Jesus and Rejection

Terry Leatherman and I were talking the other day about the story in Luke where Jesus almost gets thrown off a cliff because he ticked his neighbors off. As we went over the details of the story, he asked me about what Jesus said that prompted such a violent reaction. The story does take an odd and unexpected twist - and in this case some OT stories help illuminate the reason for the rejection.

As the story goes, Jesus goes into the synagogue he grew up in as a child, and is given the scroll of Isaiah to read for the morning's discussion. Jesus thumbs his way through the scroll to one of the last sections and reads a beautiful, politically charged, hope-inspiring poem about God's deliverance, about healing, about favor, about freedom. Everyone nods their heads at Jesus' selection, and they speak well of him when he begins the discussion by stating: Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

But then Jesus takes this brief wave of affirmation and turns it into a tsunami of truth-telling. Jesus won't have people flatter him and get away with it, especially not with the task he's been given: to save the world. So Jesus takes their flattery and flat out rejects it, noting that sooner than later their going to reject him because he's just a local boy, one of us, nobody of much account. Jesus can see where their attitude is going to take them, so he pushes the envelope to bring out their true feelings.

Jesus recalls for them two stories from two of the most famous, most powerful, most revered prophets of Israel's history - Elijah and Elisha. Everybody in Nazareth talked well and proudly of Elijah and Elisha. But Jesus points out that just as in their day, Israel rejected these two prophets, so in his day Israel will reject him. Obviously the neighbors didn't like this association - Jesus was shaming them, wounding their national pride...the truth hurts. It was for this reason that they rejected Jesus and tried to throw him over a cliff - they didn't want to hear the truth, and they certainly didn't want to hear it from that punk kid Jesus who grew up in that scandalous home of Joseph and Mary.

Will you listen to the truth? Even if you don't like the way it gets communicated to you?

Will you listen?