Amen, I say to you,
no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
The people is Nazareth wanted to see things like those they heard were done in Capernaum. They felt that if such things were really happening they who grew up together with Jesus had a primacy of entitlement to see and experience them. But at the same time they thought they knew who he was, "the son of Joseph". They suspected that what they had heard was overblown, since it was not in keeping with their past experience of Jesus and his family. How, they reasoned, could the reappearance of Jesus in their town with these newfound followers and this newfound fame be anything but a betrayal of his humble origins?
Indeed, I tell you, there were many widows in Israel
in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years
and a severe famine spread over the entire land.
We see in Nazareth two forces that can block Jesus from doing what he wants to do in our lives. The first is a sense of entitlement. The second is an imagined sense of familiarity. Rather than the true relationship that came from time spent together they had assessed Jesus as external observers and made assumptions about what his capabilities were and who he was based on those observations. From this place of judgment where they themselves were the arbiters of truth and falsehood they inevitably missed the power that Jesus only manifested in the intimacy of relationship.
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.
Do our expectations limit what Jesus can do in our lives? Does our sense of entitlement, as perhaps lifelong followers of his, block what he might otherwise do in his generous mercy?
I thought that he would surely come out and stand there
to invoke the LORD his God,
and would move his hand over the spot,
and thus cure the leprosy.
Expectations can be dangerous because they can set aside the need for real relationship and ongoing conversion. We expect something to happen in a certain way, like the scene of a movie. But the Lord has something specific in mind for us. It isn't necessarily harder. It may well be far less extravagant and more hidden. But it is available for us if we will listen.
“if the prophet had told you to do something extraordinary,
would you not have done it?
All the more now, since he said to you,
‘Wash and be clean,’ should you do as he said.”
The favors of Jesus cannot be earned or purchased or deserved, nor forecasted or infallibly predicted. He pushes back against our attempts to be in control and frustrates us when our true motives stem from jealous and comparison with others. But he does it all that we too might wash and be made clean.
So Naaman went down and plunged into the Jordan seven times
at the word of the man of God.
His flesh became again like the flesh of a little child, and he was clean.
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