The Hometown That Turned on Him

After two days with the Samaritans, Jesus went north into Galilee, where people in town after town were praising him.

Then he came to Nazareth, the hill town where he had grown up.

On the Sabbath he went to the synagogue, the town's worship house, the way he always had. (Some of the people on those benches had probably eaten at tables Joseph and Jesus built.) When it was time for the reading, the helper handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. A scroll was a book in one long strip, rolled up on two wooden handles, and Isaiah's was longer than a living room.

He unrolled it, found the place, and read:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to announce freedom for prisoners and sight for the blind, to set free the people who are pushed down, and to announce the year of the Lord's favor."

He rolled the scroll up, gave it back, and sat down. (In those days a teacher sat down to teach, which is the opposite of school.) Every eye in the room was fixed on him.

"Today," Jesus said, "while you were listening, this Scripture has come true." Isaiah had been writing about him.

At first the whole room was delighted. "Listen to him!" people whispered. "What gracious words! Isn't this Joseph's son?"

Jesus knew what they were thinking. "I'm sure you will quote the old saying to me: 'Doctor, heal yourself!' You will say, 'We heard what you did in Capernaum. Now do it here, in your own hometown.'"

(They wanted miracles, and they wanted them on their own street first.)

"Truly," Jesus said, "no prophet is welcomed in his hometown."

Then he reminded them of two old stories they knew by heart. "In Elijah's day the sky was shut for three and a half years, and Israel had plenty of hungry widows. God sent Elijah to none of them, only to a widow in Zarephath, in the land of Sidon. In Elisha's day Israel had many people with leprosy, a skin disease, but the only one made clean was Naaman, an army commander from Syria."

A widow from a foreign town. A commander from an enemy army. Nazareth heard exactly what he meant: God's kindness would not stay inside their walls, or wait in line until they had finished with it.

The room went hot with anger. People jumped up. They grabbed Jesus, pushed him out of the synagogue and out of the town, and drove him to the edge of the cliff on the hill where Nazareth was built, to throw him off.

But Jesus walked straight through the middle of the crowd and went on his way, and not one of them could stop him.

Nazareth wanted God's kindness kept at home, and it tried to get rid of Jesus for saying otherwise. But Isaiah's good news was for the poor and the prisoners and the blind wherever they lived, like the widow in Sidon and the commander from Syria.

So the promise from the scroll went down the hill on two feet. In Capernaum, in fishing boats, at the tables of people everyone else avoided, Jesus kept doing what the scroll said. One day another crowd would lead him out of another city, Jerusalem, and up another hill. That time he would not walk away. He would choose to die on a cross, to set the prisoners free.

On the hill above Nazareth, the one Isaiah wrote about walked through an angry crowd and kept going, toward everyone else.