Why was Jesus put to death?
Luke 4:21-30
Stephen Lea
Today’s gospel reading seems to telescope Jesus’s entire earthly career into a single incident. At one moment, the crowd in the synagogue are nodding approvingly, over the local boy made good and now come home. Almost at the next, they are trying to throw him off the cliff. What went wrong?
It is possible that Luke has improved the story a little for us, for artistic effect, by collapsing two stories into one. None of the gospels gives us anything like the complete story of Jesus’s life, after all, and maybe there was actually a gap between the approval and the attempted lynching; after all, Jesus in his sermon talks about the healings he has been doing in Capernaum, but in Luke’s gospel he hasn’t actually done any yet - they start immediately after this story. Or perhaps Luke knew a more colourful version of the story than the other evangelists - Matthew and Mark record the Nazareans’ amazement at and rejection of Jesus, but do not make their amazement so admiring or their rejection so violent.
But none of that textual detail matters very much. Luke places this story right at the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, and without doubt he means us to see it as the whole story of that ministry, in cameo. Jesus is first admired, then rejected, finally threatened with death.
Why? Why should people “take offence” at Jesus’s words, having recognised them as “gracious”? What did he do or say that turned their admiration into anger? That is the question that this text poses to us.
Enter the Epistle
Let’s leave that question dangling for a moment - or rather, let’s intensify it, by turning away and looking at the epistle. These words are so well loved, and so extraordinarily beautiful, that it is easy to lose sight of their extraordinary power.
The word that St Paul wrote was agape. Nowadays, that’s just the Greek word for “love”, used much the same way as we use it in English. But the “koiné” Greek in which the new testament was written was very rich in words for love. If you were in love with someone, sexually, you used the word erato - from which we have our word “erotic”. For family love, or friendship, or love of some activity, you used the word phileo - from which we have all those words beginning with phil-, like philanthropist, someone you looks after people, and philosopher, a lover of knowledge. When Paul used the word agape he was specifically talking about neither of those things. He was using the same word that is used in the passage from John’s gospel that we remembered in our song earlier, in giving us Jesus’s new commandment - that we love one another. It is the same word that appears in the letters of John, when he tells us that love is of God. It is the same word that is used in Mark’s gospel, when he recounts how Jesus told us that the highest commandments were to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds, and love our neighbours as ourselves, and that Matthew uses in recounting how Jesus told us even to love our enemies. This is love on a higher plane than passionate attraction; on a higher plane even than a parent’s loving care. This is what John Wesley calls having “the same invariable thirst for [our neighbour’s] happiness in every kind” as we have for our own. (Curiously, it has given rise to not a single word in English).
I have piled up these examples, familiar as they are, not just to stress that agape is the characteristic word of the New Testament - but to show that it must indeed have been this above all that Jesus preached. We think we know what Jesus said; sometimes we even think we know what he thought - because we know the New Testament so well. But our familiarity blinds us to the extraordinary problems it poses, if we look at it is an account of a history. The earliest book in the New Testament, Paul’s little-read first epistle to the Thessalonians, was not written until around 50AD, around 20 years after
Jesus' death - and contains almost no information about Jesus' life at all. Mark, the earliest of the gospels, was not written until the late 60s AD. The other books of the New Testament date from various times later in the first century, perhaps into the second. These are scarcely on-the-spot reporting.
And yet we can be sure that Jesus preached about agape. Why? First of all, because all these sources, which were surprisingly separate from each other, are unanimous in placing it at the heart of the gospel. Paul is the earliest of our witnesses, and he gives us this extraordinary hymn to love - which many scholars think he was actually quoting from an earlier source, perhaps a psalm that was said in early Christian worship. Paul shows almost no evidence of having known the oral traditions about
Jesus' life and teaching that the gospel writers used; but Mark and Matthew show Jesus putting love at the heart of the commandments of God. John wrote a different sort of gospel for a different church, which was probably quite out of touch with the somewhat Romanised churches that Mark, Matthew and Luke knew - but he said that love would be the unique mark of
Jesus' disciples. Wherever the new beliefs in Jesus Christ were to be found, there were people preaching about love - about the love of God for human beings, and about the love for God and for one another that we must show in response. This, therefore, must have been what he himself taught and preached. This is what his “gracious words” were about.
Then why on earth...?
And this brings us back to our question. Then why on earth was Jesus killed? Why did the village folk of Nazareth turn against him? Why did the scribes and
Pharisees hate him? Why did the chief priests conspire against him? Why was Judas persuaded to betray him? Why was Jesus killed? Why on earth would anyone want to kill someone who preached about love and forgiveness?
