Luke 4:14-30 - One Message that Always Gets Two Reactions - January 23, 2022

Here’s a riddle for you: what do the Word of God and Newton’s Third Law of Motion have in common? They both always generate two equal and opposite reactions. In other words, there is no middle ground, no neutral position in relationship to the Gospel. And that’s not just my opinion. Jesus himself says that whoever is not with me is against me (Matthew 12:30). The Gospel never lays there dead, like a cadaver on an exam table, it is living and active, sharper than any double-edged sword (Hebrews 4:12). You either hear the Word and rejoice in God’s mercy to sinners or you try to silence it; try to push it out of your life.

Now, you might be thinking: I’ve heard many sermons and opened up my Bible and read it many times – and quite often, I’ve had no real – much less passionate – reaction; I wasn’t really moved to either joy or anger. Now that’s a problem; a big problem. There are few things God hates more than apathy (Revelation 3:15-16). And who gets the blame for this problem? Well, given that the Gospel is necessarily communicated from one person to another, there are three places we could place the blame: on the message, the speaker or the listener. We can scratch the message from that list; God promises that it will accomplish whatever I please and it will succeed in the purpose for which I sent it (Isaiah 55:11). There’s nothing wrong with the Word. Apathy is a symptom of one of the biggest problems in the Church today: we’ve grown weary of the Word. Complacent. Bored even. As hearers, our ears have been dulled by the noise of the world. Movies and music and media are engineered to make us sit down, turn our brains off and be passively entertained and amused. But hearing the Word of God demands active listening. It’s not supposed to be background noise, it’s supposed to be like listening to the doctor tell you if the test results mean that you will live or die. Then there is “itching ear syndrome” (2 Timothy 4:3). We want the church to have amazing programs and powerful, moving music and messages that are relevant, that give meaning to our lives, that solve all our problems and answer all our questions – and the Word of God doesn’t scratch that itch. Finally, incessant breaking news and weather alerts and viral videos have changed our brains; shortened our attention spans, weakened our ability to focus and concentrate and meditate. And so, if something can’t be expressed in a 30 second video or 144 characters, we turn it off and tune it out. The sad result is that many Christians have a shamefully shallow faith based on theological sound-bites and Facebook memes than a firm and clear understanding of the deep mysteries of God’s grace.

But hearers don’t bear all the blame. You also have preachers who have themselves lost faith in the power of the Word; who instead trust their own wit and wisdom, their own personality and ingenuity to do what only the Word can do. They use the Word as a means to an end rather than the means of grace; as an instrument – or perhaps weapon – to manipulate and mobilize and organize and patronize. Want to start a community service program? There’s a Bible verse for that. Want to raise money? Beat people over the head with your big leather Bible. Want to trumpet your righteous cause and vilify the opposition? Scripture is cited on both sides of almost every social and political issue. And this misuse of the Word can even infect the hearts of we who claim to stand on the Reformation motto of Scripture alone. Preachers preach and hearers hear the Word expecting it to change the world and the people out there rather than do what God promises it will do: change us. It’s stupid really. It’s stupid to sit here for an hour and expect it to change the world out there – instead of changing us. It’s as stupid as taking a Tylenol and expecting someone else’s headache to go away.

Martin Luther warned his generation that the Word of God is like a passing downpour. It falls for a while in one place and the soil soaks it up. But then the soil becomes saturated and the water runs off and the clouds move on. [1] Luther predicted the day when the Gospel shower would move on from Europe to other nations and continents – which has in large part happened. And some might say that the Gospel downpour is leaving our country in our own generation. But for now, God has blessed us with the shower of his blessings in the Word – and let us never take that for granted or grow bored with it. Because the Word remains the living and active wisdom and power of God (Romans 1:16-17). And whenever it goes out from human lips into human ears and minds and hearts, it does things. It kills and makes alive. It knocks us off our thrones and picks us up off of our knees. It fills the starving and sends the rich away empty (Luke 2:53). There is no neutrality when it comes to the Word of God. There is either joy or anger; faith or unbelief.

That was true in already in the time of Ezra and Nehemiah (c. 445 BC). In our first lesson we heard that all the people gathered together at the public square that is in front of the Water Gate (Nehemiah 8:1), demanding to hear the Word of God. They listened as Ezra read from the books of Moses and the Levites interpreted it [so that] the people understood what was read (Nehemiah 8:8). Men, women, and children stood – stood! – and listened for six straight hours, from early morning till noon, to hear words that hadn’t been heard in Jerusalem in over 70 years. No comfortably padded chairs. No heating or air conditioning. No roof over their heads. They wept when they heard the Word. It cut them right to the heart. They repented. They believed. They recognized how utterly sinful they were and how incredibly gracious God was. The Word was working just as God had promised. It was a holy day, made holy by the Word.

It was also a holy day in Nazareth, when Jesus, the carpenter’s son turned miracle-working rabbi, returned to his hometown synagogue on the Sabbath. The place was packed. They all wanted to hear from the hometown boy. The attendant handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to Jesus and he found Isaiah 61. He read it out loud: The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. And then he stopped and sat down. The place went silent. You could have heard a pin drop. What was he going to say? People had wondered for centuries who Isaiah was talking about. Was he talking about himself? (Acts 8:34) Was it John? Was it someone else? Who was this Anointed One? Jesus tells them: Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. “This prophecy is about me.” And, at first, they all spoke well of him and were impressed by the words of grace that came from his mouth.

