Once, walking down a street full of food trucks in Portland, Oregon, I passed a young man working on a new sign to hold up to passers-by. He was so smartly dressed that I wondered if he were there by choice instead of necessity. He also had very good penmanship. When I saw what he was writing on his sign, I was glad to be getting past him before he held it up. “What if I am an angel,” his sign read, “and this is a test?” What a clever young man, I thought.
The remarkable thing about the stranger-loving commands in the Bible is that they appear in the sacred scriptures of Jews and Christians, which are honored by Muslims as well. By all rights, you would expect such scriptures to protect a religious community’s privileges and diminish the rights of those who do not belong to it, but that is not the case. Instead, these communities have chosen to preserve commands that clarify God’s care for outsiders as well as insiders, religious strangers as well as friends.
There is no story in the New Testament that conveys this better than the story of Jesus’s first sermon in his home synagogue at Nazareth. Only Luke tells it. Jesus has just emerged from forty days in the wilderness, where he was sorely tested by self-interest. The devil had suggested all kinds of ways that Jesus could take magnificent care of himself—by turning a stone into a loaf of bread to end his hunger, by becoming king of the world to secure his power, by summoning angels to protect him from all harm. All Jesus had to do was ask, the devil said, and God would make sure that he did not so much as stub a toe.
Jesus resisted all of these blandishments, emerging from the wilderness as weak and lean as a man ever was. His emptiness left plenty of room for the Spirit to fill him up, which it did. Jesus used the strength the Spirit gave him to make his way back home—from the desert in the south, where John the Baptist had baptized him, to his hometown of Nazareth in the north, where his mother, Mary, still lived. If the Bible were a documentary instead of a book, the narrator would speak over a map of all the places Jesus stopped on his way back home, with each place lighting up as he passed through. He taught in synagogues along the way, Luke says, and everyone who heard him was full of praise. When he finally reached the region of Galilee where he had grown up, his reputation had preceded him. It was only a matter of time before he taught in his hometown synagogue, where expectations would be running very high.
“When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up,” Luke says, “he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom.” Jesus was an observant Jew, in other words, but even if he had not been, he would probably have gone to the synagogue on his first weekend back home. Once, when I asked an active churchman why there were so many more men in church on Christmas and Easter than on ordinary Sundays, he said, “Insistent wives and mothers?”
When it came time for the appointed scripture to be read, someone handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah to Jesus. Was he self-conscious? Any other favorite son would have been. Some of the people sitting in front of him were sure to remark on how his voice had changed, while others would note the places where his pronunciation could have been better. Some would not have been listening at all, trying to find the image of the boy they once knew in the face of the man he had become. A few would wonder why he had never married. A few more would slide their eyes over to Mary, watching her watch her boy do his thing.
He was their boy too after all. Plenty of them had kept an eye on him when he was little and Mary was busy with the wash basket or the water bucket. When he had needed scolding they knew they had her permission to do it, and when he had needed comforting they did that too. Even those who had not particularly liked children would have felt possessive of him, now that he had become a famous man. Whatever their relationship to him, they had heard about the things he did on his way back home to them—the surprising sermons, the supernatural healings. They could not wait to find out what he had saved up for them. If Jesus’s hometown crowd was like any other, then the people who helped raise him wanted him to expound the values they held dear. They wanted to know that their investment in him had paid off. They wanted him to make them proud.
Jesus stood up to read, Luke says. He unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and found the place where the assigned verses were written. Then he read them out loud:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. (Luke 4:18–19)
This is not a perfect match with Isaiah 61:1, at least not in modern English translations, but the substance is the same: God anoints prophets to speak and act on God’s behalf, freeing those who are locked down by poverty, tyranny, lack of vision, or broken hearts. Whatever is holding people down, God means to lift up. Whatever is tearing people apart, God means to mend.
A phrase in the last line of the reading—“the year of the Lord’s favor”—would have had special meaning to those in the synagogue that day. It was a direct reference to the jubilee year, described in the book of Leviticus as a divine rebalancing of the economy. Every fiftieth year, the Bible says, slaves shall be freed, prisoners shall be released, debts shall be forgiven, and land sold under pressure shall be returned to its original owner. “You shall proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants,” reads Leviticus 25:10, a verse with such lasting power to lift the human heart that it was cast into the top of the Liberty Bell in 1752.
When Jesus finished reading the passage, he rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down. “The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him,” Luke says. Expectations were very high, and Jesus did not disappoint. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he said.
