On The Cliff's Edge

Jesus had left Nazareth, which was his home. His aunts and uncles and cousins and family friends had not seen hide nor hair of him for some time. They heard tales of what he had been doing. They’d heard from some cousins about what had happened at the wedding in Canaan; about the water in the jugs that was turned into wine. Not everyone believed the sensational story, but everyone retold it because it was a good one.

One of the neighbors had visited Capernaum recently and had heard that Jesus was going around that region. He had been going to the synagogues and preaching. What’s more, they had heard that Jesus had been placing his hands upon people, touching even lepers, and healing them.

Most people dismissed these stories. They had known Jesus and seen him as he grew. All agreed that he had been a unique child, but preaching in the temple at twelve years old and healing the sick and infirm were two completely different matters.

All the same, if he was performing these acts that some were calling miracles, his hometown friends, neighbors, and family wanted him to do so at home. They thought they deserved a little piece of the action. They hoped that he would come home again so that they could see him, and so that they could be healed and have wine made for them and hear one of these good sermons they had heard he was preaching.

Jesus did not call ahead to let them know he was coming. Instead, he just walked into town one day and joined the people of Nazareth in the temple for Sabbath, as was his custom. Being a man of the city, he gladly took the scroll when it was handed to him and he found a passage he liked and he read it to the congregation. Jesus read to them a part of Isaiah where Isaiah acknowledges his call and proclaims that God has called him to go to the poor and the captive and the blind to free them from their oppressions. As was also the custom, Jesus was asked to expound on the passage a bit, to offer a sermon on the text. He offered a very brief expository – “Today the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

For the people of Nazareth, it was like answering the knock at the door to find Ed McMahan on the other side with a Publisher’s Clearing House check. Jesus had come to them to ease their burdens.They were ecstatic at the prospect of having their burdens lifted and having their pains soothed. They imagined lives like kings and queens where there would be no more hauling heavy jugs of water up from the river to cook. No more cooking. No more toiling in the fields or tending the sheep. Their day of liberation had come.

But Jesus had only just begun to speak. As he continued their mood soured from elation to frustration and then agitation. He said that like Elijah and Elisha before him, who had been prophets of the Lord during difficult times in Israel, who had healed and cared for strangers and not the people of Israel who had already been blessed by the Lord. They gave respite to the foreign widow, and the Gentile leper. Like the prophets before him, Jesus had come to bring God’s good news to all, not just his hometown favorites. His mission was not to make the lives of his friends and family easy, but to bring comfort to all the earth.

The people of Nazareth were incensed. He was a child of their city, they knew him better than all the rest, they were the chosen ones, part of the in-crowd and because of that they wanted, they thought they deserved a double portion of grace.

The people of the synagogue stood and drove Jesus out of town, and further. Pushing past their borders was not enough. The people of Nazareth, the aunties and uncles of Jesus childhood, the baby-sitters and rabbis drove Jesus from the synagogue to the cliff outside of town to put an end to all this nonsense. By throwing Jesus off the cliff they would end the lavish and broad distribution of God’s grace, the grace that they believed was theirs alone to possess. They pressed in on him from behind and forced him toward the cliff’s edge and the stones below because of the words he preached of God’s glory and love of all people. Jesus proclaimed God’s grace for all.

How many of you are afraid of heights? Or, as a friend of mine used to say, not so much afraid of the heights as afraid of the falling?

Have you ever stood on the edge of a cliff? And surveyed the view and looked down at your toes to see where the land breaks off and the air and the decline begin? Have you stood there with the trill of the impending danger of the magnificent view raising the beat of your heart from resting to an admiring thump of a mild adrenaline rush? Have you ever stood at the edge of a cliff without a guard rail, with a crowd pushing in behind you?

I have not. I’ve stood on edges, don’t get me wrong. I stood on the edge of the Colca Canyon in Peru and waited for condors to arouse themselves from their chilly slumber and spread their winds to harness the thermals and soar up above the cliff’s edge and our heads in search of food. I stood there watching, so much on the edge that my next step was a precipitous one. But the crowds were not upon me. They were up on the observation deck safely contained by a rail, not on the little precipice we found, so the only danger on that cliff’s edge was my own wrong move.

I have felt the force of a crowd behind me. I have stood on a subway platform so engulfed in people that when the doors slid open I entered the car almost without moving my feet. I moved by the sheer force of the crowd behind me over the edge of the platform into the car.

I have stood on cliff’s edges and I have felt the power of a crowd pushing at my back, but I had not stood on a cliff with a crowd at my back. I have not felt the immense danger of the gospel until I climbed upon the cliff that is my faith in the face of the world.

When I first started preaching, when I had to preach a sermon for my preaching class, I was paralyzed with the fear of the cliff I was driven to by the assignment. It was not the assignment itself that was the problem. Delving into a biblical text and discussing it were becoming old hand, but proclaiming it…proclaiming it was a daunting task.

It meant deigning to articulate the acts of the Spirit that I had seen. It meant telling the world what the Spirit had moved me to say. It meant putting it out there, letting the words pass my lips. Once they had left there was nothing more for me to do. I could not control the words or how they were heard or how the Holy Spirit would twist them to speak to the hearts of the hearers. I was afraid to stand upon the pulpit and unleash such volatile, unpredictable words as God’s grace proclaimed.

But still I felt driven to the edge by that very grace that Jesus proclaimed in Capernaum and Nazareth. Grace seems a safety blanket, a gift of assurance, but to the people of Nazareth did not see it as assurance They were told that their blanket was being unfolded from their laps and spread also over the poor, the outsider. They were not guaranteed an advantage. The grace that they saw as a personal guarantee was not only theirs but also given to the world. The Gospel is dangerous to the comfortable. The danger of God’s Word is the truth of God’s grace and love in a world bent on entitlement and retaliation.

For Jesus, what brought him to the cliff’s edge was not curiosity. He did not seek out the edge to feel the pit of his stomach rise into his throat. Nor did even youthful impertinence bring him to the edge as some in the crowd may have accused.

Jesus was on the cliff’s edge because God had brought him there. It was God’s grace that led him to Capernaum that allowed him to heal and to preach. It was God’s grace that led him back to Nazareth to share the Good News to an unwelcoming crowd. God’s grace had been given through Jesus, not for the few, but for the all. Jesus had been anointed by God to preach and to teach and to heal. He had been called by God to share God’s grace. It was not grace that allowed him to escape; it was God’s grace preached plainly that carried him out of the synagogue to the edge of town to the “brow of the hill on which their town was built.”[1] It was the bold and plain proclamation of God’s grace given for all that propelled the crowd out of the temple and toward the edge. The world does not welcome the Word of God. The world has been given God’s grace, but does not want to hear about it.

When we live faithful lives in a world that does not want to hear the Good News, we live on the cliff’s edge. The edge is not just in the pulpit or on the brow of a cliff at the edge of town. The cliff’s edge is at work when someone asks you why you are generous and kind and the answer ‘God’s grace’ pops into the back of your head as an uneasy feeling eases into your stomach. The cliff’s edge is in the supermarket when I child is being roughly handled, when you know what you see happening should not be, but you are frozen feeling impelled to change it and afraid of saying no to a stranger whose hand is raised against someone who is not your own child. The cliff’s edge is daily upon us when we are faced with proclaiming God’s grace to a world that does not want to hear it.

Where’s your cliff’s edge? Are you willing to approach it?

[1] Luke 4.29