Everyone cheered when Jesus preached his homecoming sermon in Luke chapter 4!
Everyone had been waiting for the Anointed One, the Christ, the Messiah! Everyone was claiming kinship to him!
Yes, something good could come out of Nazareth!
Finally, someone great would come out of Nazareth!
Don’t you know that’s Joseph’s son?
Yeah, Joseph made my dinette set!
Well, Jesus made our living room set!
Y’all ain’t said nothing yet! Joseph’s my sister-in-law’s uncle’s third cousin – twice removed.
I babysat that boy when he was in diapers! He was so cute. Got that good hair, like his mama. Got his daddy’s eyes, though.
I ubered him in my donkey cart to Egypt.
I chauffeured him in my camel-sine back to Galilee.
Me and Jesus used to play building blocks together.
I found him after Mary and Joseph lost him in the Temple.
I fetched his sandals from the bottom of the Jordan when he got baptized.
I fed him after his 40-day fast.
He wasn’t just the Messiah – he was their Messiah!
Until. . .
He explained they could be his, but he wasn’t exclusively theirs –
He was to be followed, not possessed.
To where?
Zarephath?
Syria?
They not like us!
He’s not like us!
Worshipers gone wild!
The cheers became jeers!
Y’all sure Jesus a Galilean? Not an Egyptian?
Mary couldn’t get home fast enough for me, cuz that was one gassy chile!
I got splinters from sitting in one of Joseph’s chairs and got the scars to prove it!
We don’t wanna see that, but did y’all watch Mary and Joseph on Maury?
Never did look like Joseph!
Who’s his real daddy anyway?
Mary still telling that story?
No wonder that boy’s head so messed up!
Suddenly the celebrators became haters. . .
The thin line between compassion and combativeness had been crossed:
They felt their win required another’s loss,
So lovers became lynchers.
Their authorized gospel was an otherized gospel;
Good News for me, but not for thee.
It was a gospel of
Uniformity, rather than diversity;
Ego versus equity;
Narrow bigotry over expansive inclusivity.
They wanted others to be nones, no ones, nobodies;
But he sought to make everybody somebody because nobody’s nobody.
They wanted to make Nazareth great, but he wanted to help people be good.
Their pursuit of a greatness that never was led them to throw goodness over a cliff;
But goodness trumped greatness back then and it will again.
