Reading
Luke 4:24-30
24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
Meditation
Both Sarepta's widow and Namaan the Syrian were pagans, both of whom lived in a time of Israel's great infidelity. The two episodes mentioned by Jesus constitute the proclamation of his prophetic role and the biblical justification for the Christian mission to the Gentiles.
The anger of the men of the synagogue towards Jesus is due to the affirmation that God's favor towards them will fail to be directed to those who are far away. The expulsion outside the city walls to the top of the mountain is like a foreshadowing of the passion when Jesus will be crucified outside Jerusalem on Mount Golgotha. But his time has not yet come and Jesus escapes this attempted lynching.
We too, like Jesus, are called by virtue of incorporation to him in baptism, to exercise a prophetic ministry, courageously witnessing, with word and deed, to the gospel, starting from our environment of life, without the fear of experiencing the refusal.
The attitude of Jesus constitutes a model on how we must react in the face of hostility towards the announcement: to pass on as "he walked right through the crowd" (v. 30). But this page of the Gospel is also a warning so that we can not take for granted the word of God, which he addresses to us every day and which we must know how to welcome as an ever new word because it is a living word, inhabited by the Spirit.
Jesus challenges us today where we are. May he find us ready to welcome him, so that those who have never heard of him may not be more fortunate than us.
Prayer
May our heart, o Lord, be ready to welcome you, so that we may be constituted faithful prophets of your word, among those who do not know you. Amen.
- Rev. Dr. Luca Vona
