We have images in our mind of Jesus preaching, and in those images, the preaching is usually going over very well. There are paintings of the sermon on the mount where Jesus is addressing an enormous crowd, somehow without benefit of any amplification, and everyone in that crowd of thousands is rapt in attention, hanging on his every word.
But Jesus, of course, unlike most of the rest of us who stand up here and preach, he wasn’t always concerned about his preaching being well received and generally liked. When he needed to, he could provoke strong reactions. Of course, people could be spellbound and inspired by his teaching, but at times, he could also make people angry enough to want to kill him.
Today, we hear part two of a sermon in the temple where he did both things on the very same day. If you think back to last weekend, you heard Part 1 of this homily that Jesus gave, the one where he picked up the scroll to do the reading from the prophet Isaiah and told his listeners in the temple that he was there standing in front of them to fulfill what the prophet Isaiah had foretold. So far, he had his listeners with him all the way: the Messiah was right here in this small town, people thought, he was convincing, and people couldn’t wait to hear what was next.
But quickly the scene turns ugly. What infuriated people so fast, how could devoted religious people turn into an angry mob in a matter of a few minutes? These references that Jesus makes about two Old Testament prophets are a little obscure to us, but they weren’t obscure to his listeners. The basic drift of what Jesus said was this: If I am the Messiah, I have come to lead everyone, not just you here in this temple and others like you, but everyone. And not just some vague kind of everyone, but the people you distrust and shun the most. So he tells a story about those great prophets in Israel’s past, and about how they cured people and were accepted — except that the people who accepted and honored them were not Jews but by people Jews saw as outsiders, the unclean, political enemies, foreigners. All Jesus has to do is remind his listeners that God embraces all without distinction whenever God wants to, and suddenly this was not the Messiah they wanted. They wanted someone who would vanquish every one of Israel’s enemies. Not someone who would be a servant to everyone.
Jesus tells everyone today that prophets don’t get listened to in their own home towns, and maybe that is prophets know exactly how their home towns work, how they draw boundaries around themselves, how strongly they feel about who belongs there and who doesn’t. He knew that there are very few ways to get people angry faster than to question whatever system they have for blocking people out from their sympathy, from their neighborhoods, or from their faith.
It is easy to separate ourselves from the residents of this tiny town of 200 people so long ago. Wanting to kill someone after some words were spoken seems extreme. But before you dismiss them too quickly, the words “death threat” shouldn’t seem foreign to us in these angry and divided times. I typed them into Google last weekend and saw death threats against reporters for writing stories from a point of view people disagreed with, there were death threats for both sides involved in the confrontation between Catholic students and Native Americans in Washington a couple of weeks ago, death threats for the first black mayor in England.
If you think these are just crazy people who get so upset, I suspect you could probably also get quite a reaction in any neighborhood where you suggest that more outsiders should be given opportunities to live there, or in a workplace where you decide to ask why more people of other races aren’t being hired. Same for saying things on behalf of people with mental illnesses and prisoners and immigrants and political refugees and gay people. Go too far saying things about those on the outside in the wrong place, like on Twitter or maybe almost anywhere, and you will find yourself surprisingly unpopular.
What does this gospel story mean for us, what does it mean for this anger and resistance that we encounter in ourselves or that we see all around us? I hope that it does not mean that we all need to be prophets like Jesus; we have too many people already who think it is their job to get everyone angry and outraged. But perhaps what Jesus, as always, is trying to tell us, is not that we need to get people angry, but that we need to remember what the love he preached is actually about. Even the pushiest prophet in our tradition, and today Jesus is definitely being pushy, those prophets are preaching a God who is nothing but love, and who therefore is always pushing us to our limits with how limitless and undiscriminating that love is. Our God is a God of the broken and the cast aside, our enemies and those we don’t trust or like. Their fate matters to God, and so maybe, it should matter to us.
So a real prophet, underneath the words that get under our skin, is always pushing the circle outwards to include more people in our range of vision. God doesn’t want restrictions placed on love. In fact, Paul tells us in that second reading that if we love, prophets are unnecessary, we wouldn’t ever need these people calling us to account because love will already have shown us the right thing to do. There is the message of Jesus and all the prophets in a nutshell, even though it makes us and everyone else angry at times: loving the people you don’t really want to love is always the next step for all of us.