A Fresh Perspective - 12/14/07
Jesus comes as both the bearer of God's peace and the disturber of the peace. One of the ways he disturbs our peace is that he disturbs our nationalistic, narrow, exclusivist beliefs about God. The most poignant text on this is Luke 4. Jesus, in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth, identifies his vocation in terms of Isaiah 61: proclaiming good news to the poor, opening the eyes of the blind, freeing the captives, releasing the oppressed, and announcing the year of the Lord's favor (the year of Jubilee). Luke says that the people spoke well of him and were pleased with his gracious words.
But Jesus went on to remind them of the time when Elijah was sent to a Gentile woman in Sidon, but not to any of the widows in Israel. And he told them of the time when Elisha healed the leper Naaman, a Gentile from Syria, but healed none of the lepers in Israel. The very people who were initially pleased with his words were now furious and tried to throw him off a cliff. What turned the tide? As long as God's grace was offered to the poor and the oppressed in Israel - these were gracious words. But when Jesus extended God's grace to Israel's enemies they were ready to kill him. When you go messin' with people's beliefs you can get into trouble.
They wanted God all to themselves. Jesus disturbed their belief in a tribal God. They had forgotten that they were singled out so that through them all the peoples of the world could be blessed. Many Christians today do the same thing. They think God is the sole property of their group - their denomination, their creed or confession, or their church.
Jesus made heroes of the Samaritans in some of his stories, the most famous one being the parable of the Good Samaritan. The holy place of the Samaritans was Mt. Gerizim, not Jerusalem, and they had a different Bible than the Hebrews (they regarded as scripture only the first five books of the Law, and their version was considerably different from the Jewish Torah). Yet Jesus set the Good Samaritan before his fellow Jews as an example of true religion.
God plays no favorites. God has no nationalistic ties. God does not favor one nation or race or group over another. As a Baptist, I almost always have to identify the kind of Baptist I am to people who do not know me, because so many Baptists these days are of a kind who think that God belongs exclusively to them.
The Jesus of the Gospels disturbs all peace based on such theological narrowness and prejudice. This false peace has to be abandoned before we can experience the real peace that comes through the Prince of Peace, who through his death and resurrection, becomes the bearer of God's peace to all people.
Chuck Queen is Senior Pastor of Immanuel Baptist Church, Frankfort. You can access his sermons and past articles at www.ibcfrankfort.com. He welcomes your comments at cqueen@fewpb.net.