The Traitor

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

01.27.13; Rev. David Williams

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 4:14-21; 22-40

Of all the peculiar blended words that seem to move in and out of our collective consciousness, one that I’ve always been at a loss to figure out is the “frenemy.”  

That word wasn’t around when I was a kid, it really wasn’t.  According to the online Websters, frenemy entered the English language at some point in the late 1970s, which, having lived through the 1970s, I guess I can understand.  What with gas shortages, malaise, cocaine, Corvettes that got 15 to the gallon and only put out 140 horsepower, and trying cram into those jeans, that decade could seriously make you mean.

But the existence of the concept itself just sort of eludes me.  Why would one have a frenemy?  I mean, friends I get.  Enemies I understand.   Friends are a blessing, folks with whom we share a bond. What greater love, than to lay one’s life down for friends, as a buddy of mine once said.

And enemies?  Being human, I’ve had a few, despite my very best efforts.   I know what that feels like, and though I’ve done my darnedest to love them and forgive them, I don’t mistake them for friends.  But frenemies?  I don’t get that.  Why would you stay socially connected to someone who was actively and committedly cruel to you?  It just doesn’t process.   

Maybe it’s my XY chromosome.  I don’t know.

What I do know, though, is that it is far easier to inflict pain and damage on a soul if you really and truly know that soul.  When someone knows us, really knows us, and has been part of our lives long enough, there is in them the potential to cause pain far deeper than the person who simply hated us from the very beginning.

Those kinds of hurts, the ones that catch us in the vulnerability of our connection to another, those are the hardest to forget and overcome.  That’s true for us as individuals, and it grows even more deeply true for us as groups.   

Groups of human beings, our cliques and clans and tribes and parties and nations, are a natural part of our identity as social creatures.  We form up, we gather, and we begin to share a common identity and purpose.   And when someone who is part of that group starts challenging our understanding of ourselves, we recoil and resist.   Sometimes, that betrayal is just a betrayal.  That’s why we still remember the name Benedict Arnold as an epithet, even if the specifics of what he did back during the American Revolution are lost to us in the haze of our memories of third grade. 

That’s why the history books still mark the name Epialtes, from waaaay back in the year 480 BCE.   What, the name doesn’t ring a bell?   Ever see the movie 300, or better yet read the graphic novel by Frank Miller, arguably one of the most influential and gifted comic artists of our era?  Hmmm.  Without Epialtes legendary betrayal, the Persians would never have overcome the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae.   Two and a half millennia have passed, over sixty generations of human beings, and still, that name is there in our collective consciousness.  Or at least on Wikipedia.

When you act in ways that defy your standing within a group, when you tear at what some may have mistakenly determined is the heart of what unites you, folks don’t tend to appreciate it.

Which is why, in our two readings this morning from Luke, things turn so sour so fast for Jesus.   The story starts well enough, as the hometown boy returns following a successful tour of Capernaum.  Capernaum was a little fishing community on the shore of the sea of Galilee, with a population of around 1,500 souls.  Kfer Nahum, which is how you’d say it in the Hebrew of that era, just means “The Village of Nahum,” which was named after some guy named Nahum.  Putting that into the context of right here, this place would be Kfer Poole, and if you go down the road a ways, you get to Kfer Beale.   

So Jesus gets back from teaching and preaching in Nahumsville, and there’s buzz in the air.   He gets into the synagogue, and he reads from Isaiah 61, hitting those who have gathered with powerful words about the fulfillment of all of God’s promises for the people of Israel.  Those words, written as Israel was struggling to rebuilt itself after returning from captivity in Babylon, those words still resonated with the hopes Judaism had for itself.  We’re going to be healed!  We’re going to be set free!

Preach it, brother!

And then it all goes south.  After laying out those hopes, he challenges a fundamental assumption.  Those expecting him to perform in the same way as he did down in Nahumsville?  They were going to be disappointed.   He wasn’t there for that reason.

Instead, he challenges them, going after a fundamental assumption they had about themselves.   That quote from Isaiah?  It wasn’t just about them.  It had to do with the liberation of the entire world.

And because Jesus knew the history and tradition of his people, he reached back into the stories that they all knew to make that connection.   He tells the story of a time of great famine, when the prophet Elijah went and miraculously fed a widow in Zarephath, a widow who was not Jewish.  Then he tells a story of Naaman the Syrian, a powerful military leader afflicted with leprosy, who is healed by the prophet Elisha.

What these stories do is remind the people of Nazareth of something they’d rather not hear...that the fulfillment of God’s promise means more than just the fulfillment of their own hopes for themselves.  It does that, but it does much much more.   It means God will also work with those who are not them, who are not part of their story.   That wasn’t what they wanted to be hearing.

And so the response that comes when they are told this is anger, and not a little bit of anger, either.   How dare you betray our understanding of ourselves?  You, who should know better?  You who are a part of us?

Things get ugly then, as the group becomes a mob, and the mob tries to pitch him off a cliff.  Jesus slips away, somehow, although how you’d move like a ninja through an angry mob is beyond me.

That’s the story, at least as Luke tells it to us.  And that this recounting comes from Luke is not meaningless.  

Our two other synoptic Gospels also tell the story, but Mark and Matthew give us far less detail, and remember the event in a different way.  In Mark 6:1-6 and Matthew 13:53-58, the accounts are identical to one another.  Jesus comes to Nazareth, and teaches in the synagogue, although what he says is not remembered.  People remember he’s a hometown boy, and think this whole prophet thing just means he’s gotten too big for his britches.   Then, they’re just grumpy and offended.   That’s a slightly different spin than Luke offers.

Part of that may come from the remembering of Luke’s community.  Unlike Mark and Matthew, which were deeply embedded in the broader world of Judaism, Luke’s community was likely Greek-speaking, and comprised of either Hellenized Jews or Greek-speaking Gentile converts.   They weren’t part of the people of Israel, not in the same sense that the Nazarenes would have seen themselves.

They would have heard what Jesus was saying as an affirmation of their inclusion, just as surely as the angry Galileans in Nazareth would have heard it as a rejection of their special status with God.  Remembering that tradition was absolutely essential for them, and it may well have been why Luke goes out of his way to tell the story.

And that, more than anything, is the challenge that the Gospel lays at our own feet.  Because we as human beings are just as prone to letting our identities...how we understand ourselves from the community and the culture that we spring...get in the way of us seeing the depth of the transforming grace of our Creator.

Because culture defends itself.  Culture resists changes that might force it to deepen it’s identity.  So we resist those among us who challenge us to look at others differently, to find deeper graces, or to consider another way to live more deeply in harmony with one another.  Just as the people of Nazareth didn’t want to hear the difficult truth that their claim on God’s promise was not exclusive or unique, we find ways to close ourselves off from that still small voice which speaks to us from the deepest place in ourselves.

So remember, as you move in the world, that you will encounter those voices that call you to greater grace than you’d imagined possible, greater justice that you’d thought possible, and greater mercy than you’ve considered possible.  Those voices aren’t treasonous.  They’re transformative.

Don’t shout them down, don’t take offense, don’t take them out to the edge of the village and throw them off of a cliff. 

Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.