Love and Consequences

Luke 4:21-30

I Corinthians 13:1-13

February 2, 2025

 

            I have had friends, clergy friends, who have returned to the church they grew up in to serve as the pastor. To be honest, doing that hasn’t always worked out so well. If there is anyone in that church who remembers them as a child or as a youth – even a youth who was active in the life of the church, a youth who participated in worship – it is very hard for those who remember the child before to accept the adult and pastor they are now. It’s incredibly hard to see this child of the church as pastor. It can be even harder to receive and accept their leadership, pastoral care, and church administration.

            I have not had that same experience because the church I grew up in does not exist anymore, and, even if it did, it was a denomination that does not welcome women ministers. But I do remember what it was like to preach in front of family and friends for the first time and see their struggle to reconcile the kid they knew with the person I am up here. My sweet dad was nothing but supportive of me, from the moment I felt called to seminary, and in every call I’ve had since. But he told me one time, many years ago, that while he absolutely believed in me and believed in my call, he struggled to see me as a pastor until the first time he saw me in the pulpit. Then it clicked.

            All this is to say that I understand why the people of Jesus’ hometown might have resisted seeing their hometown boy go from carpenter’s son to healing, teaching phenom. They’d heard the stories circulating about him, and now he was here, home, back where he came from, back where it all began. What can Joseph’s son possibly have to teach us, to tell us?

            But if we read Luke’s telling of this story carefully, the people don’t initially seem to doubt Jesus, do they? If anything, Jesus seems to be the one who goes after them. Jesus reads the scroll from Isaiah and declares to the people in that synagogue that the words of the prophet have now been fulfilled in their hearing. That would have been the moment for the people who knew him when to scoff or shake their heads in disbelief or even jeer at him. But what does the scripture say?

            “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?”

            Unless I’m missing something, there doesn’t seem to be any antagonism on the people’s part. They seem positive and receptive to Jesus’ words. They seem eager to hear more, to see more from him. They are astonished, to be sure, but not hostile. Not yet.

            But with his next words, Jesus seems to go on the offensive.

            “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown 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 hometown.’”

            Then Jesus goes on to tell them that in the time of Elijah, when there was a famine in Israel and there were many widows who needed help, Elijah was sent only to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon, a widow not of Israel but a foreigner. And what of Elisha? Of all the lepers that could have been cleansed, Elisha was sent only to Naaman the Syrian, another outsider, another foreigner.

            Jesus made it clear from the get-go that any expectations they might have of him as the hometown boy made good, they needed to let them go. He wasn’t there to fulfill their expectations. He wasn’t their to be their personal messiah. He wasn’t there to play favorites just because this was his hometown.

            Was Jesus saying this to be mean? Was he directing his words at his former bullies or the kids who once taunted him? Was he trying to rub his healing power in their collective face? Of course not. This wasn’t an attempt to get back at people or to have revenge on those who may have discounted him at one time. But Jesus was making it very clear that just because this was his hometown didn’t mean that they had special favor with God. The two examples he gave about Elijah and Elisha show that God goes to the outsiders. God moves among the marginalized. If they really believed him when he read those words about good news to the poor and release to the captives and sight to the blind and the oppressed going free and the year of Jubilee proclaimed, then they also needed to believe that just because they occupied his hometown did not mean they ranked above the other. God sent prophets to the margins, to the outsiders, to the foreigners, to the strangers, and he would go to those same people.  

            Now the people turn on him. They become so angry, so enraged they chase him out of town, and up to the edge of the hill the town was built upon so they can hurl him off the cliff. He escapes their clutches and goes on his way, But that does not diminish the violent response the people had to his words.

