I have checked the records, and over my years here at St. David the King, I’ve given more than 400 different homilies. I put in the word “different” just because I realize that to many of you, some of those 400 homilies probably ended up sounding kind of similar. But really, they were at least intended to be different. And in all those years, I’ve never, I think, had anyone walk out or get angry because of a homily. I have seen a few people rush out during a homily carrying a child, so I assume it was the child who needed to leave, but it may have been an excuse for the grownup to get out. But all kidding aside, I’m relieved that no one has ever had that reaction, since the goal of all of us here at this parish is to get people to come, not to drive them away.
But Jesus had a little more courage in this area than I do, I think. Because with some regularity in the gospel he did not hesitate to say things that he knew would infuriate people. You might remember that in last week’s gospel reading, Jesus was speaking to this same crowd in his hometown and they loved what he said, when he said things that made them feel good. But this week with a few harmless-sounding remarks that sound kind of obscure to us, suddenly they have moved on to driving him out of town and wanting to kill him.
What happened here? I think the button he pushed was the one that in the gospels always seems to have been the one thing that most angered his listeners when he did get them angry. Here’s what it was: He told them that the people they considered their enemies, the worst kind of outsiders, were not enemies that God was going to come in and vanquish. In fact, far from it. Instead, Jesus tells them stories about God particularly caring for those outsiders, loving them as much as anyone. Not only were they equal, but sometimes they were more deserving of God’s grace than the people who felt that they were God’s chosen ones, the only chosen ones.
We don’t understand all the significance of Jesus pointing out that God loved someone called Naaman the Syrian. But by telling the story of when a soldier of Syria was healed by the prophet Elisha, Jesus was pointing out that even someone from a country that had once occupied yours, someone of a different nationality and a different religion, even someone in addition completely unclean because of a disease, God brings blessings to them — and not just that, he’s implying that his listeners also have to be prepared to see them the way God sees them, and to treat them the same way, too. This was apparently news to them. Jesus’s listeners up to this day thought that whenever the Messiah came he would vanquish their enemies, not serve them. We can’t identify with the history of how this congregation felt about Syrians but Jesus could. The people in this gospel were people Jesus knew and had grown up with his whole life, so maybe he had a particular insight into all their prejudices and hatreds. So he knew exactly what he was doing when he pushed this particular button and provoked so much anger and resentment, which they suddenly then refocused on him.
We live in an age when anger and resentment seem to be everywhere, although maybe this gospel is showing us that’s nothing new. But some of that anger is provoked the same way Jesus provoked it, by stirring up feelings about people who seem like enemies, getting people angry about other people somehow getting more than they deserve. What does it mean for us? It’s not that we shouldn’t ever get angry, because some things are genuinely unjust and infuriating. But Jesus is demonstrating today that all anger isn’t righteous anger, far from it. Anger is apparently rarely the answer. 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, the God of our enemies and those we don’t trust or like. Their fate matters to God, and so maybe, it should matter to us. God stands up for them, and we need to, too.
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, whether we want to do it or not. 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 really don’t want to love is always the next step, and it’s a hard one.