What Will They Say? Luke 4:14-30 - Second Sunday after Epiphany

Since we began planning for our spring mission trip, I’ve had flashbacks to the mission trip I took with my high school youth group.

Our youth leader brought a boombox, and she played just 

one song, multiple times per day, for the entire week we were away: Jesus Freak by DC Talk. 

“What will people think when they hear that I'm a Jesus freak? What will people do when they find that it's true? I don't really care if they label me a Jesus freak. There ain’t no disguisin’ the truth.”

No one’s ever called me a Jesus Freak, at least not to my face. I’ve never been persecuted for my Christian faith. Even the outspoken atheists I worked with at the bookstore were surprisingly supportive when they learned that I’d resigned to go to seminary.

The same could not be said for Jesus. 

In today’s Gospel, he is worshiping at his home synagogue in Nazareth. He gets up and reads from the scroll of Isaiah. 

Image credit: churchart.com

Initially, everyone speaks well of him. They are quite proud of the man “Joseph’s son” had become. 

But when Jesus publicly claimed the identity God gave him at baptism, the people went berserk, because he had the audacity to be someone they had not given him permission to be. They were so offended that they drove him out of town and tried to hurl him off a cliff. 

Click here to read the Scripture text

The problem Jesus faced, which is a problem we all face, is that you live out your God-given identity as part of a community, and usually not just one community, but many communities. You have your family, your school, your workplace, your circle of friends, your hometown. All these people have their own ideas and opinions about who you are and who you should be. And some people will talk about you a lot. They will spread rumors or gossip; they will criticize you the moment you fail to meet their expectations, or ostracize you the moment you defy the social position they’ve assigned to you.

As a Christian, it’s worth considering just how much your identity, self-worth, and actions are influenced by what other people say and do, and what we think they think about you. No one is entitled to authority over who you are than Jesus. But it’s hard to be the person God created you to be when people are cruel and unkind. It’s also hard to be the person God created you to be when other people have already made up their mind about you based on things you’ve done (or haven’t done), the family you come from, or the street you grew up on. 

It's hard to be the person God created you to be when you believe you’re falling short of what think you shouldbe. Some days, you may not even want to face the world, so you don’t have to feel like you’re being judged.

But sometimes, you don’t want to be the person God created you to be. You want to be the person who’s seen as smart, strong, stable, and successful; always right about everything; who always wins; and who’s always strong enough to meet every challenge with ease. 

At the end of the day, living out your God-given identity will be one of the hardest things you will do. You will question if it’s really worth the struggles and the sacrifices. 

From the moment he was baptized and the voice from heaven named him “beloved,” Jesus knew that not all people would feel the same way. But thanks be to God, Jesus chose to be influenced not by other people, but by God and God alone. Jesus’s challenge is your challenge: to live your life not by what other people say and do to you, or by what you think they think about you, but by what Jesus says and does and promises. 

If your life and identity are based on what other people say and do to you, you will be tossed to-and-fro like a pinball in a machine. Your God-given identity, on the other hand, is like a place you can call home. It’s where you can shut the door and pray to your heavenly father in secret, just like Jesus does, fully confident that God welcomes you into his presence. Your God-given identity is like armor, because people’s words, opinions, deeds cannot change who you are. You face the world with boldness, because nobody can stop you from living true to your God-given identity. They can hurt you, but they can’t silence the life of Christ within you.

Furthermore, God will provide you people and communities that will nurture and even celebrate your God-given identity. The Church is to be that community, but God will provide other people and communities as well, including some who may not even be Christian. Some could even be people who mistreated or spoke ill of you in the past, but when you responded to them in a Christ-like manner, they were changed. 

What a blessing it is, in a world so full of chaos, cruelty, and pain, to know, that nothing can change who you are. You are baptized, God has named you beloved. So be bold in the Spirit to live as a child of God and disciple of Jesus. Live in such a way as this, that if people say or think anything about you at all, it’s this: you love Jesus, and Jesus loves them, too.