The Good News Can Get You Killed

~ by Ryan Bell, the Senior Pastor of the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church, currently completing his Doctor of Ministry in Missional Leadership at Fuller Theological Seminary. To read more from Ryan go to his blog Intersections.

Our world relates to religion today in terms of exclusion. Our identity is that we’re not you. As a leader in a Christian community I have witnessed first-hand how exclusive religion can be. However, this exclusivity is not part of the Hebrew story or the Christian story as understood in the life and teachings of Jesus. Take, for example, Jesus’ first public sermon.

Jesus has returned to his hometown of Nazareth. On this particular Sabbath he stands in the synagogue to read from the scroll. Today’s reading: the prophet Isaiah. You can read the story for yourself in Luke 4:14-30. You might want to take a minute now, click on this link, and read the story. The mood in the synagogue changes rapidly.

One minute the people are praising Jesus saying, “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son? My how he’s grown up. Just look him now and listen to the confident way he expounds the scripture!” Yet the next minute Jesus is being run out the synagogue by a murderous crowd intent on his demise. What happened?

It seems that Jesus’ interpretation of Isaiah was that God’s healing and liberating work extended beyond the boundaries of Israel. That may not seem very scandalous on the surface, but it is very much like suggesting that God’s grace extends to Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and people of no faith. Judging from the things I’m reading these days, that is a scandalous suggestion indeed. Scandalous enough to get someone killed. Verse 29: “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.”

Look closer at Jesus’ words. What is it that triggers this violent reaction? Jesus is pointing to Israel’s own narratives which indicate that at certain times in history, in the times of two of Israel’s celebrated prophets, God preferred the Gentiles.

Notice vv. 25,26 – “But there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up 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.” (Hint: Sidon is not Israel).

Again in v. 27 - “There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” (Once again, Syria and Israel are worlds apart).

A modern equivalent might be something like, “There were many churches in America at the dawn of the 21st century, but none were blessed by God like the mosque in downtown Los Angeles.” I dare say a comment like that from a Christian pulpit would raise a few eyebrows. The speaker might even find himself or herself run out church by a violent angry crowd. Central to Israel’s story and faith, and therefore central to the Christian story, is the truth that God is the God of all nations.

Here at the beginning of Luke’s gospel he foreshadows the open embrace of God that will become a reality later in the story. In Luke’s second volume, Acts, the emerging Jesus movement becomes a Gentile movement. The seeds of the inclusive and expansive understanding of God has its seeds in Israel’s own story and in the life and teaching of Jesus. Reading the Bible with an eye on the fact that God makes his love available to every human being uncovers a number of telling texts such as this one in Luke.

Today, millions of people of all religions and no religion at all, claim exclusive access to the truth, or even to God Himself. But God is no more willing to be limited to one group today than he was in the days of Elijah, Elisha, or Jesus.

Comments

[courtney]

Thank you for your words. I can't help but quote so many of the following excerpts from Richard Rohr's "The Great Chain of Being" in the April/May/June 2007 issue of Radical Grace:

"Either we acknowledge that God is in all things or we have lost the basis for seeing God in anything. Once the choice is ours and not God's, it is merely a world of private preferences and prejudices."

"The individual has always decided and discriminated as to where and if God's image would be honored. Sinners, heretics, witches, Moslems, Jews, Indians, native spiritualities, buffalo and elephants, land and water were the losers. And we dared to call ourselves monotheists ("one God tends to move a people toward one world) or 'Christ-like' (the union of the human and the divine in one). The Divine Indwelling, subject to our whimsical seeing, seems to dwell nowhere except in temples of our own choosing."

"Until we weep over these sins and publicly own our complicity in the destruction of God's creation, we are surely doomed to remain blind. If not, we will likely keep looking for 'acceptable' scapegoats. We always think the problem is elsewhere, whereas the Gospel keeps the pressure of conversion on me. As far as the soul is concerned, no one else is your problem. You are your problem. 'You be converted, and live,' says the biblical tradition (Deuteronomy 31:20, Mark 1:15)."

"In the one world liberated by Christ, our need to divide and discriminate has been denied us, and frankly, we don't like it. For some reason, we want to retain the right to decide where God is, who we must honor and who we may hate. A rather clever guise, actually, for I can remain autonomous and violent while thinking of myself as holy."