In our gospel reading today Jesus experiences incredulity at home coming. The home town folks know the guy since he was a toddler. Why, they know the whole gang, all the brothers and sisters. And they know that he's a working man without higher credentials. So, no matter the buzz about his wisdom and works of power, they were offended at his person. Just to do you think you are, Jesus?
In theology we call this offense taken at uncredentialed Jesus the scandal of particularity. Why shouldn't God's grace and love and healing power be universally accessible? Why shouldn't these good things of God be available generally without fuss and bother, like electrical current when we flip the switch to turn on the lights? Why should the good things of God be communicated in this most unlikely person, a carpenter from podunk Nazareth? Why him in particular? Hence, the scandal of particularity!
Notice that they are not scandalized by reports of his wisdom and healing power. They are not scandalized that God should be gracious and good to his suffering and sinful creatures. Jews, children of the Hebrew Scriptures, our Christian Old Testament, have been taught to expect such good things from God. What they take offense at is the delivery system, the good things of God showing up in a most ordinary human being like the rest of us. And how much more scandalous this human being Jesus becomes in the course of his story, ending up, so far as the world can see, abandoned by man and by God in a terrible death. Why this ordinary human being doing extraordinary things but dying in extraordinarily terrible death – why should this particular Jesus be the delivery system of the good things of God?
Such was the offense taken by the hometown crowd that faith was crowded out by it and Jesus consequently could do little of God's healing will in their midst. Faith, you see, goes together hand and glove with the particular delivery system who Jesus is. We do not see with our eyes nor comprehend with our reason the glorious God but instead behold the humble man who nevertheless is delivering the good things God – cognitive dissonance! Incomprehensible to our reason! Yet faith does not wonder how, nor look a gift horse in the mouth, but is rather elated with joy at the good things of God nevertheless coming through this unlikely man in particular. Because faith trusts in the good will of God, Jesus is able to deliver the good things which God wills for his lost and sinful creatures. So faith, you see, is just as much a miraculous work and gift of God the Holy Spirit as the healing deeds of Jesus.
But let's dig a little deeper. Jesus’s comment about this hometown unbelief is instructive, "a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown." Notice that in the process of making this comment, Jesus represents himself as a prophet. That is to say, not merely a wise man and wonder-working healer, but one who speaks the word of God, concretely, to the here and now situation. As the snippet from Ezekiel today shows, true prophets rarely win popularity contests; in fact they often meet the fate which Jesus finally met at the cross because they speak unpopular truth in the name of God. Thus Jesus indicates the deeper reason for the scandal the folks from Nazareth find in him. It is not merely that unlikely Jesus is delivering the good things long promised by God, but that in the process he personally and prophetically brings God much too close, too close for comfort, to close to the wrong kind of people, being himself the wrong kind of expected deliverer. After all the healthy have no need of a physician, the righteous have no need of forgiveness, the living have no need of resurrection. So Jesus is the prophet who delivers the word of God to those who have been humbled by their experience of life in this wayward creation just as he himself appears as nothing other than a loser like so many others in this wayward creation of dog eat dog.
Jesus does not give up on his mission because of the unbelief but moves on, commissioning his disciples to extend the healing will of God by expelling unclean spirits afflicting the diseased to heal them just as the word of God which he is and enacts finds faith. Notice, however, how Jesus requires these disciples to be as vulnerable to offense as he himself is. They can hardly profiteer off of his commission – no bread, no bag, no money in their belts -- and must rely on the God whose kingdom they proclaim and enact. And just so be ready to suffer the kind of rejection Jesus suffered in his own hometown of Nazareth. Authentically to serve Jesus and his mission, the disciples must be vulnerable in the same way that he is vulnerable –which is another way of describing faith.
How powerfully Paul the apostle bears witness to the same vulnerability of faith in our reading today from 2 Corinthians. Paul has been put on the defensive. Interlopers are trying to alienate the Corinthians from Paul, the apostle who had founded their church by his preaching of the gospel. Paul sarcastically describes these interlopers as super apostles because they pretend to be clothed with divine invulnerability and so to extend that invulnerability to the Corinthians --if Paul's congregation will submit to their proselytizing. Paul could go toe to toe with these guys. He cleverly mentions his own profound experience of revelation, transported into the heavens to see the glory of God. But like the disciples on the Mount of Transfiguration, Paul returned to the valley below into the hardships of his apostolic ministry, meeting in parallel the resistance which Jesus warns the disciples they too will experience.
And Paul’s reward? He was conformed to the sufferings of Christ by a God given thorn in the flesh! Like Jesus in Gethsemane, he prayed for deliverance from this bitter cup and like Jesus in Gethsemane he got the answer: My grace is sufficient for you. My power is made perfect in weakness.
Is God's grace is sufficient for us? Is God's grace the pearl of great price for which we will abandon all if only to possess it as our own? The humble, suffering life of Jesus, of his disciples and of his apostle Paul are visible portraits of this invisible grace at work in human lives. Certainly the God of the Scriptures wills all good things for his lost and sinful creatures but in order to deliver these good things these creatures must be delivered from their false loves, addictions really, to things which are not good – most deeply the fantasy of and heedless pursuit for invulnerability. They must know that they have a problem as creatures with their Creator, a deep problem that goes to the root of their being. That problem is the outward pride but inward despair of unfaith with its hopeless but frentic aspiration for invulnerability; its solution is the humility and consequent vulnerability of faith. For the power of God is perfected in weakness.
This is a very hard truth for us. But we may well ponder in its light whether our looming darkness in America is a God-sent thorn in the flesh, to humble us by showing us anew our inescapable creaturely vulnerability to awaken new scandalous faith in the particularity of Jesus Have we as a nation been humbled by the great recession, costly endless war, the pandemic, political polarization, inflation, climate change, lawlessness, the authoritarian temptations? Have we been taught again our need for loving solidarity to protect us from such ravages? Humble faith active in love is the only real balm to human vulnerability by which we bear one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.
After this Independence Day we give thanks for the remarkable goodness that has been given to us in these United States of America even as we are painfully aware of the acute divisions among us which have been stretched to the breaking point by manifold exposures of our inescapable human vulnerability. Of course we cannot speak for others but as Christians in America can we not once again receive the humble vulnerable Jesus? He comes to the vulnerable as we really are that we may be converted to the grace of God sufficient in life and in death.