Luke 4:21-30
“Doctor’s Orders”
February 3, 2019 – Fourth Sunday after Epiphany
They knew me as the little boy who forced the pastor to stop preaching one Sunday, come down to where his sons and I were seated in the first row, and scold us for whispering, squirming around, and shooting little paper “footballs” across the pew to each other. I came home from college after my first year and stood up to preach in the little church in which I grew up. I know now they couldn’t have expected much.
I also recognize now how sure and self-important I felt, with a couple of theology and philosophy classes under my belt. I thought I had the answers everyone had been waiting for someone to bring them for years. From this vantage in life I see how silly I was and how kind everyone was to me afterward, with compliments and encouragement for a sermon that was certainly not very good. I also realize that most of them probably weren’t even truly, seriously listening to whatever it was I said back then.
So in just a tiny respect, I identify with Jesus in our text, coming home to preach in His home congregation there in Nazareth. The reading from Luke 4 began today with the verse we ended with last Sunday, verse 21, Jesus telling them that the Scripture He had just read from Isaiah “has been fulfilled in your hearing.” As I said last week, Jesus used Isaiah’s words to announce that He had come to proclaim good news, to heal, to bring God’s salvation to the world. But to the folks of Nazareth He must have sounded like a little boy who had grown up a little too full of himself.
This morning we move on to what they had to say in verse 22. First, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Meaningless praise for the local boy back home makes perfect sense, like the empty compliments I got in my own home church on my attempt at preaching. Jesus’ “gracious words” which amazed them might better be translated, “words full of grace,” full of that message of God’s favor which He read from Isaiah in verse 19. They were amazed at what this young man they knew so well was telling them about God’s grace.
It’s hard to understand the transition to the last part of verse 22, “They said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’” The first part of the verse sounds like those in the synagogue were pleased and complimentary to Jesus. The last verse sounds like they think He’s gotten too big for His britches. “He’s just the son of the carpenter. We all saw him as a little tyke with sawdust in his hair, playing in the streets. Who does he think he is now?”
To smooth that transition from praise to offense in verse 22, some interpreters want to translate the first part of it in a way that’s possible but unusual. Instead of “spoke well,” they would make it, “spoke against.” Instead of “amazed,” it would be something like “flabbergasted,” or “aghast.” It might work and would make the Nazareth attitude toward Jesus uniformly negative. But a mixed message—first praise, then contempt—is still the most natural way to read how Nazareth responded to the carpenter’s kid come home to preach.
In any case, unlike me, Jesus immediately knew His hometown crowd was not really going to hear anything He had to say. So He put the matter to them not in the grand words of a prophet, but with verse 23 in a homely proverb expressing their small town, localist, self-centered point of view, “Doctor, cure yourself!” You may know it from the King James, “Physician, heal thyself!” We might say, “Charity begins at home.”
Jesus understood they weren’t believing Him because they wanted, they expected Him to do some of the miracles for them that He had done elsewhere. If this local boy really had some divine grace to offer, then He should demonstrate it there in Nazareth like He had on the other side of the lake in Capernaum, which ultimately became a new home base for Him. In verse 24, Jesus followed up with another folk proverb quoted in each of the Gospels in different contexts, “No prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” He’s just too familiar, too easy to dismiss. We say, “Familiarity breeds contempt.”
I saw a new doctor last year. He’s young. To me he looks like he’s 19 years old. My first reaction was to dismiss him as wet behind the ears. I can imagine how much more I might feel that way if he were one of the young people who grew up here in Valley Covenant church. If I had seen him at age 5 almost set the sanctuary on fire playing with one of the candle lighters or dealt with him in middle school goofing off and teasing the girls in Confirmation class, it would be even harder to take him seriously when he talks to me about my blood pressure. That’s kind of how it was with Jesus in Nazareth. They thought the boy they knew so well couldn’t really be serious about saving them.
One form of that proverb about the physician says, “no physician heals those who know him.” I think our medical people in our congregation would tell you that’s right. It is usually a bad idea to treat members of your own family, except perhaps in an emergency. The doctor would have a hard time being objective and the family member would have a hard time accepting that doctor’s knowledge and authority if the treatment is difficult. That too is how it was with Jesus in Nazareth.
The temptation for us at this point is to distance ourselves from the Nazareth crowd, to emphasize how different were are from them and how much we love and listen to Jesus. What we forget is how, for most of us Christians, Jesus is really, really familiar to us. We’ve gone over and over for much of our lives the story of His birth, His boyhood adventure in Jerusalem, His teaching and His miracles, His death and resurrection. As our Sunday School teachers can tell you, even some of our youngest kids are already familiar with and can tell you those stories. We may be closer than we think to a kind of familiar contempt for Jesus which makes us unable or unwilling to really hear what He says to us.
That’s why the next verses of what Jesus said in Nazareth are so important for us to hear. Instead of trying to ingratiate Himself with them, to get them on His side, He antagonized them with a couple of examples from the Hebrew Scriptures which emphasized the fact that they weren’t going to see any of His miracles in Nazareth.
Many of us read these stories from I and II Kings in Kingdoms earlier this year. God punished Israel with a drought and, as Jesus said, widows and children and poor people were suffering all over the land. But God sent His prophet Elijah off to a foreign widow up north, in what is now Lebanon, to miraculously give her flour and oil to eat. Later on, when there were plenty of Israelites suffering from leprosy, God used the prophet Elisha to heal Naaman, the commander of army of Syria, Israel’s worst enemy. God’s charity, His grace, did not begin at home at all. The Great Physician did not heal His own “family.” Instead He sent His favor to outsiders, to people on the margins of Israel’s community.
