Victims Uber Alles

We are at a moment in time when there is no more moral or powerful claim to make than that you and yours have been victims of some horrible abuse of power. All of the political parties and factions attempt to rally their base by claiming that some all powerful opponent has done them wrong and now they must arise to settle the score and make the world right.

• Donald Trump is going to settle the score against political correctness and liberal victimhood weakness
• Ted Cruz is going to bring down the liberal elites who have ruined the country
• Bernie Sanders is going to bring down the monied interests of Wall Street and the wealthy
• Hillary Clinton has been fighting all her life against the Republican establishment for working men and women and by her ascension to power will break the glass ceiling.

Righteous indignation against some wrong done to you and whatever favored tribe you imagine in the moment is the sweetest, most self-justifying feeling a human being can have. While we may have moral qualms about the use of violence in anger in many circumstances only when we imagine ourselves righting a terrible wrong can we both feel powerful and moral at the same time. In moments like these we look around for a champion to win our battles for us and remake the world as we’ve always known it should be.

Jesus with the Home Crowd

In Luke 4 Jesus returns to Nazareth to preach in the synagogue and pulls out the prophet Isaiah. He announces the most audacious liberation.

Luke 4:14–22 (NET)

¹⁴ Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and news about him spread throughout the surrounding countryside.¹⁵ He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by all. ¹⁶ Now Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read,¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, ¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, ¹⁹ to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” ²⁰ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him. ²¹ Then he began to tell them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read.”²² All were speaking well of him, and were amazed at the gracious words coming out of his mouth. They said, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?”

Why was everyone so pleased with Jesus?

The Jews were an occupied people, under threat culturally, out-powered militarily, and under-siege religiously. What Jesus does here is nothing short of announcing that at his hand the power of their particular god Yhwh will reclaim and redeem his people. Surely these were big words but again, this is the kind of speech a politician uses to rally their base before they go out to defeat the oppressor and set the world right.

Politics Doesn’t Really Change

Everyone would have understood what Jesus was doing and approved of it, at least if you self identified with an oppressed Jewish underclass waiting and hoping that your God would send you a leader who would do what revolutionaries always do. Jesus showed promise in his miracle working, something unusual but not out of step with the kind of great leader who could kick out the Romans, push back Greek culture and drive out those who collaborated with Rome and made the occupation possible.

A leader who showed promise would gather other strong and ambitious men to himself while gaining people power. Eventually whole towns and regions would pledge allegiance to him to the degree that they would volunteer for his movement and eventually become an army. Once enough power was accumulated he would lead the charge first against the regional seats and power and finally to Jerusalem to take purge the city of those who have profited from Roman power and purify the sites and symbols of proper religion and God’s politics.

Jesus, the Worst Politician

What Jesus did next, however, was a very stupid political move. What we see in fact from Jesus is that he had the worst political instincts imaginable.

Luke 4:23–30 (NET)

²³ Jesus said to them, “No doubt you will quote to me the proverb, ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ and say, ‘What we have heard that you did in Capernaum, do here in your hometown too.’ ” ²⁴ And he added, “I tell you the truth, no prophet is acceptable in his hometown. ²⁵ But in truth I tell you, there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s days, when the sky was shut up three and a half years, and there was a great famine over all the land. ²⁶ Yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to a woman who was a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.²⁷ And there were many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, yet none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”²⁸ When they heard this, all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage. ²⁹ They got up, forced him out of the town, and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.³⁰ But he passed through the crowd and went on his way.

Here Jesus seems to needlessly and intentionally alienate what all would assume to be the base of his power.

The contemporary image of Jesus was that he was loving and accepting and would never say anything to anyone that might be considered objectionable unless that other person was “a bad person”.

We have no reason to believe that anyone at the synagogue was “a bad person”. They were likely just common, everyday fathers, mothers, children, laborers, workers, etc. Why would Jesus purposefully antagonize this group of people to the degree that they not only would reject him but in fact want to lynch him?

A Prophet

One of the things that is clear about this passage is that Jesus assumed the posture of what the people would easily recognize as a “prophet”. They had the stories and the words of the Old Testament prophets. These prophets mostly had frustrating careers because they would spend most of their ministry saying things to people in power that would eventually get them killed.

Now with the virtue of hindsight the good people of the Nazareth synagogue could comfortably endorse these Old Testament prophets and relegate their adversaries as evil. They could easily associate the adversaries of these prophets with the militaristic Romans and the culturally imperial Greeks. They could implicitly cast themselves in this narrative along side the prophets at the faithful remnant of Israel who were suffering under pagan imperial powers and cultures awaiting the redemptive actions of their God Yhwh. Within this mental landscape their first hearing of Jesus’ reading of Isaiah was comfortable, vindicating and hopeful. Why would Jesus intentionally mess up their warm religious fuzzies in this love fest?

Going Meta on this

Now it is easy when we read this text to do with it exactly what the Nazareth congregation did with Jesus’ sermon. WE read the text and Jesus the prophet speaking against the unenlightened people of Nazareth only to eventually suffer not only at their hands but also at the hands of the Romans and their Judean allies. We do this because it isn’t too hard to see that Jesus was attacking their ethnic particularism.

