-30
January 30, 2022
Emmanuel Baptist Church; Rev. Kathy Donley
Note: A recording of the worship service in which this sermon was preached may be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KakfcQ05hbs
“Has anyone ever been filled with rage at you because of something Jesus said or did?” That was the opening question in my clergy Bible study this week.[1]
The question was asked because of the rage in this text. The Nazarenes who heard Jesus’ sermon were so angry that they tried to throw him off a cliff. Has anyone ever been filled with rage at you because of something Jesus said or did?
I have witnessed religious rage a few times. I’ve probably told you about the one and only time I attended a meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention. It was held in the Super Dome in New Orleans. It was the end of a decade-long fight for control of the denomination and there were 38,000 battling Baptists in the space. Two things stand out in my memory. One is that when the people in charge didn’t like what someone had to say, they simply shut off their microphone. In that huge space, if you didn’t have a working microphone, you could not be heard. Shutting off microphones was rage expressed as power.
The other event happened when a certain prominent pastor stood to speak. He identified himself, “This is so and so, of the First Baptist Church of a well-known city” and the response was thunderous applause. Applause not for the truth of his convictions or the power of his compassion, but just because the crowd recognized his name and knew that he was one of them. He was on their side in the denominational fight. The applause might have sounded like appreciation or affirmation to some, but to me, it sounded like rage expressed as glee.
Sometimes, American Baptists enjoy holding up Southern Baptists as examples of everything we are not. So, imagine my dismay, when after my ordination as an American Baptist pastor, I started attending American Baptist Biennial meetings and saw very similar rage on display in the conversations regarding various resolutions about the inclusion and exclusion of LGBTQ persons.
Right now, religious rage sometimes flies under the banner of Christian nationalism. A well-stoked fear that the majority are going to lose power and prestige gets cloaked in religious language about God’s will, and those who are afraid project it onto God and make claims about God’s wrath. We might also see it with those who are incredibly angry about being asked to wear a face mask in a building, including inside church buildings, or to be vaccinated.
We know some of the things that currently trigger religious rage, but how did Jesus do it?
Remember that Jesus’ sermon began with a reading from the prophet Isaiah which said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
That last phrase might be part of the trigger. That last phrase – “the year of the Lord’s favor” is a reference to the Jubilee. The Jubilee was a cycle of renewal and restoration that was supposed to happen every 50 years in Israel. In the Jubilee year, debts were forgiven, slaves were freed, and property ownership went back to people who had fallen on hard times and had to sell it to survive. Two weeks ago, we read the first part of this sermon and you might remember that after Jesus quoted Isaiah, he said, “Today this has been fulfilled.”
So, what the people might be thinking is that Jesus is declaring this a Jubilee year, starting now. And that might be good news for many of them. The working folks are wondering if their mortgages are going to be considered paid in full. The landless poor may be thinking about what it would be like just to have a garden of their own.
Jubilee was God’s original vision for the country, and it is a good one. Jesus is reaching way back to the memories of when the people first entered the land, the story about themselves that they have carefully nurtured for centuries. Imagine a speech that calls Americans to remember our ancestors who left their homelands to fight for freedom here. Imagine a crowd-pleaser built around the poem on the Statue of Liberty. The Nazarenes might have thought they were getting a first-century Palestine feel-good speech about the Jubilee.
Walter Brueggemann says that the principle of divestment in the Jubilee is “the most difficult, most demanding, most outrageous requirement of biblical faith.” You see, it is not just a kind thought or religious idea. It is a concrete practice where money and property change hands. Brueggemann says, “every fifty years, you must give back to the people the land and property that is inalienably theirs that they have lost in the rough and tumble of the economy. You must give it back, even if you own it legally and it is properly yours. . . Imagine, when the Jubilee signal is given, everybody returns property, everybody cancels debts, everybody breaks off the mad scramble of accumulation and acquisition . . . because life in the community of faith does not consist of getting more but in sharing well.”[2]
As difficult and unlikely as all of that sounds, maybe, at first, the people of Nazareth are just thinking about what it would be like to live in a place where everyone’s needs are met, about what more they could have than they have now. OK maybe those who are a little bit better off might have a twinge of worry about having to give up what is rightfully theirs. But they have probably heard preachers dance around that before, just like you and I have heard great speeches praising our immigrant ancestors without even mentioning the more controversial issue of people attempting to come here today.
