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I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah\u2019s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed\u2014only Naaman the Syrian.\u201d All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. (Luke 4:25-28)

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The home town crowd of this domesticated Jesus may have wished him to \u201cdo here what you did in Capernaum.\u201d\xa0 In other words, bring your show home, we want to be entertained too!\xa0 Not to believe, but just to see what the fuss is about for ourselves\u2014if you really are anything special, that is.\xa0 They had their doubts.\xa0 Our text from today is Jesus\u2019 offensive, roundabout way of saying \u201cno.\u201d

Middle Eastern cultural scholar, Ken Bailey notes how Nazareth was located in \u201cGalilee of the Gentiles\u201d as a Jewish enclave.\xa0 A sort of frontier settler town, really, with a very nationalistic bent.\xa0 In Jesus\u2019 reading of Isaiah from the scroll that began this whole scene, he had omitted key sections about judgement against the Gentiles.\xa0 And now he presumes to tell these nationalistic folks that God\u2019s salvation is for foreigners.\xa0

Jesus is drawing some very clear and stark lines here, and not in the places that his home-town crowd would\u2019ve liked them drawn.\xa0 Clearly, Jesus was no longer one of them.\xa0 He had broken faith with their interpretation of their Bibles.\xa0 They envisioned a wrathful God that they could employ to fight their battles against their foreign, gentile neighbours.\xa0 Jesus proclaims to them a Biblical God who heals and saves indiscriminately, sometimes even choosing foreigners in preference over his own people.\xa0 What a slap in the face!

But also, what a counter-cultural gift for those who might have the ears to hear it.\xa0 God is bigger than our own use for him.\xa0 Jesus is too.\xa0 Jesus is about much more than acting as our own personal body guard, mercenary, or vending machine. \xa0He doesn\u2019t play that role for our countries either, no matter how good and civilized we may think them to be.

You never can quite contain or box-in the Sovereign Lord.\xa0 Otherwise he wouldn\u2019t be very sovereign, would he?\xa0 He does new things and things that are calibrated to his notions of justice, righteousness, flourishing, not ours.\xa0

So always, always again we are invited, especially by these strange, counter-cultural words of Jesus to stop trying to submit God to our will, and to submit to his instead.\xa0 That is an invitation to humble ourselves, open our eyes and ears, and be attentive to the surprising ways that He might move or speak so that instead of using God to build our kingdoms, we might follow him into his kingdom: because he is our Lord and Sovereign King.

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