Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.
Jesus told the crowd in the synagogue at Nazareth that what they were hearing was the proclamation of the jubilee year by the one anointed with the Spirit of the Lord, the messiah. He had come to proclaim glad tidings to the poor, the marginalized, and the neglected. He was announcing the liberty from debt and captivity that the jubilee was always meant to entail, a year when the oppressed were set free and slaves returned to their native lands. But he was thinking about something deeper and more intractable than the Babylonian exile or the Roman occupation. He had in view freedom, not so much from monetary or political woes, but from sin. And the exile from which he desired to lead a return was not merely bringing the lost tribes back to Israel, but by finally bringing the human race to the paradise that we had squandered by sin.
And all spoke highly of him
and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They also asked, "Is this not the son of Joseph?"
On the one hand, what Jesus said sounded awesome, and some listeners momentarily lost themselves in the grandeur of the vision he described. But it didn't last long. They quickly became critical, not about what was said, but about by whom it was said. The trouble was that they thought they knew him, in such a way the precluded the possibility that what he said was true. They felt that if he was the miracle working messiah he claimed to be they ought to have known it already from the fact that he grew up in their midst. The idea that he would have revealed himself elsewhere before doing so in Nazareth provoked them with jealousy. But Jesus did not respond with an apology. Rather, he leaned into the fact that God often began his work with outsiders, even when his plan was ultimately also to address those in Israel, just as he had done with Elijah and Elisha. Sometimes God seemed to decide it was appropriate to address an unearned sense of entitlement in this way. By doing this he made it clear that everything ultimately depended on grace rather than merit.
When the people in the synagogue heard this,
they were all filled with fury.
Even in our own day it still seems more common to hear about miracles among outsiders and on the fringes than among the rank of file in the pews of modern churches. But this is not meant to infuriate us, nor does it even necessarily represent a failure on our part. It is rather meant to help stir our desire to seek the Lord with greater fervor. If miracles seemed to happen in our midst as a matter of course we would come to expect it. But as it is, we have to signal that we want what the Lord wants to give us. This makes sense, for he has said, "You will seek me and find me, when you seek me with all your heart" (see Jeremiah 29:13).