Starting here, I am going to press “pause” a couple of times, since this is the point at which many Christians stop listening to the story and start running an old tape they have heard a hundred times instead. Before I became a student of the Bible, I was taught that when Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he was telling the people sitting in front of him that he was the Messiah. This infuriated them so much that they hustled him out of the synagogue to go throw him off a cliff. I can still remember the umbrage I took at “the Jews” who were so dead set against Jesus that they could not hear the good news he brought. I say this now to my shame.
Luke’s Gospel tells a different story. In the first place, Jesus never said he was the Messiah. He said that God’s jubilee was under way. In the second place, the people sitting in front of him loved hearing that. “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” Luke says. They turned to one another and said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” They could not believe that the son of someone they knew had turned out so well. It was like being from the pope’s hometown.
I know that some Christians interpret the question about Jesus’s parentage as an insult. To their ears, it was a way of putting Jesus back in his place as the son of a man instead of the Son of God. This is odd for several reasons, not least of which is that “Son of Man” was Jesus’s preferred way of referring to himself. It is also odd to presume ill will in people who just a moment ago spoke well of Jesus and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. The only sense I can make of it is that such interpreters are looking for something—anything—that might explain what happened next.
What happened next was that Jesus blew his lid. He may have had excellent reasons for doing it, but he was the one who turned the congregation against him—first by accusing them of skepticism about him and then by reminding them that God did not belong to them.
“Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’” he said to them, though they quoted no such thing. “And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the thin
gs that we have heard you did at Capernaum.” If you believe Jesus was a mind reader—or was really good at reading body language—then his accusations may make perfect sense to you, but no one said anything like that to him out loud. Strictly speaking, it was Jesus who turned on the hometown crowd and not the other way around. Right after telling them that God’s jubilee was under way, he assumed their distrust of his good news—not their distrust of his divine status, mind you, but their distrust that God was about to act in a decisive way. He was not finished either. “Truly I tell you,” he went on, “no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.”
This is another good place to pause the old tape, since you might not have noticed that Jesus said “prophet” and not “messiah.” As long as he was on a roll, why not accuse the people in front of him of doubting that he was God’s anointed one? But Jesus did not say “messiah.” He said “prophet,” which can change the way you hear what he said after he read the passage from Isaiah: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” That sounds like something a prophet might say: God’s promises are coming true. But for whatever reason—mind reading, body language, or the prophetic ability to speak the future—Jesus assumed that no one in his hometown believed him. When he looked at the people in front of him, he saw squinty eyes. He saw “prove it” written all over their faces.
I honestly do not know what was going on in Jesus’s mind—or in Luke’s mind either, as he decided how to tell this story—but what Jesus said next was what drove his listeners to rage. “Here’s the truth,” he said in so many words. “There were hungry widows right here when it didn’t rain for three and a half years and there was famine all through the land, but God didn’t send the prophet Elijah to any of them. God sent him to a widow in Sidon. There were also a lot of miserable lepers right here during the time of the prophet Elisha, but he didn’t heal any of them. The only person he healed was Naaman the Syrian.”
Everyone listening to him would have known these famous stories of God’s deliverance. The stories may have been so familiar, in fact, that people had stopped thinking about the widow or the leper as religious strangers. Like the magi, these two had been thoroughly assimilated into the hometown congregation’s sacred plot. When Jesus reached back and pulled them into the spotlight again, however, he made a point of their strangeness. Sidon and Syria were foreign countries. Neither the widow nor the leper was an Israelite. They did not speak Israel’s language or worship Israel’s god when God sent prophets to help them. This might have been all right if God had helped everyone in Israel first, but that was not what God did. In these famous stories of God’s deliverance, God chose to help foreigners instead of family. God blessed the strangers and let the family hurt.
“When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage,” Luke says (emphasis mine). They were not furious because Jesus had made special claims for himself. They were furious because he had taken a swing at their sense of divine privilege—and he had used their own scriptures to do it.
If the word “synagogue” makes you think this is a story about Jesus and Jews, it is time to press the pause button again. Jesus was in his home congregation. He was among his own people. If he had been a twenty-first century Christian instead, he might have told the members of his home church that God was free to heal a Taliban fighter without lifting a finger to help thousands of wounded American veterans. He might have told them that God could choose to send someone with a bag of groceries to a Hindu widow living in a trailer park without leaving anything on the doorsteps of her hungry Christian neighbors. Until you let that message sink in, you may never understand why the people in Jesus’s hometown synagogue wanted to throw him off a cliff or why so many Christians have distorted this extremely upsetting story.
