This Week's Newsletter...
Faith - The Challenge of Unbelief
The second half of Luke 4 tells the story of Jesus' visit to his own home village of Nazareth. He entered the synagogue and read one of the messianic passages from the Book of Isaiah that outlines the activity of the Messiah. It read:
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
Because the LORD has anointed me
To bring good news to the afflicted;
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favorable year of the LORD .
(Isaiah 61:1-2)
When he finished the reading he handed back the book to the attendant and said: "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Jesus here claims to be fulfilling this particular prophecy of Isaiah. Whether the congregation understood clearly enough the claim he made is uncertain because they all started commenting on the eloquence of his speech and that he was Joseph's son, whom they had watch grow up into the very nice, balanced person whose fame had come back to them from work he had done abroad.
Rather than basking in this paternalistic praise Jesus moves to provoke them by suggesting that they will reject His words because of their familiarity with him. Such familiarity should not be relied upon because God in the past had often gone outside of Israel to support his prophets when the nation was in disobedience to God's will and purpose (he notes the story of the widow from Zarephath, in the time of Elijah and the healing of Naaman the Syrian in the time of Elisha). The crowd in the synagogue became enraged at these words and dragged Jesus out of the synagogue up the hill to throw him off the cliff. However, Jesus slipped through their fingers and went on his way.
Although Luke indicates that this praise, even though paternalistic, did not yet have the antagonism in it that latter came when Jesus continued his words, Matthew's rendition notes that this praise itself was already antagonistic (Matthew 13:53-58). Both Matthew and Mark note that the source of their antagonism was unbelief. Because of that Jesus was unable to do many, if any, miracles in his own home town.
For Jesus, their familiarity, with its paternalistic praise, stood as a barrier to their ever truly hearing his words or understanding his teaching. He provoked them further in order to move them from the comfort of their unbelief to struggle to find faith again, and with it new hope. We are often challenged by unbelief in our daily life and circumstances. Jesus will often disturb our peace so that we might once again struggle with faith to find new hope in our lives. The writer to the Hebrews not only tells us that "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen", but that "without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is and that He is a rewarder of those who seek Him" (Hebrews 11:1,4).
HAVE FAITH!
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