3rd Sunday Year C Luke 4:16 seq.
In this scene we have what we might call the perfect setting for Jesus’ teaching. We have the crowd wrapped in attention; eager and anxious to hear what he has to say; hanging on his every word; all eyes fixed on him. But the scene ends very differently from what we would expect from such a favourable beginning. The crowd turns against him; they are enraged at him; they become an angry mob shouting for his blood; they hustle him out of the town to throw him over a cliff.
What went wrong then? What was it that so changed their attitude to him? Was it that he claimed to be from God; to be a prophet? No, they seemed to accept that on the strength of what they had heard about his miracle working in Capernaum. Was it that they were put off by his promises about deliverance from oppression; about setting the downtrodden free and bringing liberty to captives? Were they afraid that he was promising a rebellion against Rome and they were afraid of the hopeless bloodshed that would lead to? No, it was none of these things that turned them against him.
What turned them against him was the fact that he prophesied their rejection of him and God’s turning to the Gentile world with the offer of salvation. He did this by reminding them of God’s miraculous feeding of the widow of Sidon during the famine while jewish widows were dying of starvation. And he reminded them of the miraculous cure of the Syrian General Naaman while there were many lepers left to perish in Israel.
The lesson for us all is that we must be prepared to accept the word of God just as it comes at us: whether it is comforting or challenging; whether it is encouraging or warning.
The fruitfulness of God’s word in our lives depends to a great extent on the attitude we have to it; whether we accept it in faith for what it really is: God’s word for us, or whether we are indifferent to it or even antagonistic to it.
Just as we see the Fruitfulness of the words of Jesus himself depending on the basic attitude of the Crowds to whom he spoke.
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