            Was Jesus just trying to provoke them or did he enrage them because he spoke a hard and stinging truth? And what was that truth? It wasn’t that God didn’t love them or care for them, but that he came not to curry favor but to upend expectations. He came to turn everything they thought they knew and understood about God upside down. He came to fulfil what Isaiah prophesied. He came not for the ones in the upper echelons of society, for those in power, but for those at the bottom, for those on the edges, for those who were dismissed or forgotten or exploited or all the above. His words evoked a bitter truth – that proximity to him did not mean they could take God for granted. God was doing a new thing through him. They could either join him or not.

            It’s interesting to read this story from Luke through the lens of our verses from I Corinthians and vice versa. Go ahead, admit it, when we hear these words from I Corinthians chapter 13, don’t we all think of brides and grooms, of wedding dresses and tuxedos, of flower girls and ring bearers, and couples standing in front of the officiant promising to love each other in the way that Paul defines love? How could we not? These verses are read at weddings all the time. They are quoted in beautiful script on wedding invitations and programs. It’s hard not to think of them as being solely connected to starry eyed couples on the precipice of a new life together.

            But that’s not who Paul was writing these words to. It’s not that they can’t apply to couples. Anyone who has been married for more than five minutes knows that there are times in a relationship when you need to be reminded that love is patient and kind. But Paul was writing to a church in crisis. The Corinthian church was filled with conflict. That’s why Paul was writing to them. They were taking sides; they were dividing into factions. People who had the gift of speaking in tongues were considered spiritually superior to those who didn’t. The most vulnerable in their midst were being forgotten. They were arguing over whose baptism was the best. They were a mess! The Corinthian church was a mess.

            In Chapter 12, Paul has written about the importance of all spiritual gifts. They were all needed and had their place in the community. He wrote to them about the body and its many members. There was no member of the body that was dispensable or disposable. In fact, the smallest, seemingly most insignificant member was the one that was indispensable. But now he brings all this home in these words about love.

            No matter what your gifts are, no matter what member of the body you are, if you don’t have love then your gifts all come to nothing. If you can speak in the tongues of the angels themselves, but you don’t have love, that language is worthless. Its nothing more than the clanging of cymbals. If you have superior knowledge but your knowledge is not grounded in love, then it’s pointless and fruitless. If you are generous to the point of giving everything you own away, but you don’t do it out of love and for love, then your gesture is empty.

            You have no patience with one another, you show no kindness to one another, but love is exactly that – patient and kind. You boast to one another. You are jealous of one another. But love is neither of those things. You say your way or the highway, but love does not insist on its own way. You rejoice when someone else messes up, but that’s not love. Love bears all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

            All of theses gifts and talents that you hold so dear, they’re going to end. They will die with you. But love does not come to an end. You think you know everything, you think you can see everything, but you can only see a glimpse of what the full truth and knowledge is. Children may bicker and quarrel, but childishness needs to be left behind. You need to grow up. You need to grow up spiritually and leave those childish ways behind. You need to have faith, and you need to have hope, but most importantly you need to have love. You need to love.

            It seems to me that both Jesus and Paul were trying to convey the same message. Jesus wanted his hometown to understand that they could not be complacent in their faith just because they were his hometown. They could not take God for granted. God was doing a new thing through him, and they were invited to come along but on God’s terms not theirs. And God’s terms were about love – love as action, love as a verb, love with its work boots on, seeking out the lost and the forgotten. Though it may not seem like it, Jesus was speaking to his hometown with love.

            And Paul wanted the church in Corinth, a church that came together because of their faith in Jesus the Christ, to understand that their fighting and grasping and grappling was pulling them away from Christ and one another, not the other way around. They were missing the point because they were missing the love. And if anyone understood what the power of love could do, it was Paul. It changed him from Saul to Paul, from being a vengeful, vicious, violent threat-breathing persecutor to a man willing to die for the One, the Love that saved him, that struck him blind on that road to Damasus so that he might finally see.

            Jesus and Paul both spoke the truth in love and faced the consequences of doing so. Are we able to do the same? Are we able to face the consequences of love?

            Let all of God’s children say, “Alleluia.”

            Amen.