So Jesus begins his ministry and the first thing that happens is that the folks in his hometown try to kill him.
To be honest he did provoke them.
The reason they were so upset was because Jesus said that the good news of God’s kingdom, the healing and the feeding has always been for everyone, not just for Israel, not just the chosen people, but for all people, capital A, capital L capital L in Bold.
ALL
And that obviously did not sit well with the folks back home as Jesus was dragged and pushed to the edge of a cliff.
I can almost hear Jesus saying, “Where’s the love?”
It is a quick reversal of their first reaction, at first they were all proud of their home town boy making it big, but that changed quickly when they heard what they didn’t want to hear.
It is a little prelude to Palm Sunday, where the fickle crowd welcomes Jesus to Jerusalem as their King and we turn around the next week and crucify him.
God’s prophets always end up like that.
We are like that aren’t we?
We don’t deal too well with hearing what we don’t want to hear, no matter how true it is.
We are all like the home town folks in the Synagogue.
We love God, but only on our own terms.
Only when God fits into our own life, our own expectations, our own needs.
We say, “I worship and serve MY GOD.”
Rather than saying “I belong to the God who is holy, other, utterly different, beyond my expectations, beyond my conceptions.”
Jesus walked into the synagogue and broke up the idolatry of settled and comfortable worship, he broke the idol of settled answers, crushed the idol of expectation, and startled us with the God who is good news to all.
We have been confronted by the living, breathing, flesh and bone word of God.
No more God in the abstract.
We are now caught up in a relationship with a person, a person with a name, Jesus; a relationship with the One who is beyond knowing.
We have been caught up in a holy contradiction.
Jesus is the contradiction who won’t let us settle for being settled.
Jesus is here to reintroduce, mystery, the unknown, the unknowable, the unexpected, the unsettled, curiosity, longing, reaching, holy wandering, unusual company, he brings back the question.
Our idols and our idol busyness are not safe around him.
He will not let us be content with anything other than the blazing, consuming love of God, until all becomes love, and love is all.
Paul touches on the all transforming mystery of God’s love in his Epistle today, the 13th chapter of the first letter to the Corinthians, the ode to love.
Without love everything else is a waste of time.
Nothing else lasts. Nothing else endures.
Whatever, wherever, whoever love completes it.
No matter how big or small, love attends and completes.
And we have only just begun to know what love is, the great adventure of God’s Love in the incarnation of the Son is still unfolding in our lives, we are only getting started, who knows where we will end up! Though one thing is certain, it will take us to the cross, and then beyond.
So God’s came home, and the hometown rejected him and ran him out of town.
That is one response.
We hear another response today from Jeremiah.
God’s word came to Jeremiah and his response was one of overwhelmed humility. Jeremiah let go of everything he thought he ever knew and said “God I have no idea what I’m talking about.”
That is the faithful way to begin, and we are always beginning.