Monday of the Third Week of Lent

Lectionary: 237

"Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place...." 
They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong.

Lent leads inevitably to Holy Week and the climactic Friday; the gospels direct us into the heart of the conflict between God and his people. Even as we celebrate the mercy of our Savior and the salvation he gives to us, we must stare directly at the tragedy of our own sinful choices. 

In today's Gospel Jesus has come to his own native region, where he and his family are well known. "His native place" implies more than a single lifetime of knowing this attractive young man; he and his people and his ancestors and his neighbors and all the intermarriages of a settled community reach back many years, at least as far as the return of the exiles from Babylon. 

Inevitably, following a forced migration, some survivors return. Some Cherokee Indians, after the United States Army marched them from North Carolina to Oklahoma, returned to their native mountains to reunite with those who had fled into the hills and hid in caves. Likewise, some Jews, when they were driven out of Judea, fled to Egypt while others were taken to Babylon. Although the Jewish Diaspora left Hebrew-speaking settlements from India to Spain, some returned to Judea and Galilee, with Jesus's ancestors among them. They knew each other. 

That kind of knowledge is both liberating and confining. It liberates by providing one with a strong sense of membership in a familiar locale. People are bound together by their language, cuisine, songs, dances, and labors. There are a million puzzles already solved, a million questions already answered. Problems must come from elsewhere; from invaders, disease, climate change, or outsiders who wonder, "Why do you do it this way?" 

When Jesus returned from his forty day sojourn in the wilderness -- among the wild animals, tempted by Satan, and assisted by angels -- he was a changed man. And they didn't know what to make of him. 

Many American families have endured a similar shock when their young adults returned from Afghanistan or Iraq. They went away as boys and girls; they returned as strangers with familiar, sometimes haunted, faces. "Oh, Johnny, we hardly knew you." their families say. 

Jesus, however, was changed by happiness. If he had been sorely tried in the desert, he had also triumphed and was prepared to face the greater challenge that would come in Jerusalem. For now, however, he met his own people and saw by their expressions that he had become another Jeremiah. Suddenly he knew that "no prophet is accepted in his own native place." 

He was meeting the dark side of freedom, the unwillingness and frank inability to adapt, adjust, or go with the flow. The Galileans liked the man they had known, they didn't like this new one. To save their way of life, he had to be driven out. 

As we undergo our own forty day sojourn in the wilderness of Lent, we ask the Lord to show us the joy of his life, death, and resurrection; and to make us a new people, even at the cost of estrangement from our old ways and habits.