The Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, February 2, 2025

Jesus 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.’” Luke 4:23

When I was a child, I really enjoyed the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis (And when I got older, I enjoyed sharing them with my children, too.) You may also be familiar with Narnia; but if you need a refresher, here are some details: Narnia is a magical world, parallel to our own, where animals talk, and trees and rivers have spirits, and the tenets of the Christian faith are lived out in quests and adventures and setbacks and recoveries and unexpected learnings.

The Christ-figure in Narnia is Aslan, the Great Lion, the Son of the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea. In the very first book of the series, children who come from our world into Narnia are about to meet Aslan for the first time. They’ve heard that he is the King, but they are dismayed to find out that he is a Lion.

One of them asks, “Is he safe?” And old Mr. Beaver, who is their guide and is taking them to meet Aslan, says, “Safe! Who said anything about safe? ’Course he isn’t safe! But he’s good. He’s the King. After all, he’s not a tame lion.”

The children discover rather quickly that in Narnia, God is not a tame God: God calls you when don’t expect to be called, and sends you where you don’t expect to be sent, and challenges you in ways you don’t expect to be challenged, and inspires you to grow and flourish and come alive in ways you never expected were possible. Aslan is not a tame lion: the God of the Gospel is not a tame God.

That insight strikes me as particularly important for the Gospel reading assigned for the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany. Because this strange little story of the people of Nazareth first admiring Jesus and then turning against him seems to me to hinge on that disturbing realization that Jesus is not a tame prophet, and God is not a tame God.

The Gospel today picks up immediately where the Gospel last week left off: Jesus is just beginning his public ministry. He’s been going around the villages of Galilee, preaching and teaching and healing, his reputation has been growing, and now he’s come to Nazareth, where he grew up. He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, he’s invited to preach, he takes as his text the passage from Isaiah – “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” – and then he says to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Now think about this for a moment from the point of view of the people sitting there in the synagogue. This is Jesus talking to them. They know him. He’s one of theirs, one of their own.

“That’s Joseph’s son!” they’re saying to each other. “Remember how he used to run errands for Mary around town? Remember how he used to help out Joseph in the carpenter shop?”

“Remember that time half the village went to Jerusalem for Passover, and Jesus stayed behind in the Temple, and we were all so worried about him?”

“And now look at him! – he’s all grown up! And what a preacher he’s turned out to be! And have you heard about the miracles he’s done?!”

“You know, it’s good for us that Jesus is here. I mean, him being a holy man and all, I’ll bet he can do some good for Nazareth. Start putting Nazareth on the map.”

“My mother has arthritis so bad; I’ll bet Jesus will heal her if I ask him nicely.”

“And we’ve had so little rain, the crops are really suffering; I’ll bet Jesus will bring the rain for us. After all, he owes us that much.”

“My brother-in-law has been giving me a real hard time about that ox I sold him; I’ll bet Jesus would straighten him out and give judgment for me and settle this in my favor; I’ll have a little talk with him.”

Of course Scripture doesn’t actually record anybody saying those things; but it’s not hard to imagine the folks at Nazareth beginning to see Jesus as their home-town hero, their resident holy man, their source for signs and wonders, their own private leash on their own tame God.

So Jesus says to them, “Doubtless you will quote this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself! Take care of your own!’ Doubtless you will say to me, ‘Do here in Nazareth the mighty things we’ve heard you’ve been doing in other towns. Be our prophet here.’”

But that’s not why Jesus has come to them. He hasn’t come to Nazareth to be their resident miracle-worker, their village holy man, their leash on a tame God.

He’s come to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, to proclaim the coming of God’s reign, to proclaim the breaking down of barriers, to say that God has opened to everyone the way of light and love and eternal life.

God’s favor isn’t just for Nazareth alone; God’s favor isn’t just to make them comfortable and cozy and happy with themselves. God’s favor, God’s grace, is meant to energize them, to enliven them, so that they can break out of their oppressive complacency, so that they can learn to live together in a new and holy way, so that they can share that way of living with everyone they can reach.

The good news of God’s reign will push them beyond themselves, Jesus tells them. Just as God pushed Elijah beyond Israelite territory to feed a Gentile widow at Zarephath. Just as God pushed

Elisha beyond Israelite politics to heal the Gentile Syrian leper Naaman. So God will push these people beyond their comfort zones to be God’s witnesses in new and unexpected ways. Jesus will not be their tame prophet, and God will not be a tamed God.

And I think that’s what gets the people at Nazareth so enraged at Jesus. They’re scared. Here they thought they had God on their side, they had a direct line to divine favor, that Jesus was their leash on a tame God who would see to their needs and make them feel better – and now they find out Jesus will turn their world upside down, and Jesus will call them to follow God into places of the spirit they’d never expected to go. It’s a scary prospect. I’d be scared, too.

And of course that is the point of the story. The Gospel challenges us to recognize in ourselves how we often respond to Christ’s call with fear and anger, how we would often prefer to think of Jesus as a comforting and cozy presence whose main job in the cosmos is to be there when we want him and solve our problems for us – and to go away again when we’re done with him – how we are often tempted to forget that the God whom Jesus makes manifest is not a tame God.

The Gospel challenges us to let God push us beyond ourselves, so that we can break out of our oppressive complacency, and go beyond our comfort zones, and learn to recognize God’s grace made manifest to us in the unexpected, untamed places in our lives.

Process theology describes a God who is always giving us new possibilities, always calling us to combine continuity with our past and novelty for our future. Each moment of our experience begins with an initial aim from God, which guides our self-formation as we combine data from the universe and from our own past into a single feeling of the-world-as-it-is-for-me-here-now. God feels that feeling also, as it is released from immediacy of experience to serve as data for the next round of occasions in the world. God’s feeling of our experiences becomes an influence on the next aim that God can give us for the next moment of experience. In this way, through successive occasions of aims-and-experiences, God leads us into new configurations of relationship and action, offering us opportunities to go beyond what is merely familiar and to embrace wider connections with our world. In this way God is “the Adventure of the Universe as One,” who calls us to share in adventure in our lives.

This God is not a tame God. But this God is good, and the goodness of God will be made manifest in us and around us, offering itself to be received by us, receiving from us the goods we offer from ourselves, gathering us all up into the Adventure of the Universe as One. Even when our lives seem battered and stressed and overwhelmed, even when we are about as far from our comfort zones as we can imagine, the untameable goodness of God will meet us there, and will activate in us healing and liberation and vision and right-relationship beyond anything we can ask or expect.

Where is God calling you into untameable goodness today?

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The Rev. Dr. Paul Nancarrow is an Episcopal priest, whose theological work has focused on process-relational interpretations of religion and science, spirituality and liturgy, and especially on the co-acting of divine action and human action and natural action in sacramental work and worship. He is a co-author of The Call of the Spirit: Process Spirituality in a Relational World, and blogs on “Transfigurations” at paulsnancarrow.wordpress.com. He can often be found contemplating the Adventure of the Universe as One from the saddle of his bicycle on back roads and rail-trails in the Midwest.