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They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way (Luke 4:29-30).

Has Jesus ever made you so angry you wanted to throw him off a cliff?

Our Lord\u2019s escape from the angry mob has always fascinated me. How did he do it? One moment the crowd\u2019s got him in their clutches, the next he\u2019s slipping away like a fish through water. Mysterious as that is, Luke does not want us to focus on that part of the story. Its almost an after thought. He draws our attention to the anger of the crowd and the reasons for it.

Let\u2019s summarize the last few devotions. Jesus is a local boy become a celebrity, but in his hometown, he will always be just the son of Joseph. They are afraid he is getting too puffed up with his recent fame. And now he has the audacity to tell them that God\u2019s great plan of redemption will include those outside Israel. Israel has always been God\u2019s gateway to the world. If they can\u2019t handle that, he will simply step over the gate to invite the Gentiles into his redemptive work.

Jesus is inviting the folks in Nazareth to join him in God\u2019s mission in the world, but they will have none of it. The Lord is their God, and they will not share him with any others. Others are simply not good enough. Later, Jesus will explain that those who refuse the invitation lose out (14:15-24). The party will not be delayed or put off. In Christ, God is doing a new thing, putting to death the hostility between Jews and Gentiles, reconciling them both to God through the cross, thus, creating a new humanity (Eph. 2:11-22).

Now, let me return to my opening question: Has Jesus ever made you so angry you wanted to throw him off a cliff? I doubt it.

But I sometimes wonder how different Christians are from the Jews of Nazareth. Certainly, we are all for missions and evangelism. Its not that we want to keep the gospel to ourselves. Yet, churches tend to be closed groups. We will let people hang around with us, but unless they start to look, smell, speak and act like us, they will always be outsiders.

Paul, the apostle, came to understand that the union of Jew and Gentile in the church was central to the work of redemption. The church is the new humanity. It is our calling as Christians to live out this new reality in the church. Human divisions such as language and culture and ethnicity are irrelevant. At least, they are supposed to be. But often, they are not. We hang onto them in subtle ways. The memory that someone came late to the party remains with us.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that becoming a multi-racial church is very difficult. People are unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary for this to happen. We want people to become like us; we do not want to change.

How many of us make it a goal to develop friendships with people who are different from us in ethnic and social and economic background? Are we willing for our church customs and traditions to change so that we enfold new members? If we are not willing to do the real work of forming a new humanity, are we really very different from those who wanted to throw Jesus off the cliff?

When Jesus said, \u201cToday, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing\u201d (Luke 4:21), he was offering them the \u2018good news\u2019, the Lord\u2019s favour (18-19). But they could not accept that they needed redemption. This story calls us to remember that each of us needs to respond to the good news; we all need the Lord\u2019s favour, his redemption. All of us are sinners.

And having received redemption, we are taken by the Holy Spirit into the community of Christ, which we call the church. This community is constantly growing up, to use the language of Ephesians 4, becoming the new humanity. Churches are not meant to be static, locked in traditions, but communities always finding new ways to welcome the stranger, to break the barriers that divide.