Heading for the cliff

 This week's Bible study is on Luke 4:23-29:

Jesus said to them, “No doubt you will quote to me the proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ and say, ‘What we have heard that you did in Capernaum, do here in your hometown too.’” And he added, “I tell you the truth, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. But in truth I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s days, when the sky was shut up three and a half years, and there was a great famine over all the land. Yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a woman who was a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, yet none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, forced him out of the town, and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.

I was having a conversation with a friend recently who was frustrated that God was not intervening in a difficult situation he was facing. Sometimes God doesn't intervene in the way that we would like him to, and it usually gets people angry. We expect to have privileged access, and we are aware of what he is capable of doing, so it is never easy to explain when we ask and nothing happens.

Jesus was visiting his home region and people were celebrating him and the message he was sharing. Everyone was happy. They imagine that he is going to put on a show for them like in the miracles they've heard about. People are believing for the supernatural. The atmosphere is charged. What is Jesus going to do? How is God going to move tonight?

But Jesus disappoints them. He uses the insulting examples of the widow in Sidon and of Naaman the Syrian. These were foreigners who had no claim on him whatsoever. They had no righteous background, no privileged access, no promise of salvation. They were strangers. And in those situations, despite the fact that there were plenty of faithful people in Israel, it was these strangers who received the miracles from God, while the rest suffered helplessly. It was entirely a question of God's grace and God's consent and nothing else mattered.

The people were filled with murderous rage! They wanted to kill him for refusing to perform signs and wonders and miracles! They were disappointed and insulted and no longer rejoiced at Jesus or at the message he shared. It was clear what their relationship represented to them, and what they expected from it. They were in it for the handouts and not for the person of Jesus himself.

Do we have such a mercenary view of God? Do we count the Sundays we've sat in church and the Christian books and music and clothing we've bought and the time we've spent in prayer, and the good deeds we've done, and look at it as a kind of club membership, like a celestial AAA tow service that gets us out of trouble when we need it and offers other amenities on the side? We ask ourselves "what good is a God that lets us suffer, or who doesn't rank us according to what we have done for him?" But that's a question that ignores both the cross and the grace it represents.

Do we love Jesus as a person? If he never performed a miracle in our lives, if we were guaranteed a life of suffering and disappointment and only received salvation, would he be enough for us? Or would we lash out and look elsewhere? It takes a lot to go from worship and adoration to being a fed up lynch mob. That seed is in all of our hearts.

And if we have been lucky enough to see a miracle, or to enjoy a privileged position in life, do we explain it to ourselves as a benefit awarded to us for our faithfulness? Is our story a story of a kind of divine loyalty club where we earn points that get cashed in for prizes along the way? Or do we exist on a kind of baseline of suffering, like a dark canvas on which God paints the light of his acts of grace in our lives? 

I think the latter is closer to the truth than the "tithe your way to a McMansion and a clean diagnosis" message we hear more and more today, or the "but you're our hometown boy; you have to give us a better deal than those other people" demand of the people in Jesus' region. As much as God is a god of love, he is also a god of undeserved favor. If he wasn't, we'd be lost forever.

So, why are we faithful, if we are faithful? It's a good question: If we're not earning anything by doing so, if we're not going to get a place at the front of the line, if it doesn't mean an end to suffering in this world, how do we justify it? In our culture of merciless time management and intentional living, what is the value-add of our Christian life? Is Jesus enough? When we worship, do we worship God, or is our worship for the fabulous things we expect he has in store?

We see in the people of Jesus' region what happens when our eyes are on the prizes and not The Prize. How can the well-behaved, well-connected people of Nazareth rejoice at the totally undeserved miracles Jesus performed in filthy Capernaum if they see it as a kind of wage for religiosity and goodness, or a show reserved for people who have managed to schmooze their way to a short-list of invitees? How can we understand and appreciate what Jesus did on the cross if we don't love grace? And how can we ourselves follow his example if the concept is so foreign?

It forces a rethink of the whole foundation of our existence. What if suffering is the norm? What if every good thing that happens to us, from the circumstances of our birth to our greatest triumphs was a gift, a nice surprise from a mostly-anonymous donor? What if nothing we can do can change the likelihood of these world-changing acts of kindness? Do you still go to work? To church? Do you still give to charity and not take home all of the sugar packets from the kitchenette at work? How do you even rate compared to others if nothing you do puts you on any sort of meaningful leaderboard of righteousness? Was that Bible quiz challenge victory all for nothing?

Take some time to consider Jesus and what he is to you. Consider grace, and suffering, and your place in the midst of all of it. Are you in it for the wrong reasons? Are you blind to the beauty that still exists when sometimes evil men enjoy good long rich lives while sometimes the righteous die young and penniless? When things don't go your way, is God still God, and is he still worth worshiping? Or are you heading for a cliff with your like-minded friends?