A prophet is not without honour...

I was at a fairly mainstream but non-traditional Anglican Church in east London on Sunday—mostly singles and young families. We had a good, thoughtful, and well presented sermon about the offence taken by the people of Nazareth at the wisdom and mighty works of Jesus (Matt. 13:53-58). I tried not to take offence at it but failed.

What was the offence?

The argument was that the people were offended at Jesus because he did what biblical prophets—John the Baptist, for example—typically do: he called them to repentance. So the message for us is that we all have to get over the hurdle of repentance if we are going to enjoy the blessings of the gospel.

(Ironically, the service concluded with the baptism of three babies, whose parents and sponsors were told that baptism is first of all a burial of the old person. I have no great objection to infant baptism as a hangover from our Christian past, but it can’t mean the same thing as adult baptism.)

There is, I admit, some point to the argument. A call to repentance is certainly in the narrative background.

• John called people to repent in view of the impending action of God, to bear fruit “in keeping with repentance”; and Jesus begins his ministry with the same stern summons to Israel: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matt. 4:17; cf. Mk. 1:4, 15).
• The current generation of Jews refuses to respond to the prophetic message, whatever the modus operandi or mood or lifestyle of the prophet. If the prophet sings a dirge, they do not mourn. They dismissed the ascetic John as a man possessed by a demon. And if the prophet plays a flute, do they jump up to dance? No, they don’t. Jesus comes eating and drinking, and they say, “Look at him! A glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!” (Matt. 11:16-19). Then he roundly denounces the cities of Chorazin and Bethsaida because, even though “mighty works” were done there, they did not repent. “I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you” (Matt. 11:24).
• After the incident in Nazareth, Jesus sends out the disciples. They will be received in some places, rejected in others. They travel through the towns and villages of Israel, proclaiming “that people should repent. And they cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and healed them” (Mk. 6:12-13).

But this is not why, when he comes back home and teaches in the synagogue, everyone “stumbled (eskandalizonto) over him.”

Nothing is said in the preceding stories of exorcisms and healings to suggest that he opened with a call to repentance. He may have done, but that is not the issue.

The “offence” appears to have to do with the person of Jesus.

Stumbling over Jesus

When the disciples of John ask whether Jesus is the one who is to come, he effectively identifies himself with the anointed prophet-liberator of Isaiah 61:1-3: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them” (Matt. 11:4-5). Then he adds, “Blessed is the one who does not stumble (skandalisthēi) over me” (11:6*).

He warns against causing one of the “little ones who believe in me to stumble” (18:5*). The disciples will suffer and be hated by the nations for the sake of Jesus’ name, and many of them will “stumble” (24:9-10). The disciples will “stumble” because of Jesus (26:31, 33).

So the Nazarenes “stumbled over” Jesus not because he has told them to repent but because they can’t get their heads around his new and other status. They are astonished, but not so much that he speaks with remarkable wisdom and does mighty works. The first question they ask is: where (pothen) did he acquire these skills? Matthew has them ask the question twice: “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? … Where then did this man get all these things?” (Matt. 13:54-56). He has become an outsider to them, an opponent.

The point is much more sharply made in Luke’s version of the story (Lk. 4:16-30). Jesus has received the Spirit of the Lord to fulfil the vocation of Isaiah’s prophet-liberator. The audience is amazed, but he immediately turns it against them: they represent Israel humiliated by the faith of the widow of Zarephath and Naaman the Syrian. “When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath” (4:28).

A prophet like Jeremiah

The saying about a prophet not being without honour “except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household” (Mk. 6:4) is not attested elsewhere, but the ESV has a cross-reference to a passage in Jeremiah.

The prophet is “the son of Hilkiah, one of the priests who were in Anathoth in the land of Benjamin” (Jer. 1:1). He has heard that YHWH is about to bring disaster upon his people:

A voice, a rumor! Behold, it comes!—a great commotion out of the north country to make the cities of Judah a desolation, a lair of jackals. (Jer. 10:22; cf. 11:11)

The “men of Anathoth” turn against Jeremiah and seek his life, but YHWH will “bring disaster upon the men of Anathoth, the year of their punishment” (11:23). Jeremiah laments the endless suffering of the land because of the presence of wickedness, but he is told that there is worse to come: “because even your brothers and the household of your father, even they rejected you…” (12:6* LXX).

So we have here the type of the prophet, sent to address the unrighteousness of Israel, who is violently opposed by the people of his home town, who is without honour among his relatives and in his own house.

Since the typology is found elsewhere in the Synoptic Gospels—the teaching about gehenna and the action in the temple come to mind—it seems likely that Jesus’ saying echoes the story.

Who stumbles over Jesus?

OK, so maybe it’s not really about repentance. But why not preach a sermon about people today stumbling over or being offended by the person of Jesus?

My bigger frustration with the sermon was that no attempt was made to locate Jesus in the story of Israel. I’m pretty sure neither Israel nor the Jews were mentioned. There was a standard old perspective apology for the Old Testament as a compilation of pointers to the coming of Jesus, who otherwise may be lifted out of his historical setting and presented to the modern person as basically a mythical—arguably gnostic—saviour figure.

We can’t afford to keep doing that.

The prophetic call to repentance is firmly lodged in the story of a severe political-religious crisis for first century Israel that would culminate in war against Rome. It is directed principally at the Jerusalem establishment, representing that current “evil and adulterous generation” of Jews which would bring this very mundane disaster upon the nation (Matt. 11:16; 12:39, 45; 17:17; 23:36; 24:34).

It is specifically this “generation” of “Judeans”—the term better captures the historical focus—which refuses either to mourn or dance in response to the prophets sent to it (11:16).

Unrepentant cities such as Chorazin and Bethsaida will be devastated in the course of the war. In this story, it is not eternal separation from a loving God or torment in hell that is to be feared but the decimation of a population and the ruin of national life.

Similarly, Jesus is the anointed prophet-liberator who will deliver Israel from its current captivity to unclean, corrupting, debilitating foreign powers.

We do considerable violence to the witness of the Gospel writers if we remove him from this narrative. Yes, we need to persuade people to reckon with the person of Jesus who gave his life as a ransom for many in Israel (Mk. 10:45), but not in a way that obliterates the offensive historical person in the process.