Human nature

Still catching up... Today, I am struck by the section in the NT reading for 3/20. This is the section in Luke where Jesus states that a prophet is never accepted in his hometown. (Luke 4:16-30). I know I have written about this before, but Luke's expanded account of the interaction gives more richness to the story and allows a greater expansion of ideas.



It's hard to imagine gathering up a man and trying to throw him off a cliff simply because he has said he is God's chosen one. I try to think of the anger that leads the mob to do such a thing, and then I try to think of the etiology of that anger. I put myself in the place of the person sitting at the synagogue, looking across the rows at the face of the "chosen one" and assess how I would feel.



Here I am, having gone to the synagogue my whole life, knowing other people in my temple, including the man who says he is the chosen one. What would I think? Would I be frightened for the purity of my faith, because suddenly someone I know, someone I have worked beside, and who cannot possibly, therefore, be the chosen one (because he is the same level as I, who am not chosen in God's eyes), suddenly slaps my faith and says that he is? Would I feel responsible for making sure that scourge of my faith does not infect other people who don't know this man personally? Would I be angry because, well, why him? Why not me? Would there be any chance at all I might believe him? Would he just simply piss me off, given his presumption?

I think it is a combination of all those things. I think that Jesus obviously knew this, which is why He realized that miracles would be to no avail. In fact, they might work exactly opposite. Refusing to work miracles, refusing to create more strife (given His knowledge of human nature), was, in fact, a loving act. The rest of the story, and how He slips away at the end, given what we know of the entirety of His life, seems somewhat comical. I can almost imagine it as an old black and white keystone cops movie. But in the end, the story gives us a glimpse not only of human nature, but how well Jesus understands it, and how well He loves despite it.