9 July, 2006

Our gospel reading today comes in a particular sequence. Jesus calmed the storm as he and his disciples crossed the sea. When they arrived at the other side, he drove the “Legion” of demons out of the man they were afflicting and into the pigs. At the pleading of the people of the area, they cross back over the lake. After they get there, Jesus is approached by Jairus, the ruler of the synagogue, to heal his dying daughter. On the way to Jairus’ house, he heals the woman with the issue of blood. The little girl dies before they get there, but Jesus raises her from her deathbed. So now Jesus has demonstrated that he has authority over the powers of nature, demons, disease, and death itself.

And now he has come home. Local boy makes good! Right? Wrong. They think that he’s gotten too uppity. You see they know him. And they even feel a bit proprietary. He’s one of them. He belongs to them. “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joseph and Simon and Jude, and are not his sisters here with us?” This guy may have a dandy ministry, but he’s our guy and he’d better remember it.

And then comes one of the most frightening sentences in all of scripture. But you’ll miss it if you aren’t paying attention: “And they took offense at him.” Another way to translate this would be, “they stumbled over him”. The verb in the Greek is skandalizo. It is the root of our word “scandal”, and it means “to give offense” or “to make stumble”. It is the same word that Jesus uses when he says it would be better to be thrown into the sea weighted down with a millstone than to “cause one of these little ones to stumble.” St. Paul spends quite a bit of time teaching us that we should not cause our brother to stumble. And yet Jesus’ relations and neighbors stumbled over him.

You see, every time someone is confronted with Jesus, there is a decision to make. I had better not do anything that leads someone to sin. But one can reject Garrin Dickinson as such and not be in sin. Jesus, however, is the Word of God spoken into a world of death. And by his very nature, an encounter with him requires either submission or rejection, a choice for life or death. Isaiah says (and St. Peter quotes) that God will become “a stone of offense, and a rock of stumbling”. Many will stumble over Jesus, because the only alternative is repentance and faith that leads to obedience. And so, in Nazareth, Jesus himself “marveled because of their unbelief,” their lack of trust.

Now let’s take a look at our other readings for a moment. God tells Ezekiel that he is sending him “to a nation of rebels”. “The people also are impudent and stubborn: I send you to them”. And he tells Ezekiel, “be not afraid of them, nor be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns are with you and you sit upon scorpions; be not afraid of their words, nor be dismayed at their looks, for they are a rebellious house.” If I were Ezekiel, this would not be very comforting to me. I’m sorry God, but the fact that they are a rebellious house is exactly why I am afraid of them. You’re not helping, here.

St. Paul seems like he is in a similar situation. God gives Paul this marvelous spiritual experience of being “caught up to the third heaven”. God didn’t have to do that. But then Paul says, “to keep me from being too elated by the abundance of revelations, a thorn was given me in the flesh”. There has been plenty of speculation about what this “thorn in the flesh” is. It could be a physical ailment; it could be other people undoing his work; it could be any number of things. We simply don’t know. But it was unpleasant enough that Paul prayed that God would take it away, and God didn’t.

There seems to be an injustice in the way God is dealing with both of these men. To our fallen minds, it doesn’t seem fair that Ezekiel has to suffer in order to communicate God’s message to a people who aren’t listening anyway. To our fallen minds, it doesn’t seem fair that God would allow Paul to suffer to counter-act the effect of God’s own actions. But both Ezekiel and Paul would tell us that we are wrong. With God, we are in a realm beyond justice as we understand it. Or rather, we are in a realm of such profound justice that it took the scandal of the cross to accomplish it. We appeal to justice not only through God’s sovereignty, but also through the suffering of the spotless Lamb of God, who’s justice so outstrips our own that he was unjustly executed in our place.

The Lord responds to St. Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” And here is the crux of the matter. We don’t like being weak. We like to be powerful. We learn early on that being strong and powerful allows us to call the shots. Either we are in control and like it, or we are not in control and we wish we were. And we learn all this before we can even speak.

And that is why Jesus the Christ is a skandalon, a stone of stumbling. Every single one of us wants to be in charge at some level. If I can’t be in charge at work, at least I’m in charge at home. If I can’t be in charge at home, at least I’m in charge in my bedroom. And even if I can’t be in charge anywhere, I’m sure as heck in charge of what goes on in my own soul. At least no one gets to tell me how to think or feel. And Jesus comes along and says, “Sorry, even in here I’m the Lord. The only way to avail yourself of my power of truth, peace, hope, love, joy is to give up your power, to submit and repent and trust and obey. You must become weak.” And we take offense at him.

There are other places in which Jesus encounters rejection. The whole gospel narrative could be read as a long list of the weak who accept him, versus the strong who reject him. But only here in Nazareth are there so few people who trust in him that Mark and Matthew both report that he did “no mighty work there”. Jesus himself explains it by saying, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.”

And so we have to ask ourselves, here in the Lord’s house, are we so familiar with the things of God that we take them for granted? Do we think we know Jesus well enough to feel that we own him? Are we willing to allow our own behavior, thought patterns, and emotional self-indulgences to be challenged? Do we boast of our weaknesses, as St. Paul does, or only of our strengths?

If we are not willing to be weak, then Jesus can do no mighty work here. If we are in charge, then he will not be. And if we are like the Nazarenes, then maybe that’s what we want. They certainly didn’t want him coming in and taking charge, changing things, changing them.

If, on the other hand, we want our selves and our lives to be whole; if we want to be healthy and righteous and strong for the Lord; then we must work at repentance and forgiveness and submission. We must trust the Lord to speak to us and obey him when he does. We must work at allowing ourselves to be weak. We must work toward the ability to agree with St. Paul: “I will all the more gladly boast of my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities; for when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Counter-intuitive? Yes, to all of us miserable, wretched sinners. But it’s the only way to live.