The gospel writers are less help to us here than they might have been. All of them were writing to churches that were to some extent in competition and conflict with their local synagogues. To state the obvious, Christianity started as a movement within Judaism. Even Paul, the self-proclaimed apostle to the Gentiles, always started by going to the synagogue in any new town he visited. But by the time the gospels were written, the breach between church and synagogue was becoming irreversible. A meeting of Jewish leaders had ruled that in every synagogue meeting, those present must formally curse the name of Jesus; after that there could be no compromise. In that situation, it isn’t very surprising if the gospel writers tend to present organised Judaism in an unflattering light. It would not be exaggerating very much to say that Luke’s implied answer to the question, “Why did the Nazareth synagogue congregation reject Jesus?” is “Because they were a synagogue congregation” - or even, “Because they were Jews”. In the experience of Luke and his first listeners, rejecting Jesus was what synagogue congregations did, and what Jews did.
But that cannot be good enough for us. We recognise that if anyone is to be identified with the synagogue congregation in the story, it is not some absent gathering of Jews, it is us - the ordinary folk going along to our regular place of worship and unable to cope with a new preacher. We also, nowadays, have enough scholarship to know that love and forgiveness were part of the regular doctrine of first century Judaism. Jesus’s teaching was creative and striking, to be sure - but it was not contrary to the best thinking in his day. We have Jewish documents of the period which show that the rabbis were concerned to help people understand the love of God; and the whole ceremony of the Day of Atonement, which developed quite late in the old testament period, shows that Judaism was then as it is now a religion with a strong emphasis on divine forgiveness.
So why was Jesus killed, if what he was preaching was orthodox religion, albeit in new and arresting words? There are I think two possible answers.
The New Testament scholar E. P. Sanders, who has asked this question in a particularly insistent way, suggests that it was because Jesus staged political and religious demonstrations. By upsetting the tables in the temple, by entering Jerusalem on a donkey, and directly in his preaching, Jesus made an explicit claim to be the Messiah. This was intolerable to the the Jewish leaders, so they acted against him.
That is possible; indeed, it almost has to be part of the story. It is part of the story as Luke gives it to us in to-day’s gospel reading: the reading from Isaiah that Jesus used in the synagogue at Nazareth, which is quoted just before the passage we read, was recognised as a prophecy of the Messiah, and Jesus was saying it had been fulfilled. He did seem to be saying that God was NOW HERE. For the good country folk of Nazareth, it was intolerable that someone they had known since he was a boy should make such a claim; for the priests and pharisees, it was intolerable that someone whom they did not know, and had not approved, should make it. Certainly by the time Luke wrote his gospel, that was how things had settled.
The danger of love
But this is only part of the story. Look at just what it was that Jesus preached, on his Isaiah text. It was not just that the Messiah had come - but that he had not come to the Nazareth peasants. Just as Elijah and Elisha had performed miracles for people who were not Israelites, so Jesus’s mission was not going to be confined to his native village - might not even be available to them. Look at what he was saying in the Temple when he overturned the tables - that the temple did not exist for the Jerusalem hierarchy; the outer courts, where they had allowed trading to take place, was the one part of it that was open to the pious gentile who wanted to worship God. Jesus preached love of God and love of our neighbours. But he preached them in a very uncomfortable way. He preached that they knew no boundaries; that they were not restricted to the good religious folk who went to the synagogue Sabbath by Sabbath; that they were not restricted to priests and pharisees, but extended to tax-gatherers and prostitutes; that they were not restricted to God’s chosen people, but extended even to Samaritans and Roman centurions.
Furthermore, he insisted in putting this revolutionary approach into practice. He talked to anyone - women, rich rogues, poor beggars, Roman officers - and ate with anyone. He touched lepers; he called tax gatherers to be among his closest disciples. He simply didn’t care. On the contrary: he loved.
And that was the dangerous thing about Jesus; that was why he was bound to get into trouble in the end. He didn’t just talk about love, he loved. What we have to recognise that if we follow his teaching in that open-minded, clear-headed way of his, we too run the risk of getting into trouble.
On a station platform in Switzerland in August 1914, two churchmen were saying good-bye to each other. One was getting on a train to Germany, one to France and England. Their countries had just declared war; officially, they were now enemies. But they knew that they were still one in Jesus Christ. “Whatever happens”, they said to each other, “we are not divided”. And they went home to found an international movement of Christians opposed to the war, and indeed to any war - and a whole lot of trouble they got into. But that is what happens if you see
agape clearly and try to put it into practice. I think that we can all think of many other examples.
“All ... were amazed at the gracious words that came out of his mouth... They ... led him to the brow of the hill... so that they might hurl him off the cliff.” When we think about what love really means, the question that should haunt us is not why people so often tried to kill Jesus. The question is why they so rarely try to kill us.
