Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany - January 31, 2010

"Exceptionalism at Nazareth"

The Rev. Dr. Richard W. Pfaff

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord."

Jesus had been standing at some sort of reading desk and, handing the scroll to a kind of acolyte, sat down—the traditional position of a teacher—to expound the reading. As last week’s passage concludes, “the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him;” and Jesus started to preach.

This week’s reading begins with the opening words of that sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The evangelist Luke, who is careful and deliberate in his choice of words, describes the congregation as being pleased as well as fascinated: they all, we are told, spoke well of Jesus and seemed particularly gratified that he was a local product: “Is this not Joseph’s son?” It’s a rather bright picture, home-town boy makes good in local synagogue.

But very soon the picture darkens. Perhaps Jesus sensed what was likely to follow: some eager Nazarethan springing up and saying “We’ve heard about amazing things you did in Capernaum; surely you’re going to do something even bigger and better here, where we know your people.” Not going to happen, is Jesus’ implied response; and he continues in a vein that we must admit is distinctly testy.

Remember, he points out, the miracle that Elijah performed during a great famine, when he was able to keep a poor widow’s miserable supply of flour and oil from ever running out. She was not an Israelite, you know, though there were plenty of widows there; rather, she was a Gentile and lived in Sidon, outside the borders of the promised land. And what about the miraculous cleansing, through the agency of the prophet Elisha, of the leper Naaman, who was a general in the army of the threatening Syrians—though, to be sure, there was a plentiful supply of lepers in Israel who could have been cleansed.

Immediately the mood of the listeners changes. They feel that Jesus has been insulting them, and as anger mounts and spreads one can almost hear the grinding of their teeth. They spring up and, in what must have been a kind of bum’s rush, throw him out of the synagogue and even, apparently, out of the city. Worse still: a kind of lynch-mentality emerges, and some intend to hurl him off the cliff that formed one of its boundaries. Somehow—we’re not told how—Jesus is able to slip through the angry mob and make his escape.

There are, to be sure, some perils connected with preaching, though I feel fairly safe here in the pulpit. Safe even if I venture to suggest that what incenses the congregation at Nazareth so violently is Jesus’ implicit criticism of something quite familiar to us: what we call Exceptionalism. “Exceptionalism” is now so widespread a concept as scarcely to require explanation—and fuzzily enough used to make precise explanation doubtful. At its simplest the notion can be expressed in two words: “We’re special.” Those attending the synagogue at Nazareth thought themselves special because they were Israelites (and were maybe all the more prickly about this, placed as Nazareth was, between Gentiles to the north and Samaritans to the south).

And of course we all are special, in a soothing, Mr. Rogers sort of way. Soothing, but not much fun; what is wanted is to have it generally understood that we are specially special. We hear the word bandied about most often in the phrase “American exceptionalism”: roughly, the idea that, for whatever combination of reasons, we in the United States are not really on the same plane as people in the other nations of the world. On such grave matters as climate control or the interrogation of suspected terrorists, many feel that our country is different enough from, and superior enough to, other nations that arduously crafted international agreements don’t apply to us. Indeed, it is the settled order of things that we should always be Number One. That order of things is upset—journalists and broadcasters are upset, anyhow—if our teams don’t win the largest number of gold medals in the Olympic Games. (For that matter, the order of things takes a blow whenever a certain local basketball team doesn’t win at least eighty per-cent of its games: Tar Heel exceptionalism is very much alive and well.)

It is easy to point fingers, and preachers are sometimes required to do so, as is the case with Jeremiah in today’s Old Testament reading [Jer. 1:4-10]. But more often the fingers could better be pointed at ourselves. I sometimes think that the most chilling phrase in Scripture is the Pharisee’s prayer in the hearing of the nearby Publican: “God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are” [Luke 18:11]. We might call that Pharisee the ultimate exceptionalist–while recognizing the danger posed by our own unspoken prayer of thanks that we are not like that Pharisee. The truth is that we are all, and all too frequently, like that Pharisee. We have reason to thank the Lord that we are not as most others are: we are exceptional individuals, and corporately–whether as Americans or Episcopalians or whatever–even more exceptional. Almost as exceptional as that Pharisee.

But, you may reasonably counter, as Christians we are, as the First Letter of Peter has it, “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” [1 Pet. 2:9]. How, then, can we hope to walk the tight-rope of faith that accepts that truth about ourselves as God’s own people while not falling into the ditch of exceptionalism: doesn’t apply to us, we’re specially special? This is a challenge to the Church, as well as to each of us individually. There is no pat solution, but common sense suggests that we begin by acknowledging our propensity to consort with the exceptionalists: to admit that we like to be specially special, Numero Uno, alpha dogs. To admit also that we are as a consequence likely to pretend that rules and limitations that apply to others don’t, for one reason or another, apply to us.

At the same time, it’s essential to maintain, and manifest to the world, the confidence that befits the chosen race/ royal priesthood/ holy nation that we are. Not to do so is a kind of faithlessness: faithless not because of some quantitative inadequacy on our parts—not enough faith—but because it denies the fundamental point about faith, which is that it is a gift from God, not an accomplishment of our own. Much of the thrust of Holy Scripture involves stating and re-stating that God has chosen, God has made covenants, God is active in the world He created.

Expressing this kind of confidence does not mean that we have to utter triumphalist statements about other religions or other ways. Equally, though, we don’t have to mumble diffidently, “our way, the faith of Christ crucified and risen, seems to be quite a good way, though there may well be others just as good.” What we have to do is simply to paraphrase, and then mean, the famous words of Martin Luther: “Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.” In jutting out our metaphysical jaws that way we’re asserting not “We are who we are, what we’ve made of ourselves, and that’s it,” but rather “We are, however imperfectly, what God has made us.”

The great object lesson here is offered by the story of Abraham. If you review that story as related in the book of Genesis, you will realize that there’s a lot about that patriarch which is regrettable—that he was at various times greedy, shifty, cowardly, and (not to mince words) at least once morally despicable. Yet God loved him, chose him, dealt patiently with him. God’s action in Abraham turned out to have wondrous consequences, so much so that today it is common to speak of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam as the three “Abrahamic faiths.” And the evangelist John recounts a dispute between Jesus and some Israelites in which they claim that their being descendants of Abraham [John 8:33] leaves them superior to the good news the Lord is offering: they’re too “specially special” for that. John the Baptist had encountered this “exceptionalism” when he thundered at the Pharisees and Saducees, “Bear fruit that befits repentance, and do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham” [Matt. 3:9].

In the synagogue at Nazareth Jesus set out to expound God’s word, conveyed through the writing of the prophet Isaiah. The demands of that word impelled him, so he seems to have felt, to remind his hearers in a manner that got their irritated attention that they were not exceptional because of anything about them: not because they were from Nazareth or because they were Israelites, or even (as their reaction demonstrated) because they were particularly good people. That they were as Israelites part of “God’s chosen people” is not in doubt, nor that they were God’s deplorable people. Still less in doubt is that, deplorable as they on that occasion were, they were God’s loved people.

And so are we. How this can be, in the face of our endlessly yammering exceptionalism, we cannot understand; but we say, and believe, that God is love. Now (as the Apostle puts it) “we see in a mirror darkly, but then face to face” [I Cor. 13:12]. Out of that darkness there is, even now, a light that shines: that “has shone in our hearts to give the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ” [2 Cor. 4:6]. It is the knowledge, however imperfect, of that glory that enables us to ascribe to God, Father, Son, and Spirit, the praise and honor which are most justly due, now and for ever.