Shedding false identities

Luke 4:16-30 NRSV

When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

“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.”

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?” He said to them, “Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!’ And you will say, ‘Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.’” And he said, “Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.

Luke chapter 4 shows us the Jesus who wrestles with his identity, which I believe is great news for all of us, as we humans are prone to a life of regularly forgetting who we are and why we’re here. Before he began his years of public ministry Jesus was baptized and then led by the Holy Spirit into the wilderness for 40 days of isolation and temptation. And after he faces his own shadowy desires, after he’s tempted over and over to make his identity personal, wrestling with the phrase “if you really are the son of God,” for days on end—after choosing instead the experience of hunger and longing and all the limitations of being a human, he emerges, “armed with the power of the Holy Spirit.” And then he makes a weird move—he heads back to his home town.

Now, with his new identity, with the boldness that comes with the presence of God’s Spirit with him, he goes back to where he grew up. He starts to teach in the synagogue, and surprisingly enough, the prince of peace gets into an altercation. Something along the lines of, “Remember when we used to change his diapers? When did he learn to teach with so much authority?” This version of Jesus is very relatable to me, when he looks at them and says, “No prophet is recognized in their own country,” and he tells them stories from their own tradition—stories that he’d learned from them—and they prove his point. So naturally his community drives him out of their town with every intention of killing him, right then and there.

The Holy Spirit seems to have led Jesus right to the middle of a paradox: he has followed the traditions of his people and his home all the way to the heart of God, where he discovered that the Love of God was the point all along. Society was always going to resist Jesus’s teaching because his prophetic teaching was that there is more to you than what society tells you. The traditions of his hometown were in line with the ruling religious society, and they were intended to bring life to God’s children, but when Jesus offered them a glimpse of the eternal life they were headed towards, his people clung to their traditions instead. They felt threatened. In the blink of an eye, Jesus went from “That sweet boy down the street” to a threat to life as they knew it. And all he did to earn this was to show them where they fit into their own stories.

We give a lot of emphasis to Jesus’s rejection at the end of his life—abandoned by his closest friends and publicly executed is sort of the epitome of rejection, if you ask me. But I don’t hear a lot of conversation about the rejection Jesus experienced at every turn of his years in ministry. Sure, crowds followed him and wanted to see him perform, but at the same time people hated him. He was rejected because he knew the truth and he wouldn’t keep it to himself. He saw the people around him—the people whom he grew up with—trapped in the systems they couldn’t even see, and they didn’t want to see it.

Remember the first time you spent a few days in a different culture? Remember how much of your own preferences and assumptions you could see for the first time? It’s hard to see the systems and stories we’ve bought into until we lose them. Losing them can come in lots of different ways—traveling is a more adventurous, elective route to take, but what about the times when the stories come crumbling down around us? What about heartbreak? What about when someone who grew up in the same environment we did finds a different path and tells us there’s a lot more out there?

Jesus basically went back to his home town and said, “Look, I know you can’t hear me say this without wanting to kill me, but just in case there’s one person here who’s more curious than afraid, I have to tell you: what you think you’re seeking is already available to you, and none of it is based on getting it right.” And they hated him for it. They hated him because they loved their practices, their tradition, their right-ness—all of the things that made them who they were. They hated him because they loved their own identity, and from the looks of things Jesus had discarded his.

Later in Jesus’s sermon on the mount and his parables, it would become clearer that Jesus’s teachings are even more personal and even harder to swallow. But here at the beginning, he braced himself for opposition, knowing, “I have surrendered completely to my experience of being human, in all its pain, in all its limitations, and found that it’s there that the power of God fills me.” He knew that the power of God is love. He knew that the power of God is life itself—that the Holy Spirit that compelled him into the wilderness was the path of true life, in all its suffering and beauty. That this is what it meant to be human.

But the people in this synagogue were not interested in what it means to be human, instead they were trapped by their clinging to what it means to be “me.” When we are focused on what it means to be “me,” there is a lot more to get right, and when we’re trying so hard to get it right, we tend to lose ourselves in the process. The invitation of Jesus is to just be a human. Just be. It requires a lot of faith to let those stories and systems fall away—this is not easy.

It’s in the very nature of systems to stay the same, but in the very nature of the individual to grow out of it/move on. Unless we move on, we never find ourselves outside of the system. This is laying down our identities—all of the things that we think make me me—they have to die before I can know the presence and love and power of God in this individual experience I call me.

People aren’t always going to like it. Especially the ones who are very invested in keeping things the way they’ve always been. Maybe that means your hometown, maybe that means your family. Maybe that means the religion you grew up with brands you as a heretic. Trust that when you see through the holes in the trappings of the system, you are on the path to freedom. And as you follow Jesus into a truer, realer life, remember his promise: you are never, ever, ever alone, because Love is who you are.