They are settling in to enjoy a great sermon offered by a rising star from their own village -- a sermon about who they were in the good old days and who they still are and who God is and how God has chosen to care for them … And then Jesus goes and ruins it. He reminds them about some other old stories -- the one about the Gentile widow that God provided for during a great famine, and the one about the enemy combatant General Naaman whom God healed of leprosy. It is as if Jesus holds up a sign that says Gentile Lives Matter. The people know this. It is not new information. The covenant with Abraham was intended to bless all the people of the world. Isaiah said that Israel was called to be a light to all the nations. It has been part of who they are and who God is from the beginning of their relationship. The people know that Gentile Lives Matter, but it seems to enrage them anyway.
Jesus says that there were lots of widows in Israel during that long-ago famine, but God did not send the prophet to any of them except the Gentile in Zarephath. And there were lots of lepers in Israel, but God sent Elisha only to Naaman the Syrian. And so, one commentator suggests that maybe the Nazarenes are not angry that they are being asked to share God’s favor, but because they are being bypassed.[3]
This is one of Jesus’s first sermons. He is new at it. So maybe he has over-stated the case, over-emphasized the people’s seeming exclusion from God’s loving action. Or maybe this story conveys what it feels like to insiders when the legitimate needs of the outsiders get addressed. When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality may feel like oppression.
Jesus tells them a truth about God that they already know. Jesus tells them that God wants the same kind of communal life, the same sharing and mutual care for everyone, including the people they consider inferior, including their enemies. It was one thing to believe that Jubilee might just happen, that their lot in life might improve even at some cost to the rich. But to think that God might want them to do that for everyone? To provide for their enemies in concrete, material ways? To cancel the debts of foreigners? There were a lot of Gentiles living in Galilee, many who had done so for multiple generations. If Jesus came into an American church and started advocating for reparations for descendants of enslaved people or if he pointed out that native peoples do not benefit from the American narrative that we have carefully nurtured in the same way as the dominant majority, if Jesus said that God wanted our wealth, that we have earned by our own efforts, to be distributed to everyone, then we might begin to understand what the Nazarenes were feeling.
The idea that God wanted the same shalom, the same peace and well-being for those people – well young Jesus has just gone too far. Who does he think he is? They are so enraged, Luke says, that they become a mob and try to throw him off a cliff. Fred Craddock writes that “anger and violence are the last defense of those who are made to face the truth embedded in their own tradition.”[4]
“Has anyone ever been filled with rage at you because of something Jesus said or did?” That was the opening question in my Bible study this week.
In a different Bible study, the question was “Who told the truth so clearly that you wanted to kill them for it?” [5]
I’m beginning to think that if no one ever gets angry at us because of what Jesus said or did, maybe we’re not doing it right.
There is so much rage, so much anger and violence swirling around us. Religious rage takes many forms. Sometimes it looks like a well-known well-dressed preacher defending the status quo. That veneer of respectability is a thin cover for violence. We see the true ugliness of religious rage in events like school board meetings where parents cannot even speak civilly as they protest children learning about racism. We see it in the distorted faces of those who terrorize others by the light of tiki torches. We see it in place after place as extremists kill people in the name of their God. And we often see it, hopefully not to such a degree, in conversations with other Christians.
We are not far from the rage of this text. And that might seem like a cause for despair. Have we really learned so little in the last two millennia?
But I want to suggest that there’s some good news here. If Fred Craddock is correct that anger is the last defense of those who have to face the truth, then perhaps what we are witnessing is a harsh confrontation with truth. The truth that God is bigger than we can imagine, the truth the God’s love is powerful and comprehensive and intended for all, all, all of creation. The truth that brings good news for the poor and release to the captives and binds up the broken-hearted. The truth that God is love is love is love.
Beloved ones, let us seek to know that truth, to embrace it, to allow it to confront us and transform us over and over again. Because that truth is marching on. Amen.
[1] This wonderfully provocative question was posed by the Rev. Rahel Hahn, pastor at the Lutheran Church of the Holy Spirit, Albany, NY.
[2] Walter Brueggemann, “On Signal: Breaking the Vicious Cycles” in The Collected Sermons of Walter Brueggemann, Vol 1, (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011) pp. 140-141.
[3] Warren Carter in Connections: A Lectionary Commentary for Preaching and Worship, Year C, Volume 1 Joel Green, Thomas Long, Luke Powery, Cynthia Rigby, Editors, (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 2018), p. 221.
[4] Fred Craddock in Craddock, et al Preaching Through the Christian Year: Year C (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), p. 92.
[5] Barbara Brown Taylor “The Company of Strangers” in Home By Another Way (Boston: Cowley Publications, 1997) p.43.