1 Kings 21 - Naboth the Jezreelite has a vineyard next to Ahab’s palace. Ahab wants it for a vegetable garden
and tells Naboth he will pay for it; but Naboth does not want to sell it. It is his family’s ancestral home. Ahab becomes “resentful and sullen” again
over this and will not eat (21:4). Jezebel
can’t understand why he doesn’t just take the land. “Do you now govern
Israel?” (21:7) So she decides she will
handle the matter. She plans
to have Naboth falsely accused of some crime by the city’s elders and
nobles—like cursing the king or something. A Jerusalem Bible note says that the property of traitors reverted
automatically to the king. They do it, and in the end Naboth is taken
out and stoned – no legal process, simply accusation and death. Jezebel tells
Ahab he may now go and take possession of the vineyard.
But “then the
Lord said to Elijah, . . . ‘Go to King Ahab of Samaria [and] tell him that I,
the Lord, say to him, ‘After murdering the man, are you taking over his
property as well?’ Tell him that this is what I [the Lord] say: ‘In the very
place that the dogs licked up Naboth’s blood, they will lick up you blood!’” (21:19).
He also foresees a terrible end for Jezebel: “The dogs shall eat Jezebel within
the bounds of Jezreel” (21:23). Ahab tears his garments and fasts when he hears
this, so the Lord relents somewhat, telling Elijah “Since he [Ahab] has done
this, I will not bring disaster on him during his lifetime; it will be during
his son’s lifetime that I will bring disaster on Ahab’s family” (21:29). Yet another difficult moral framework for modern readers to
accept – that somehow God finds an equal justice in punishing the offspring of
the real perpetrators.
Luke 4:1-30 - Having had it revealed
to Jesus in his baptism that he is God’s “beloved Son” Jesus goes out into the
wilderness and is tested. Of interest in comparing this to Mark’s version, here it
says, “the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily
form like a dove” – all very public.
In Mark it says, “as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens
torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him” (1:10). The idea of it being a personal opening
to Jesus is more likely in the Mark version. Here there is an attempt to make it look like the vision was
there for all to see.
He goes out into the desert for 40 days, eating nothing. The devil comes to him and tempts him
three times: once suggesting he should command the stones to becomes loaves of
bread since he is so hungry; once offering him the glory and authority bestowed
on rulers over all the kingdoms of the world; and finally tempting him to put
God to the test by hurling himself off the Temple to see if God will protect
him as is promised in scripture.
Jesus refuses all of these.
The Spirit of God is with him but he eats nothing for forty days, fasting to attain clarity and
self-discipline to discern what it means that he is God’s “beloved Son.” Does it mean that he will be given
miraculous powers to feed the masses and thus win favor by satisfying the
material needs of man? Does it mean that he is to have power over all the
earthly kingdoms of this world? Does it mean that whatever he wants and needs,
he will be able to attain from God because of God’s special love for him. He learns in turning his back on all
these temptations that the true path of the Son of God is not any of these. It is not clear that the reality of
what it does import appeared to Jesus at this time, but there were clearly a
number of possibilities that “tempted Jesus” when he considered how he might
use his powers. It is these that
he turns his back on. He meets
temptation with obedience and lowliness.
The scriptures he cites show that even for Jesus the ancient Hebrew
scriptures were a source of guidance and inspiration, but we must be careful
here for the devil too quotes scripture to Jesus. It is not the words found in scripture but the spirit of
discernment applied to them that provides the wisdom.
After
concluding his time in the desert, Jesus goes to his own town, Nazareth, and
begins to preach in the synagogue. At first people
admire him for his “gracious words” (4:22), but they soon turn on him when he
compares them with some of the stubborn Jews of old and praises the outsiders
in Israel’s past who were more open to God than the people (the Phoenician widow
in Elijah’s story, Naaman the Syrian). Jesus adds to the Naaman story a detail
that is not obvious from the scriptures – that the prophet Elisha was unable to
cure anyone of leprosy in his own land.
I like it
here that Jesus is using the book of Kings to teach the people – we need
to remember that when we have the urge to throw out or denigrate the sometimes
messy stories that come to us in Kings. What Kings teaches here is that often “the
stranger,” “the foreigner,” is more open to the healing touch of the prophet
than the people God called to him through Abraham and Moses. Jesus uses this to reproach the people
of Nazareth and they “get it” in no uncertain terms. They are offended by his criticism of their complaisance or
their unwillingness to believe in a “prophet” [Jesus] who is altogether too familiar to them to really
“see.” They are like the
dutiful son in the prodigal son story.
They cannot see into their father’s depths because they are too used to
seeing him with eyes of flesh.
The “living God” is different
from the notion of God we create in learning about him as a child. This is a lesson we too must
learn. We will never see God or
hear His voice in us if we cling too tenaciously to the notions we learn of Him
before we have experienced Him. We
somehow must be brought to see the great gulf that lies between Him and the
familiar comfortable concepts we have of him – in a sense we must all come
to him as foreigners, strangers, sinners, outsiders.
They run him out of
town. He goes to Capernaum
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