Beyond "Nice"... to "Good"

Beyond "Nice"... to "Good"--February 8, 2018

"When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
     ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
      because he has anointed me
      to bring good news to the poor.
     He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
      and recovery of sight to the blind,
      to let the oppressed go free,
      to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’ He said to them, ‘Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, “Doctor, cure yourself!” And you will say, “Do here also in your home town the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” ’ And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s home town. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.’ When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way." [Luke 4:16-30]

Jesus is good.  Always good.  But, as Stephen Sondheim's version of Little Red Riding Hood sings in Into the Wood, "nice is different than good."

This is one of those stories that at first might make us blush, or squirm, or look away, or just wish that it had ended halfway through, when everyone is still nodding their heads in approval over the hometown boy come back to the synagogue to speak.  The first half of this scene, after all, is... nice. The first half is hard not to get excited about.  It's when Jesus starts moving beyond the comfortable boundaries of "nice" into the challenging goodness of truth-telling that the crowd turns on him.

It may be hard for us to get at all that is happening in this scene, or maybe hard to understand how this gathering of people who had known Jesus while he was growing up now all turns on him in the space of just a few minutes.  But here's the gist:  Jesus first comes back home to Nazareth, reads an excerpt from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and then says to the congregation, their eyes fixed on him, "Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." 

Well, so far so good.  That's like telling people, "You have been chosen by God to see these ancient promises come true!"  And in the ears of all Jesus' listeners, it sounds even more appealing, something like, "You--and only you--are special in God's eyes, you lucky, wonderful, great, great people, you!"  Everybody likes to hear that some higher authority is giving you a gold star, after all, and that's how the folks in the synagogue want to hear Jesus' words: as simply a pat on the back and a "Job well done" for being such wonderfully nice people.

But this is where things get hairy... and at the same time, this is the point at which it becomes clear that the way of Jesus is about more than nice--it is something genuinely good... for all.  See, as soon as Jesus sees the heads nodding and the wide smiles there sitting in the pews, he knows what they are all thinking.  He knows that his own folks, his own old neighbors, are thinking, "We're the best!  God's affection is reserved for us--us first, us and our group!  We are the ones who matter most, and our hometown hero Jesus has just confirmed it for us by telling us that God is fulfilling prophecies here right now!"  He knows that when they hear his words, they are hearing them through the filter of "Me and My Group First!"  And while that is a nice-sounding sentiment for oneself, it is a far cry from the goodness of God.  And the way of Jesus will settle for nothing less than what is good and what is true.

So Jesus bursts the congregation's bubble.  He starts rattling off for them a list of times in Israel's past--stories from the same Bible he also had just read from in their hearing--when God did amazing, wonderful, miraculous things... for outsiders.  For non-Jews... non-members of the people of Israel.... for  Gentiles.  Jesus starts reciting the times when God's goodness was not for the "Me and My Group First" of the house of Israel, but intentionally went outside those boundaries to the forgotten people like the widow of Zarephath and the enemy military commander Naaman.  And like putting salt in the wound to their collective egos, Jesus points out in those instances that there were plenty of people in need "back home" in Israel whom God could have helped... and instead, Jesus notes, God deliberately went across the borders, outside the lines, and beyond the boundaries of the inside-group to bring rescue and healing and life for hurting people from "out there." 

(As a brief side note: I often hear folks, often church-going "religious" folks in fact, saying things these days like, "We shouldn't be helping those people in ___________ [insert some foreign country dealing with war or famine or disaster], when we have our own troubles here in THIS country with ____________ [insert some local cause-of-the-week]. It should be US First--we have to look to our own needs before anybody else!" And while I can understand the frustration about local or domestic needs that we can sympathize with and witness with our own eyes, we should be clear that this is exactly the sort of counter-argument Jesus sees coming and basically dismisses here in Luke 4, when he comes out and says that there were plenty of people in Israel with needs when Naaman the Syrian got healed or the widow of Zarephath needed help.  Jesus just believes that God reserves the right to go beyond the boundaries we place on the divine... even when that upsets the respectable religious crowd.)

