We have moved through the first chapters of Luke and learned about who Jesus is and what his mission and work entails. We learned that He is the Messiah, the son of God, sent to save the world from sin and death. He resisted temptation and is the new Adam. In him we are part of a new genealogy a new family tree of believers. We affirmed the fact that Jesus can be proofed historically through the works of Flavius Josephus. Jesus the Son of God is the perfect sin offering and the conclusion of Old Testament practices.
In Luke 4:14-30 we observe how Jesus is welcomed by the world. So, Jesus preached and work all through the region of Galilee he was accepted with gratitude and awe. He then went to his hometown Nazareth and went to the synagogue on the Sabbath. He read from Isaiah 61:1-2.
Till this point all was well but went he started to expose the chapter things went terribly wrong. The first problem was wen he insinuated that he himself was the Messiah and secondly when he discussed the problem of faith and acceptance of the message.
The people who know him from childbirth and worked with his father could not accept the fact that the Messiah was just an ordinary guy from up the road. The Messiah must be somebody from higher up. Somebody with some clout, status, and power. The boy from up the road is not posh enough to be the Messiah and when Jesus ended up on the cross many people scoffed him as a fake and lost faith in his mission. We don’t want to see our saviour as powerless and weak; we want a strong victorious Messiah with a sword in his hand conquering the world and destroying the wicked. A dying and suffering Messiah on paper is fine but if he knocks on your door that is hard.
Secondly the Messiah should not be shared with undesirable people. Heathens and pagans should not receive pardon from God, they are not entitled to mercy and grace. They should be punished.
A romantically portrayed Jesus on the cross far away in Jerusalem is fine but if he come to knock on my door I will reject and despise him. We want to be comfortable and affluent not poor and struggling. Jesus came to be with the poor and destitute of this world and he himself decided to be humble and poor himself, a homeless carpenter from Nazareth. If you find this picture hard to swallow and imitate you are like the friends and pals in Nazareth, utterly disgusted and in pursuit of killing Jesus.
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