4th Sunday after Epiphany – Year C
February 2, 2025
Gospel Lectionary Text
Luke 4:21-30
4:21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
4:22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"
4:23 He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'"
4:24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.
4:25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;
4:26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
4:27 There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."
4:28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.
4:29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
4:30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Context
Welcome to the fourth Sunday after Epiphany. Last week, we saw the start of Jesus’ first sermon. Everything seemed to be going great; people were in awe of His gracious words. This week, things take a turn and it doesn’t end well. Jesus is driven out of town — like some kind of demon — by a furious crowd ready to hurl Him off a cliff.
This scene echoes Leviticus 16, where the high priest lays the community’s sins on a scapegoat and drives it to the cliff’s edge. But why turn Jesus into a scapegoat? Perhaps it’s because He refuses to play the scapegoating game.
When He quotes Isaiah 61, He leaves out the line about “the day of vengeance of our God” (Isa. 61:2b). That’s risky business — stripping the text of vengeance, in effect pruning the human imagination of the violence it projects onto God. Then He praises God’s mercy to outsiders like Zarephath and Naaman, triggering outrage. Awe becomes anger, and anger becomes violence.
As it turns out, preaching a God without violence tends to expose our own. We often crave payback and scapegoats, but Jesus won’t let us off that easily. Instead, He offers a vision of grace so expansive it scandalizes. And that’s where the real adventure begins.
Question
What is it about extending God’s grace beyond our comfort zones that moves us so quickly from praising Jesus to pushing Him off a cliff?
Reflections
Whose Voice?
By Sue Hudacek |
Burning in our hearts is the desire to encounter and experience the Divine. We yearn for this encounter, even if we aren’t quite sure what to expect from it. Those who heard Jesus were no different. They all had the same response as he read from Isaiah … wonder and amazement, even awe.
Are you in or out?
By Joel Van Dyke |
Taking a deep breath, Jesus knows his proclamation will transform the cheering multitude in front of him into a mob of murderers behind him. He points to two stories that his audience would have known well.
The Mystery of Incarnation
By Kris Rocke |
Last week we heard Jesus’ first sermon. This week’s lectionary text keeps us in the same passage, but it focuses on the end of the sermon when things turn ugly. In the first half of the sermon Jesus lifts up the expansive nature of God’s grace, which is why “all spoke well of him and…
Praying Eucharistically - Weekly Homily by James Alison:
Understanding the Bible anew through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.
Poetry
Waiting for the Barbarians
by Constantine P. Cavafy
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
Queer Jesus
by Steve Garnass Holmes
How dare he uncenter us, the right, the normal.
Oh, we want so badly for Jesus to be like us.
To praise our kind, to fit in, and bless our fitting in.
But he will not.
He will stand outside our lines, athwart our expectations, the sickness of our normal.
He will not fit, and make unfit our fitting in.
He will be the one we judge and label, and all who are not our kind, and try to throw away.
But we can’t be free of him.
Even as he lives on the edge of us he passes through the center of us.
This queer savior, this noncompliant master, this misfit, is the uncaged Word made flesh, whose ways are not ours.
Beneath our fragile costumes of class and sect, in our honest lives undressed,
ill-fitting and not right, unpacked and unconformable, there,
there, is our place in him, and our salvation.
Prayer
Lord of Life, baptize us again in the sea of your love where we release our useless fears and relax into your mercy. Inside this new love we die to all that is false. By your power made perfect in weakness, awaken us to the mystery of life. Speak to us again the truth of our deepest identity hidden in you: "You are my child whom I love, with you I am well pleased."