This is what pushes the "nice" religious folks in church that day over the edge.  Jesus has effectively told them that while God loves all of them in Nazareth, that God also reserves the right to love people in the next town over--in Capernaum, where Jesus had been living by that point--and for that matter, that God had the right to go love people beyond the boundaries of the "well-behaved, respectable, nice religious people" like them in Nazareth.  And Jesus seems to think, in fact, that such boundary-breaking, table-turning acts were what made the difference between genuine goodness and just counterfeit niceness.  Anybody can tell people what they already want to hear, and anybody can simply shout the motto "Me and My Group First."  That is child's play. The way of Jesus, however, has the courage, the honesty, and the love to tell people that the reach of God's love is bigger and wider than they dared imagine.  That pushes things beyond safe "niceness" into the challenging realm of the good.

But that is where we will find Jesus... not safely hiding where it is simply "nice," but always pushing beyond into God's strange kind of goodness.  If we are going to follow on the Way of Jesus, we should be prepared sometimes to leave "niceness" behind to enter what is genuinely good.

You'll note, too, here that once the crowd turns on Jesus (and boy, do they turn on him--not just scowling at him or saying nasty things about him on their social media accounts, but actively trying to push him off a cliff because he has dared to say <gasp!> that God does not think in terms of "Me and My Group First!"), Jesus himself does not get violent or angry back at them.  He has been honest with them--he has spoken a truth to them that was difficult for them to hear, and he has pulled no punches with them.  But Jesus doesn't start punching back, or throwing any of his would-be attackers over the cliff in the name of "defending himself" or "standing his ground."  There is none of that from Jesus--he doesn't even sink to the level of insulting them, calling them names, making threats, or shaking his messianic fists.  None of that.  There is only the truth they need to hear, and then even when they want to hurl him off the cliff to silence him for shaking up their world (and their bad theology!), Jesus neither slides into petty childishness nor escalates into violence.  

This is perhaps just another angle of the same thing we noticed yesterday--that for Jesus, courage and love, compassion and truth-telling, are all woven together.  As different as a private miraculous healing and a public confrontational sermon might seem, they are both occasions in which Jesus responds with this seamlessly brave, truthful, compassionate love.  It is a reminder to me that this scene is a story of love, even though it doesn't feel very "nice" perhaps.  And it is a reminder that love is not simply a matter of telling people what they want to hear, but sometimes means saying things that will poke at people, or make us squirm, precisely because when you love people you tell them the truth.  Jesus never fudges with the truth toward people--that is both a sign of the respect with which Jesus treats people even when they are being disingenuous to him, and it is also a sign of Jesus' maturity when the people around him are often terribly childish.  But that's what the way of Jesus looks like--Jesus' kind of love is not a rainbows-and-unicorns kind of fantasy. It is as real and gritty and brave and strong as life in this world requires.  But it is always love from which Jesus operates.  It is always love that is the reason Jesus insists on telling people truths they may not want to hear, but need to hear. It is always love that leads Jesus beyond the empty saccharin aftertaste of "nice" to genuinely satisfying flavor of "good."

I don't expect that you will likely be in danger of being hurled off a cliff today, and I'll bet that I won't have to face that possibility today, either.  But I do believe that we have the opportunity to walk the way of Jesus, like he does in this story, in the day before us.  I believe that we will have the chance to engage with people in a way that brings courage and compassion, love and truth-telling, maturity and humility together in one inseparable whole.  And when those opportunities come, it will be stories like this--of the way Jesus pushed beyond the "nice" mindset of "Me-and-My-Group First" to the genuine goodness of God's expansive mercy--that guide us in how we speak and act.

And even if a whole room full of the Respectable Religious Crowd want to push you off a cliff today, you and I can follow right on the footsteps of Jesus, who just passes on through without making a threat or breaking a sweat.

Where will Jesus lead you today beyond "nice" to "good"?

Dear Lord Jesus, we settle for bland niceness so easily when you would have us walk in your goodness.  Pull us beyond what we have settled for, and into your boundary-breaking, truth-telling love.