Once, in a minor attempt to preach it straight, I suggested that Christians who wanted to take Jesus’s sermon to heart might start by donating some of their outreach funds to a local Muslim community that was trying to buy land for a cemetery or by volunteering at an after-school program at the Laotian Buddhist temple—anything they could think of, really, that might help them mirror God’s indiscriminate love. Luckily, I was preaching in a town with no cliffs.
I am not saying that Christians have a hard time caring for those who are not Christian. It happens all the time. A synagogue burns, and local churches take up a collection for the rebuilding fund. A Muslim girl wearing hijab is threatened in public, and Christians step up to protect her. You hear stories like that all the time, for good reason. Putting oneself at risk for the safety of others is a central Christian teaching. So is laying down one’s life for one’s friends. When Christians act instinctively and self-sacrificially on behalf of those outside the tribe, you can almost hear the angels sing, because someone got the sermon.
But there is a deeper message in the sermon at Nazareth, which is that no one owns God. The great religions may possess genuine revelations of God’s nature and purpose. Their most gifted listeners may truly have discerned a divine call to special purpose, both for themselves and for their communities. Traditions that do not speak of God have certainly perceived truths about the human condition and have conceived inspired ways to transcend it. But whatever we mean when we say “God” is not fully captured by any of these traditions. If it could be, it would not be God.
This can be very difficult for some faithful people to accept, especially those who read their sacred texts selectively. Yet one of the reasons these texts are sacred is because of the cautions in them about trying to lay claim to God. When people of faith reach out for God with sticky fingers, their holy books remind them that possessing God’s word is not the same thing as possessing God. In a familiar passage from the Hebrew Bible, God warns the people against becoming too familiar.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa. 55:8–9)
In the Christian New Testament, Jesus himself admits that he does not know everything there is to know about God. When his disciples ask him to tell them about the end times, he gives them a harrowing description that includes everything but when. “But about that day or hour no one knows,” he says, “neither the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.”
Passages like these protect God’s autonomy, but most of us prefer those that grant us special privilege. For Christians, the most potent one is John 14:6, in which Jesus says, “No one comes to the Father except through me.” Here is the bedrock assurance that Christians alone have access to God. But why is this verse more important than one that comes two chapters earlier in John’s Gospel? “Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me,” Jesus says in John 12:44. Maybe my hearing is off, but those two verses sound different to me. So why do so many Christians know the former saying but not the latter one? Could it be that our favorite verses are the ones that make us feel most right?
“I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.” That is something else Jesus says in John’s Gospel. He does not elaborate, but I like imagining the God of many sheep, many folds, many favorites, many mansions. This is how far my holy envy has brought me: from fearing that Jesus will be mad at me for smelling other people’s roses to trusting that Jesus is the Way that embraces all ways. Because there is only one of me, I can only walk one way at a time, but that does not prevent me from believing that other people might be walking their ways with equal devotion and good will.
No one owns God. God alone knows what is good. For reasons that will never be entirely clear, God has a soft spot for religious strangers, both as agents of divine blessing and recipients of divine grace—to the point that God sometimes chooses one of them over people who believe they should by all rights come first. This is a great mystery, but it does nothing to obscure the great commandment. In
every circumstance, regardless of the outcome, the main thing Jesus has asked me to do is to love God and my neighbor as religiously as I love myself. The minute I have that handled, I will ask for my next assignment. For now, my hands are full.
7
The Shadow-Bearers
O mankind! Truly We created you from a male and a female, and We made you peoples and tribes that you may come to know one another. Surely the most noble of you before God are the most reverent of you. Truly God is Knowing, Aware.
QUR’AN 49:13
When I ask students to rise from their seats during the first week of Religion 101 and write what they already know about the religions we will study on the board, I can predict what they will write under Islam. “Terrorism” will lead the list; “Muhammad,” “9/11,” “Allah,” “ISIS,” “veiled women,” “Saudi Arabia,” and “the Qur’an” will show up somewhere underneath. This helps explain why some Muslim students decide not to add anything more nuanced to the list. They can see which way the wind is blowing. I remember one in particular, a winsome young man with roots in Mali. He asked me not to ask him about being Muslim in class, since he was not ready for his classmates to see him “that way.”
It was not always so. When I first began teaching the class, Islam was only a little more foreign than the other religions on the course plan. The first, failed attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 had receded in memory, leaving most students with the impression that Islam was a religion in the Middle East whose combative followers had brown skin, lived in the desert, and wore flowing white gowns. Few could have guessed that Indonesia has the largest Muslim population in the world or that the majority of Muslims are not Arab. Fewer still would have suspected that Muslims revere Jesus or that the Qur’an upholds his virgin birth and says more about his mother than the New Testament does.
Holy Envy Page 11
