WHY PROPHETS CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN – Part II

It is often said that behind every successful man is a proud wife and surprised mother-in-law. But behind the successful prophet, Jesus, was an embarrassed mother and jealous and ashamed brothers and sisters. He was out prophesying, teaching, preaching, healing, performing mighty acts far above his inherited station in life. They thought he was crazy and tried to take him home to end their embarrassment at his unauthorized upward mobility.

Well, he did go home, not then, but later. In fact he had moved to balmy Capernaum on the northwest shore of the Sea of Galilee where he bought or rented a house. (A good move in my opinion!) It was in Capernaum and other places his fame began to spread. People marveled at his parables. He raised from the dead Jairus’ daughter, saying, “Talitha cumi – little girl, arise.” And she did.

The woman suffering from the flow of blood all her life touched the hem of his garment and was healed by his divine energy. The Gadarene demoniac was liberated by Jesus who seized his many demons and cast them into the 2000 pigs which ran wildly off the cliff into the sea. All that and more in Capernaum and Galilee.

It was then he went home – home, that is to Nazareth, where he grew up. But as Thomas Wolfe famously said, “You can’t go home again.” If that’s true for many of us, it’s especially true for prophets. If Robert Frost claimed “home is the place, where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in,” for prophets, as the song says, “It ain’t necessarily so!!”

Not so among the dear hearts and gentle people of Jesus’ home town, Nazareth. That Sabbath morning in the synagogue, they eagerly waited to hear what their now-famous home town boy would say. At their invitation he read the scripture – yes, read not just any scripture, but from the prophet Isaiah.

He read: The afflicted are comforted and the comfortable are afflicted. Those captive to oppressive powers are hearing news of liberation. Political prisoners have hope of being set free. The blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk and the poor and destitute have a revived expectation of the good life of this world. He finished reading what was popularly known as a prophecy of what the coming messiah would do. Sitting down to begin his sermon, he said, these prophecies are being fulfilled in what I have been doing.

At the beginning of the sermon they were amazed and astonished at his gracious words. But prophets cannot really go home again, because they awaken the hometown folk to how dull and stagnate and placid they had been while one of their own was stirring up the multitudes, making a name for himself, advancing well beyond his caste and class and place in life. Who does he think he is? Does he even think he is the Messiah? What blasphemy.

The jealous, incredulous hometown folk begin to ask, where did he get all this wisdom? Is this not Joseph’s son? Are not his four brothers and sisters here with us? We never heard any of this when he and Joseph were building houses and making furniture. He never studied to be a rabbi. He was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He was not even, as some American “royalty”, “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” They were scandalized by his humanity. He was only a carpenter, a builder. He was too human. Their eyes glazed with provincialism, familiarity had bred contempt. They were expecting a super messiah.

In their eyes, in their body language, in their restive murmuring, Jesus felt the mounting opposition. He said, no doubt you are saying, physician heal yourself, or heal your own people before you run off the Capernaum to heal strangers. Charity begins at home. And if you heal here we could be a first century Lourdes generating enormous revenue for us all. They were beginning to sound like profit-motive prophets.

So Jesus quoted another proverb affirming no prophet is acceptable in his hometown or family. Anchored in his and their background, they cannot see his vision of a new future in the foreground. Like many people today, they did not know that it is not the footprint of the age in primeval mud that bespeaks our true humanity, but the footprint of the man on the moon. It is not what humans descend from that matters, but what they ascend to. But the hometown folk couldn’t see it.

But outsiders often can see it. There were plenty of widows in Israel but Elijah helped the outsider, Gentile widow of Sidon, raising her son from the dead because she had faith and expectancy.

There were plenty of lepers in Israel, but it was Naaman, commander of the enemy Syrian army that Elisha cured of leprosy, because Naaman had faith and expectancy that the “prophecy-hardened” Israelites had forsaken. That, said Jesus, is why I preached and healed and taught in Capernaum and Gadara and the Decapolis – because they had faith and expectancy.

The life of a prophet is not easy, and the true prophet usually cannot go home again. Those dear hearts and gentle people of the hometown Nazareth synagogue were filled with rage. They rose up and forced him out of the city and tried to throw him off the cliff. But bearing a moral majesty in his countenance, he walked through the hostile mob unscathed and taught the multitudes with existential authority without footnotes.

(to be continued)