When I left school, I applied for, and got, a job in the lift industry. In one sense I was fortunate to get that job because, at the time, the company concerned had a policy of prioritising job applications from the children of people whom they already employed. Having said that, I wasn’t the only son of a current employee of the company who applied for the job, so my success in getting the job wasn’t simply a case nepotism.
So the fact that my dad worked for the company I’d applied for a job with certainly helped me to get the job. And it certainly helped when I finished my apprenticeship and had to go out on breakdowns myself, to have a dad whom I could ask for advice and help with technical problems. But, as time went by, the fact that my dad did, and then later had, worked for the same company became more of a hinderance than a help. By the time I was in my late 20s, and by then my dad had retired; despite the fact that by that time I’d achieved a good reputation as a lift engineer not only on service and repairs, as my dad had before me, but also on installations, which my dad had never worked on, despite the fact that I’d had a promotion in the company’s service/repair department, that I’d achieved their ‘Gold Standard Award’ for installation work, and been a Charge Hand on installation sites, to a lot of people I worked with, including the vast majority of the management at the branch office, I was still known as, and usually called, ‘Young Smithy’ and still known to them as ‘Ricky’s Son’. In the end, despite the fact that, on the whole, I enjoyed the job I did, and the company was one of the highest paying in the industry, one of the main reasons I left was that I felt I was never going to get anywhere with a company who, after employing me for 14 years, still saw me primarily as a young kid, and as someone’s son.
I don’t know how many of you have had similar experiences to mine, but any of us who have had that kind of experience will have a very good insight into a problem Jesus had in trying to proclaim the Gospel. It’s the problem we heard about this morning, the problem of making those who know us well, and perhaps especially those who’ve known us as children or young people, from taking us seriously because they find it hard to see us as anything but children and youngsters and who tend to see us less as people in our own right than as someone’s son or daughter.
We know that this is a problem Jesus had in proclaiming the Gospel in his hometown and amongst those who knew him and his family because we read about in the Gospels more than once. This morning we’re told that,
‘…all spoke well of him and marvelled at the gracious words that were coming from his mouth. And they said, “Is not this Joseph’s son?”’
But the Gospel goes on to say that by the time Jesus had finished speaking,
‘…all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff.’
In his Gospel, St Matthew tells the same story of Jesus’ rejection at Nazareth, but in a different way. He says,
‘…coming to his hometown he taught them in their synagogue, so that they were astonished, and said, “Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? And are not his brothers James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us? Where then did this man get all these things?” And they took offence at him.’
And in his Gospel, St John tells of a similar thing that happened at Capernaum:
‘…the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven.” They said, “Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”’
The Gospels don’t really leave us in any doubt that one of the reasons some people found it hard to believe in Jesus, is that they knew him and his family. The Gospels don’t put it in these terms, but I think many of these people would have heard Jesus speak and teach and thought, ‘Who does he think he is? We know him, he’s just a carpenters son!’ And the Gospels don’t leave us in any doubt either that this attitude and the lack of faith it caused was a major stumbling block to Jesus’ mission and ministry in his hometown and amongst the people who knew him and his family. And we’re told that Jesus couldn’t do in his hometown and amongst those who knew him, the things he did elsewhere. So it was a problem Jesus wasn’t really able to overcome.
But if it was a problem for Jesus, and one he wasn’t able to overcome, how much more of a problem is it for us to proclaim the Gospel in our hometowns and amongst the people who know us so well? Jesus was sinless and so at least he couldn’t be accused of hypocrisy. But we’re not sinless and we very often are accused of hypocrisy, and most easily by those with and amongst whom we live and who know us and our faults and failings so well. And yet isn’t that exactly what the Church asks us to do? At this very time, the Church is asking us to be a living, witnessing presence in the heart of every community, and what is that other than asking Christians to proclaim the Gospel in the place where they live and to the people who live there and who know them well?
This is nothing new, of course, it’s something the Church has always expected its members to do. The Church has always asked and expected its members to live out in their daily lives the faith they proclaim in church on Sunday. The Church has also expected its members to be open about their faith, to let those they meet during their daily lives know that they’re Christians, rather than to hide it. And that Church has expected its members to do all these things because it’s what Jesus himself said his disciples should do. So how do we do something that Jesus himself found to be such a problem?
Well, in one sense, proclaiming the Gospel isn’t such a hard thing to do because it’s easy to say that we’re Christians and that we come to church. It’s also easy to tell people what Jesus taught, to tell people the kind of lives Jesus said we should live. The only difficult thing about doing that is putting up with the abuse we might get for doing it, whether that’s from the secular atheists, who argue that science has all the answers and religion is for stupid people who don’t understand the science, or from those who simply want to rant about the hypocrisy of the Church, or organised religion generally. (Actually, for the vast majority of people, science itself is a religion because the vast majority don’t understand the science but simply put their trust, their faith, in what scientists tell them. And whilst organised religion may well be hypocritical, that has nothing to do with faith itself. That some people who call themselves Christians, for example, don’t follow the teachings of Jesus doesn’t mean that Jesus’ teaching is wrong, that it isn’t to be trusted or believed in. It just means that the people concerned are not really Christians, or at least, not very good Christians.)
So, if we can put up with that kind of abuse, and better still are able to counter it with arguments of our own, proclaiming the Gospel isn’t hard, at least in general terms. What is hard is proclaiming the Gospel to those who know us well because if they accuse us of hypocrisy, it will probably be because we have been hypocritical, and they know we have because they know us. And there’s really only one way to counter that; don’t be a hypocrite. And if we are being one, stop, and don’t be one anymore.
Whoever we proclaim the Gospel to, there’s no guarantee that they’ll listen to us and even if they do, there’s no guarantee that they’ll take what we say to heart and become Christians themselves. But we shouldn’t feel as though we’ve failed if they don’t because even Jesus couldn’t convince everyone to become his disciple. What we’re called to do is to proclaim the Gospel, to sow the seed as the parable says. Whether the seed takes root or not, whether it produces fruit in the form of a new disciple of Christ depends on many other things apart from the sower. Where we, as sowers of the Word can, and will, have more of an influence on the outcome is when we proclaim the Gospel to those with and amongst whom we live and amongst those who know us best because those people will look at us to see how well we live up to the Gospel we proclaim.
That is a hard thing to do because none of us ever live out the faith we proclaim as well as we should. But perhaps more importantly, we don’t live out our faith as well as we could. If we did live out the Gospel as well as we could, if we lived out the Gospel to the very best of our ability, then we’ll be doing all we could do to be the living witnesses to the Gospel in our own communities the Church is asking us to be. There’s still no guarantee that we’ll make new disciples for Christ because even Jesus couldn’t do that in his hometown and amongst those who knew him. But the Gospels tell us that wasn’t seen as a failure on Jesus’ part but was because of their lack of faith.
We’re called to be like Jesus, not to be better than him, if that were actually possible, so if Jesus couldn’t make new disciples in his hometown and amongst those who knew him, there’s no reason to think we’ll fare any better. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, as hard as it is, because Jesus tried. And if we can do as he did, we’ll have done all we can, we’ll have done our best and I’m sure the Lord doesn’t ask us to do more than that.
Amen.
The Propers for the 4th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Epiphany 4) can be viewed here.
Parish Church of St Mark Chadderton 