Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild?

A message from Luke 4:23-30 by Phil Rogers 20/05/07

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At first glance Jesus appears to be quite deliberately trying to antagonise these people from his home town of Nazareth. He so antagonises them that they mob him and hustle him out of the town with the intention of throwing him over a cliff.

Didn’t the Son of God understand the principles of Dale Carnegie’s book “How to Win Friends and Influence People”? He certainly didn’t seem to make any effort to make himself popular and gain influence amongst his home-townspeople. In our desire to be liked most of us today are motivated by a fear of rejection. We want to be accepted and so we project an image of ourselves and try to please people, but fear of rejection locks us up in shyness and self-consciousness and in all kinds of fears such as a fear of confrontation or fear of failure.

Fear of rejection makes us compliant or critical, independent or a whole host of other deceptive strongholds that grip our lives. Jesus was totally free of any fear of rejection. The only thing that had any hold on his life was his love for his Father and his total commitment to him and his purposes.

When Jesus spoke as he did here it was not out of any of the wrong motives that we exhibit as a result of our fallen humanity. He has no need for caution or diplomacy. Although his words seem provocative, he did not set out to deliberately antagonise or stir up trouble; but neither did he avoid confrontation. He is ‘the Truth’ and he was very aware of what was going on in people’s hearts; he spoke what he heard.So what did Jesus hear? These folk had known him from childhood and had heard what he had been doing in the year since he had left home. They had heard he had healed the royal official’s son in Capernaum. So as he read the scriptures they were outwardly very positive about him. But he sees the incredulity on their attentive faces, their questions “How can this be? Isn’t this Joseph, the carpenter’s Son? Where did he get such learning?” We have a saying ‘familiarity breeds contempt’ and Jesus could sense their contempt for him. So he mentions it.

He verbalises their inner thoughts, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your own home town what we’ve heard you did in Capernaum.’” No-one likes to have their façade exposed, so this immediately makes them feel uncomfortable. But Jesus goes on, “I tell you the truth,” ‘No! We don’t want to hear the truth.’ “No prophet is accepted in his home town.” ‘What do you mean, Don’t you like the welcome we gave you? We offered you the scroll and asked you to teach in our synagogue! Now you are insulting us, criticising our welcome.” What Jesus said exposed what was really in their hearts - they made a show of accepting him in their synagogue, which was the polite thing to do, but in their hearts they could not accept that this unimpressive nice young man who they had known for years was someone special! He showed no particular promise as a lad, he was quite bright, never got into trouble like most of the lads, took on the responsibility of the family when Joseph died, a nice young man, a good son, but a prophet - doing miracles! No! They would never accept that!

Jesus explains why he had not done any miracles in Nazareth, although he was the anointed one (Messiah) referred to by Isaiah. He goes on to strengthen this concept by referring to two scriptural events, two very popular stories from the lives of Elijah and Elisha, their Northern folk-heroes, rather like William Wallace and Robert the Bruce are in Scotland.
1. The FACT that Elijah was sent to Sidon to be provided for supernaturally by a widow, even though there were plenty of poor widows at the time who could have done the same for him in Israel.
2. The FACT that despite the prevalence of leprosy in Israel at the time of the prophet Elisha, not one of them was cleansed--only Naaman the Syrian.

The teachers of the law would never have seen such truth in these well known stories, blinded as they were by their prejudices. They were God’s chosen people. How they hated being lorded over by the Romans. The Jews were a nationalistic, racist and exclusive people, who kept themselves from being contaminated by dirty despised uncircumcised gentiles, but even within their own society they had an underclass the ‘tax-collectors and sinners’. No wonder they erupted so violently when Jesus gave them two illustrations of God showing grace to gentiles that he did not show to his own chosen people. But this is what Isaiah 61 is all about, God’s grace to the poor, the broken, those in servitude, prison and slavery. To Jesus there is no underclass -those despised by those see themselves as better. No apartheid, no untouchables, no different classes, just poor, hurting, needy people whom he came to help.

Nazareth itself did not have the best reputation in the land. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” But they do not identify positively with any of Jesus’ words, rather they take offense. All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. “How dare this jumped up carpenter speak to his elders and his better in such a way!” They began to stand up and shout out and then the braying mob hustled him out of the synagogue and out of their town, up towards the brow of the hill on which the town was built, intending to throw him over the cliff. That must have been a pretty disturbing event even for the Lord, but he had no fear and remarkably it is recorded that “he walked right through the mob and went on his way.”

Jesus had no fear because he was not afraid of death and he also knew that no one could take his life until it was God’s time for him to die. He had no fear of death because he was totally secure in his Father's love for him. Now this is equally true of us. Death need hold no fear for us. “For me to live is Christ, to die is gain.” We will all one day leave our earthly bodies to go to be with God our Father in whose presence is fulness of joy. Whta is going to be more wonderful than leaving all the struggles of this earth to be with the Lord for ever? He holds the keys of death and Hades so we cannot die until God decides it is time for us to die and when God says so, nothing can prevent our death. Jesus came into this world in order to share our common human experience, including this threat to his life, so that by his death on the cross Satan, who has the power of death, was rendered powerless and so Christ was able to deliver those kept in lifelong slavery to the fear of death. (Heb 2:14-15) We too can know the Lord’s freedom from the fear of death, the fear of rejection and all the many fears that these spawn in our lives. Does fear hold us back?

Consider these three scriptures:
Ps 34:4   I sought the Lord and he heard me and DELIVERED me from ALL my fears.
2 Tim 1:17   God has not given us a Spirit of timidity (cowardice or FEAR) but of POWER, LOVE and SELF-CONTROL
1 John 4:18   There is no fear in love, but perfect love CASTS OUT FEAR, because fear has to do with punishment and the one who fears is not perfected in love.

If we only realised just how much God loves us, as Jesus did, we would have no fear. He has died fo all our sins and he can and will never punish us. If God is for us, and he is, who can be against us? Satan tries to keep us locked up in all kinds of fears but Jesus has done everything necessary to deliver us from fear, to cast all spirits of fear out of our lives, fear of rejection, fear of death and all the other fears that relate to those two vile works of Satan. Be free! For freedon Christ has set us free, so let the Lord set us free if we know fears have any sort of grip on our lives.

So we will become like The Lord, not gentle Jesus meek and mild, but bold, confident, loving and compassionate. Always confronting what needed confronting never holding back out of fear.