When Grace Offends

March 24, 2025 - Monday of the Third Week of Lent

Luke 4:24-30

Jesus’ preaching in his hometown ends with listeners getting furious. What made them so angry? What made young Saul so angry that he persecuted the followers of Christ? The fact that God could care more about the Gentiles than about his own people. The two examples that Jesus brought in his sermon from the Old Testament are about a Sydonian widow, and a Syrian military officer, who although Gentiles received God’s grace. The widow was saved from death by the miraculous provision of food and the Syrian soldier was cleansed of his leprosy by bathing himself seven times in the Jordan river.

Elijah and Elisha were Jewish prophets and yet through them God saved two Gentile people. Jesus was a Jew and yet, many non-Jews received God’s grace during his ministry on earth. The apostles of Christ were all Jews and yet they brought the Gospel to the whole world. ’Salvation comes from the Jews’, said Jesus to the Samaritan woman. But many Jews would add to Jesus’ statement that it should come first of all for the Jews. For most of them the term salvation equaled liberation from the Gentile occupation of their land.

The people suffered a lot from the hands of the Romans. Few years after Jesus was born it was from Syria that the Roman legions came to Galilee to crush the rebellion of the Jews. Should God not crush the Romans instead of saving them? The saving of the Sydonian widow happened when there was famine in the land of Israel as a punishment for their sins. Did Jesus bring that story to indicate that they were also sinners like their ancestors in need of salvation? All of these infuriated the people and they ‘drove him out of the town’ to kill him.

This incident in Nazareth at the beginning of Jesus ministry prepares us for Jesus’ passion and death in Jerusalem that ended his ministry. He was rejected by his own people, handed over to the Gentiles, who brought him out of the city gate to the hill of Golgotha and crucified him there. It also prepares us for the experience of the first followers of Christ, who although being Jews were expelled from the Jewish religious gathering.

But Jesus ‘passed through the midst of them and went away’, we read at the end of today’s Gospel. His own people did not succeed in their plan and neither death was able to get hold of Jesus. Christ’s resurrection proclaims that Jesus passed through the gates of death to the fullness of life. And finally, expelled from the synagogue, Jesus’ disciples went to other nations to proclaim the Gospel.

The world can attempt to harm God’s messengers, but God’s message cannot be stopped. No rejection, persecution, or human expectation can limit God’s mercy.