Those stories are how Jesus chose to tell His hometown how God’s grace actually works. The “gracious words” of our Lord are not just for those with the inside track, those who grew up knowing all about Him, those who have always felt themselves loved and favored. No, the grace of God, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, is for those who truly and deeply understand that they don’t really deserve it, who get the fact that, because of their sins, their place really should be on the outside looking in.
Jesus is a gracious doctor, who has a healing prescription and therapy for us. But His “doctor’s orders” will do us no good if we cannot accept them, if we will not listen and carry them out. If we are so familiar with the life and words of Jesus that what He says doesn’t ever change our minds, our hearts, or our actions, then His medicine is not getting into us. His grace is not working the miracles He wants to work in us. It’s only when we constantly, regularly admit that we are sick sinners in need of healing, that we can accept Jesus’ words and receive His grace.
That’s why we confess our sins before coming to Communion. As one of our Covenant founders would say, the Body and Blood of Jesus is medicine for our souls, healing us of our sinful ways. But we aren’t really taking that medicine if we do not first admit how much we need it, how deep and pervasive is the disease of our sin.
Part of our sinfulness can be that same kind of selfish, local pride that infected the people of Nazareth. They were deeply offended by what Jesus said about God’s grace toward foreigners. They were so upset they tried to kill Him by forcing Him out to the edge of the hill on which Nazareth was built. They wanted to throw Him off the cliff. There is something inside of us which may get nearly that upset if someone suggests God loves people in other countries more than He loves us. Isn’t America the Christian heart of the world, the “city on a hill” (like Nazareth!), the light of freedom to the nations? No, no we’re not, if we will only admit it. We are a country of flawed and prejudiced and sinful men and women just like every other country on earth.
If Jesus came to preach here today, He might tell us a story about how God is doing miracles among people in China or in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where there are twice as many Covenant people and churches as there are in the United States. He would want us to get over ourselves; to quit imagining that we are special and deserving of God’s grace; to humble ourselves and accept the medicine He has to offer us.
In a weird way, the people of Nazareth had the right idea. The death of Jesus was in fact God’s plan, just not right then. In perhaps the one miracle He did do there, Jesus “passed through the midst of them,” and left. We don’t know exactly what that meant. Maybe God hid Jesus from their eyes. Maybe divine power held them back so He could walk through the crowd. We don’t know how that happened, but we do know that when it came time to die, Jesus would. He died on the Cross and rose again so that He could truly be the Doctor we need, the Great Physician for our souls.
Let’s not force Jesus to pass by us. Let’s quit trying to take hold of Him by force of some right or privilege we think we have. Instead, let us let Him take hold of us. Let’s receive His gracious, healing doctor’s orders. Let us really listen to His words of grace.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, the practice of medicine was just starting to become “scientific.” Physicians began to observe more carefully, to correlate data, to put together how they went about their practice with how things turned out for their patients. In 1846, a Hungarian physician, Ignaz Philipp Semmelweis, was appointed assistant to the director of the First Clinic of Obstetrics in a hospital in Vienna. He was to make rounds, observe and keep records.
Part of those records was the fact that the First Clinic had a much higher maternal mortality rate than the Second Clinic of Obstetrics. More than 10% of the mothers in the First Clinic died of what was then called “childbed fever,” while only 4% of the mothers in the other clinic died that way. Semmelweis figured out why. He eliminated other factors and finally came to realize that in the First Clinic students and teachers were passing directly from doing autopsies to delivering babies. No one really knew about germs then, but Semmelweis theorized that something bad was being carried on the practitioners’ hands, from the corpses to the mothers.
Semmelweis’s solution was easy. His orders were simple. Wash your hands. He made those delivering babies first wash their hands in a chlorinated lime solution, which we now know is a strong disinfectant. The mortality rate in the First Clinic dropped 90%. The problem was that no one outside that one clinic believed him. He published a book of his findings, but it was ignored. He began a crusade to get doctors to wash their hands before delivering babies and he was laughed at around the world. At one point he told a group of doctors,
I have shown how it can be prevented. I have proved all that I have said. But while we talk, talk, talk, gentlemen, women are dying. I am not asking anything world shaking. I am asking you only to wash… For God’s sake, wash your hands.[1]
But no one listened then. Semmelweis ultimately went insane in his lonely crusade. He was sent to an asylum and beaten by the attendants. He contracted and died of the same sort of septicemia from which he was trying to save all those mothers. It’s a sad story about people failing to listen to a wise doctor.
Let’s not be like that. Let’s not be like the people of Nazareth. Let’s not be like the medical community of Semmelweis’ day. Let us be people ready to take Jesus seriously when He diagnoses our sin. Let us accept His prescription of grace, which is for everyone not just the privileged. And let us respond faithfully to His direction for a daily therapy of confession and repentance. Let us follow our good Doctor’s orders.
As we will say in a few moments, we come to this Table of our Lord today, “not because we are strong, but because we are weak… not because we have any claim on the grace of God, but because in our frailty and sin we stand in constant need of His mercy and help.” Come now in that attitude, with that sort of humble heart. Come receive the cure for your soul in the gracious love of Jesus Christ. Come and be healed.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2019 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] 750 Engaging Illustrations for Preachers, Teachers, and Writers edited by Craig Larson (Grand Rapids, Baker Books, 2007), p. 478