Jesus intentionally points out to them that while the prophets attacked the unrighteous kings and wealthy elites of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah they at the same time blessed their pagan neighbors. Jesus pulls out two stories that highlight how in fact God blessed enemies of Israel

Now we might here this and say “ah yes, isn’t this really what we love about Jesus. Jesus loves his enemies. How wonderful, loving, beautiful, accepting, tolerant, enlightened, spiritual.”

Before we let those warm fuzzies sink in too deeply let me make two observations.

1. Loving enemies in theory is always nicer than having God bless, forgive or give victory to your actual enemies, the ones that you believe are destroying the world, ruining your life, abusing, killing and subjugating for their own fun and profit. There were very real reasons why the congregation at Nazareth saw themselves as the victims of the new Roman way that was dominating their world and destroying their language, culture, religion and way of life. Their area of the Galilee was increasingly being settled by people from all over the Roman world, starting new cities and occupying what in their imaginations was supposed to be their promised land set-aside for Israel. Ponder for a moment who you imagine is destroying the world. Would you like Jesus to use his influence, fame, authority and power to bless them?
2. However we feel about the Nazareth congregation we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Jesus intentionally picked this fight with them. How does that sit with your imagined Jesus kingdom of nice? It is very clear that Jesus was willing to not only trash his influence with them and risk his safety with them in order to try to make a very uncomfortable point. If you imagine “Jesus would never say anything unkind or not-nice to a ‘good person'” then you had better check the record. Jesus uncomfortably points out the selfishness of their particularism and in a very dramatic and offensive way demonstrates that neither Jesus nor the God of the Prophets in whose name they gathered, and whose law and reputation they imagined themselves to defend, is NOT their property or their servant.

The Popularity of the Marginalized

On any given day I can find wonderful Christians of nearly every stripe speaking out in Jesus’ name to stand against power in favor of defending the marginalized or oppressed. Those who do so have a lot of Biblical material to back up their cause. Again and again the Old Testament including the prophets that Jesus refers to rails against the powers that were in their abuse of their power at the expense of the poor, the weak and the defeated. God again and again in the Old Testament comes out as the defender of the widows and the orphans.

The two examples Jesus brings up we might imagine to be particularly painful. The first is Elijah and the widow of Zeraphath in the region of Sidon. You might remember that Elijah squared off against King Ahab who was under the influence of his wife Jezebel. Jezebel for you Bible trivia fans came from… Sidon. This means that Elijah, while there were many widows in need of rescue worked to spare the life of a country-woman of Jezebel, not Israel.

Naaman too was an interesting case. He was the general of the Syrians who were at that moment militarily oppressing Israel. Many in Israel if they had heard of Naaman’s leprosy would have cheered this as the justice of God wrought upon the enemy of Israel. You might recall that it was a Hebrew slave girl that pointed him to Elisha. What was he doing with a Hebrew slave girl you ask? How did he come to possess one? He undoubtedly came to own her in his military campaigns.

The climax of the story is when Naaman upon receiving this healing declares “Now I know that there is no God in all the world except in Israel.” (2 Kings 5:15)

He then asks for a special dispensation when he must escort his master, the king, to the pagan temple and it is granted. Nowhere do we find him renouncing slavery or saying that he’ll no longer lead raiding parties to take slaves and properties from weaker cities in Northern Israel. Whatever happened to morality?!

The congregation at Nazareth were eager for the Lord through their new, hometown prophet Jesus to practice “my well-being at your expense” to their Roman and pagan overlords. Jesus in effect points out that the way they imagined their world setting functionally made God their servant and Jesus their agent. What Jesus illuminates for them is what Paul made clear at the end of the his letter to the Ephesians “we battle not against flesh and blood.” If Yhwh was Lord over all the earth then his concern was not particularly for Israel and her interest but for all of humanity which includes abusers of power and imperialists.

It is not hard to see how the victim narrative is compromised as simply another tool for my exaltation at the expense of my neighbor. How lovely when I can show the world how evil they are and by virtue of victimization the moral high ground I stand upon.

Misery

Our hearts constantly look for a place to stand where we can find in ourselves our moral righteousness and justified salvation. We are capable of twisting any narrative towards our service and casting God as vindicator and justifier for our agendas and our righteousness. The most gracious thing Jesus could do in Nazareth was to expose their hearts even in the hard and offensive way he chose and they hated him for it. Hated him enough to want to take his life.

Deliverance

Jesus would be such a bad politician, such a bad messiah, such a poor manager of public opinion that he would alienate nearly everyone, Jews, Romans and Greeks alike up to the point that they who could not agree on much would agree that the world was better with Jesus dead.

This Jesus would be condemned by those who imagined themselves righteous for loving the evil doers, whether they be his countrymen who in the eyes of the imperial elites didn’t have enough sense to embrace the right side of history, or the evil doers who were destroying the moral fiber and divine revelation embodied in the particular revelation of the Torah.

Jesus would become the victim of all of them and not the servant of any of their agendas.

Because he did so, he in fact became the master of all agendas whose allegiance is demanded of all. This is of course the claim of the great Christian hymn of Philippians 2.

Gratitude

Now as we overhear that troubles at Jesus’ sermon in Nazareth we must ponder our place. What agenda do we wish to subject Jesus to? Who are the enemies that we wish to employ Jesus-as-destroyer towards their demise?

Or do we see that in fact the one who took no side simply asks that we be on his and follow him as he offends our moral sensitivities and orders history in ways we can never predict and seldom comprehend.