But then the devil elbowed his way into their minds and elevated their reason over the Word. They kept saying, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” They remembered that Jesus had played in their streets with their kids, traveled with them to Jerusalem for the required festivals – that for 30 years Jesus walked and talked and lived like anyone else. “Wait a minute…who does this guy think he is? He leaves home, runs around with that weird, renegade cousin named John, and now he comes back and thinks he’s the Messiah? Well, we’ll see about that. Prove it, Jesus! You’ve done miracles for other people, do one for us. Prove yourself here and we’ll believe you, but until you prove it we are going to reject your message.”

Jesus knew what they were thinking. Amen I tell you: No prophet is accepted in his hometown. He reminded them that there were lots of widows in Israel but God sent Elijah to the widow at Zarephath (Elijah 17:7-24) and there were lots of lepers in Israel but Elisha healed Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings 5) – both of whom were Gentiles. He was sending them both a fact and a warning: if you reject the Word, don’t expect miracles. Faith doesn’t come from seeing miracles but from hearing the Word (Romans 10:17). If you continue in your unbelief, God will take his Word away from you and give it to people who joyfully receive it. And with that, Jesus’ hometown congregation had heard enough. They were filled to the brim – not with faith, but with rage. “Let’s get rid of this guy! We don’t need to sit here and listen to him call us unbelievers and that we need him to save us from ourselves.” They drove him out of town and tried to throw him off a cliff. If you actually listen to what the Word says to you and about you, you can’t remain neutral. You either hear it with joy or you try to push Jesus out of your life. There is no middle ground.

Of course, Jesus slipped away because it wasn’t the time or place for him to die, but this was a bitter taste of the ultimate rejection to come. He was Anointed by God to save God’s people, but God’s people rejected him. Three years later they would finally succeed in pushing Jesus out of their lives for good – they would arrest and convict and beat and crucify him as a criminal. But only because he willingly allowed them to. Because only by dying could he pay for the world’s sin, death and unbelief (Hebrews 9:22). He had told them God had sent him to save them from their sins – and they wanted to kill him for it. Do you see how irrational unbelief is?

But today isn’t about the people of Nehemiah’s time or Jesus’ childhood neighbors. Today is about you…and me. Are we more like those people in Jerusalem or the people in Nazareth? We are both! We have split personalities when it comes to the Word of God; we are both glad hearers and angry despisers. Our old Adam rises up in rebellion against the Word, rejects its demand to rule our hearts and minds, resents the Law that exposes our sin and the Gospel that says God sent a Savior because we couldn’t save ourselves. It’s our old Adam that just wants to stay in bed on a frigid Sunday morning, that searches for excuses to avoid hearing the Word, that counts the seconds until the “Amen.” The old Adam hates church. He can’t wait to get as far away from the Word as possible because he knows that the Word means his death. He must be coerced, compelled, threatened, forced to hear it. He’s why you and I do not always gladly hear the Word of God and obey it (Romans 7:18).

But the New Man in you is different. The New Man is an eager listener. The New Man would gladly stand in a crowd outside the Water Gate in Jerusalem and listen to the Word of God for six hours – to say nothing of driving through a little snow and cold to sit in a padded chair in a climate-controlled sanctuary for one hour. That’s the real you. The you who was reborn in Baptism. The you that died and rose with Christ. The you who rejoices at every opportunity to hear and study and read God’s Word, who gets a shiver down your spine whenever you hear that God loved you so much that he sent his Son to die for your sins, so that he might call you his child and give you the inheritance of eternal life.

You know what that means, right? It means war. It means that each of our lives is a never-ending war between the old Adam and the new man. It is a weekly struggle to make the trek to church. A minute by minute struggle to pay attention. A daily battle to open up the Bible at home and read it and teach it to our children. An ongoing struggle against the devil’s temptations to become apathetic toward the amazing good news of God’s grace for sinners. It means that we need to repent for allowing the Old Adam to gain the upper hand, for treating God’s grace as old news or irrelevant news or fake news, for refusing to receive the gifts Jesus wants to give us, for treating the Word as something optional or secondary in our lives, even for wanting to shut Jesus up and get rid of him. We need to drag the old Adam here kicking and screaming and repent because that is how God puts him to death.

And then we rejoice. We rejoice not because we have overcome the old Adam. Let’s be honest, none of us have. No, we rejoice because Jesus has overcome where we have failed. We were the captive, blind and oppressed ones Isaiah was talking about – but Jesus is the Anointed one who came to live and die and rise again to set us free. Your sins – even your sins of apathy – are forgiven. You stand justified before God. You are his child through baptism. You have a place in his heavenly mansion. That’s the Gospel. It might make you mad or glad, sad or joyful, you may want to hear more or you might just want me to shut up – because the Word always gets both equal and opposite reactions. But there’s no denying this fact: that this day at Risen Savior is a holy day because this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Amen.

[1] LW 45:352