Did Jesus Need to Get Over Himself?
THE FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER THE EPIPHANY
Jer. 1:4-10 • 1 Cor. 13:1-13 • Luke 4:14-30
Imagine this scenario:
One Sunday, after the opening hymn, Collect for Purity, Gloria, and Collect of the Day, we sit down as usual. But then, a young man comes to the lectern here and opens the book placed there. This man isn’t a stranger; he grew up in this community. Maybe you remember him sitting in the pew behind you with his parents. Maybe you recognize him from the few years he sang in the choir. After he finished high school, you lost track of him. You haven’t directly asked about him, but you think you’ve heard he’s doing well.
Now, this man, mostly grown up, flips around in the book on the lectern until he finds what he wants. He says, “A Reading from the Prophet Isaiah,” which is annoying, because the bulletin says, “A Reading from the Prophet Jeremiah.” Then this man reads aloud—not a whole passage, though. He chooses a few verses and jumbles the phrases together until he comes up with something like this:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has chosen me to be the Christ, to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives . . . to let the oppressed go free.”
Then this man sits down again. There’s an awkward silence—and not just because the presider has forgotten she was supposed to start the Psalm at this service, not the choir. (That was me a few weeks ago.) When no one starts the Psalm, this young man gets up from his seat and climbs into the pulpit. He tilts the microphone up to his face, since he’s taller than the person who was supposed to preach that day. Then he says, “Just so we’re clear: the prophet Isaiah was talking about me.”
People turn to each other and start whispering. “Isn’t that the kid who messed up his lines in the Christmas pageant twelve years ago?”—even though they promised at the time that no one would remember that. They stare at him, trying to figure it out. They’re glad that he’s grown up into a confident public speaker, at least. He has good pulpit presence.
But then the young man says, “Someday, you’re going to see that I’m amazing at teaching, and healing, and liberating people from all the oppressive powers of this world. You’re going to wish I’d do all that cool stuff here too. But you know what? I’m not going to. Remember that time our Community Meals coordinator ignored all the hungry people in Fayetteville, moved to New York, and started a feeding ministry there? And remember that time when our parish nurse quit her job at the local hospital and went on a medical mission to South Africa? That’s what I’m going to do: fulfill my prophetic mission elsewhere, before you all get the chance to Hold. Me. Back.”
. . .
Perhaps that’s what it was like to attend the synagogue service described in today’s gospel. Imagined in this way, I have to admit: Jesus comes off terribly arrogant. He reads very selectively from the prophet Isaiah and then claims that the words are about him. He just announces in front of everyone that he’s the anointed, the Messiah, the Christ, instead of humbly concealing it, let alone questioning whether it could be true. Jesus clearly didn’t show any of the insecurities with his prophetic calling that we saw in today’s first reading, when Jeremiah protested that he was too young and ineloquent to respond to God’s call.
Jesus is also disdainful toward worshipers in his hometown, and he uses stories of the prophets Elijah and Elisha to make his own people feel that the Lord neglects the poor, the vulnerable, and the ill among them. Jesus could have picked stories about the Lord’s favor, nurture, and protection. But he didn’t.
I pity the authors of our gospels, who had to find a place in their accounts of Jesus’s life for this strange and unflattering incident. Mark the evangelist puts this story later in Jesus’s life, after Jesus has racked up real credentials for teaching, healing, freeing people from chains and from sin, and asking a demon not to blab around that Jesus is the Christ. Over time in Mark’s gospel, Jesus grows in confidence and credibility, and people recognize him as the Christ only slowly, not because he kicks off his ministry with a big public announcement.
This isn’t the only episode from Jesus’s life that was hard for the evangelists to find a good spot for. The biggest challenge may be the episode when Jesus enters the Temple in Jerusalem, chases out the people selling sacrificial animals, and turns upside down the tables used for currency exchange. That episode appears toward the end of Matthew’s gospel, where it reveals Jesus’s rage finally boiling over, and Matthew uses it to explain the hostilities between Jesus and the Temple authorities, which that gospel claims led in part to Jesus’s crucifixion. But John’s gospel places that turning-of-the-tables episode at the beginning of that gospel, in chapter 2, where it serves more as an outburst from early in Jesus’s ministry. Over time in John’s gospel, Jesus transmuted his anger into abiding love, and confrontation gave way to surrender.
…
I wonder if Luke the evangelist wanted to do something similar, repositioning today’s challenging episode from a turning point in the middle of Jesus’s ministry to a starting point that Jesus grew beyond. In today’s gospel, Jesus can seem audacious, polarizing, and disdainful toward his roots. Perhaps this episode reflects the rush of confidence Jesus felt from his baptism that he was God’s anointed and beloved Son. But then, in the course of his life, Jesus came to choose humility over audacity, reconciliation over division, rootedness over ambition.
Our own beliefs about Jesus’s status as God’s Messiah and Son sometimes get in the way of our seeing that Jesus still may have gone through very human processes of growth and change. But in different ways, the gospels all use what materials they have to piece together a story about growth and change across Jesus’s brief life. We see signs of Jesus’s dawning knowledge, his expanding heart, his growing courage, his deepening humility. It’s impossible to know much about Jesus’s inner life, but the gospels all seem to want to show that Jesus’s identity as God’s Messiah and Son doesn’t mean he didn’t wrestle with uncertainty or self-doubt—or maybe with arrogance.
In my own life, I’m mortified to recall how I applied fresh out of college for a job that I was vastly underqualified for yet felt destined to have. Worse, as an elementary school student, I severely overestimated my chess-playing abilities on the basis that I could defeat my own father. (I realized only later that he boosted my confidence by letting me win sometimes.)
I don’t know exactly how the scene in today’s gospel went down, or when exactly in the sequence of events in Jesus’s life it took place. But I know that when I admit Jesus comes off as unappealingly self-assured here, I can better accept that bold infusions of confidence have their place in the developing lives of all God’s children. Sometimes, these episodes are just the beginning of a long journey to live with fuller confidence in the God who loves, anoints, and sends each one of us.
© 2022 The Rev. Dr. Lora Walsh
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas