An Unexpected Jesus

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What are your expectations for 2025?

This is something that has been in the public consciousness the last couple of weeks, as folks are creating their lists of expectations for the new year. Shane riffed on the idea of New Year’s resolutions last week, and reminded us of the 2025 Annual Meeting coming up in a couple of weeks. We just met over the weekend with the leadership of the church, thinking and planning and praying about the year ahead. Many of us are setting our expectations now for what the year will be.

Ironically, though, this might not be the best time to create those goals. I have been reading some stuff lately suggesting that this time of year is actually the worst time to try and create new expectations for yourself. The weather stinks, so any resolutions you make to exercise or spend time outside are harder to stick to. The cold makes our bodies go into hibernation mode, making it even tougher to change diet or lose weight. A lot of us deal with seasonal affective mood stuff, making it harder to be motivated to change. Some stuff I have read recently suggests that we should make resolutions in the spring, where our success rate is likely to be higher. In fact, the failure rate of New Year’s resolutions now has a name. Have you heard about this? There is a thing called “Quitters Day.” The statistics say that two days ago—the second Friday in the year—is the day that people are most likely to give up on their New Year’s resolutions. Statistically speaking, your 2025 expectations very likely may already be on the trash heap!

Let me suggest that sometimes our “success” rate for these goals might be tied to the question of who is actually setting them. I wonder—how many of those expectations are we setting for ourselves, and how many of them are set for us by someone else? Someone else’s body image ideal that we should live up to? Our family of origin’s expectations of what we should do, or be, in our lives? Even complete strangers can prescribe these expectations, often passed along through various media sources about what goals we should set for the year, or our lives. At the heart of it is what kind of person we should be, what kinds of people are more valuable than others.

 

I bring this up because today’s text seems to center around this theme of expectations. As the passage opens, Jesus has just been building his ministry: teaching, healing, gathering momentum and crowds as folks start to see what wondrous things he is doing. And then, he goes home. “Home” and “expectations” often go hand in hand, do they not? Our families, our childhood teachers, our younger selves often create this list of expectations for us that sometimes lead us to greatness…and other times lead us to disappointment. Do any of you have a story of a homecoming that did not go as well as you hoped because someone expected you to be one thing, but you came home something else?

If so, you and Jesus have that in common! From Jesus’ message to the folks in Nazareth, it seems like there are some unspoken or spoken expectations going on here. In the second half of the passage, Luke paints the picture of a hometown that is thrilled to see Jesus, and to see how successful he has become. They are proud, and hopeful, and excited when he makes his homecoming. Like the line in It’s a Wonderful Life, they “only lost three buttons off their vest,” they were so proud.

But unlike Harry Bailey, this homecoming didn’t go well. Some of their pride seemed to come from the fact that they wanted Jesus to do the same things for them that he had in other places. After all, this was his hometown, shouldn’t he save the best for “his” people? Shouldn’t they be able to share some of the credit in his notoriety? They seemed to be particularly upset that he was doing ministry in Capernaum, a place with a high percentage of non-Jews. Shouldn’t he take care of his own?

Jesus disabused them of this “Nazareth-first” idea. He explains that God doesn’t tend to favor “insiders” over “outsiders.” In fact, it is often the other way around. He reminds them of a couple of stories that they all would have known by heart. We read one of them a minute ago, where the prophet Elijah could have performed miracles to any number of Hebrew widows, but instead he went to their mortal enemy in Sidon and saved a widow and her son through miraculous intervention. And he tells the story of Naaman, another mortal enemy of the Hebrew people—a commander in their army, in fact. The prophet Elisha could have saved any number of “insiders” from their leprosy, but instead he saved this enemy commander. Scholar Peter Gomes suggests that the people of Nazareth didn’t want God, they wanted their own “tribal deity,” and that’s what they expected Jesus to be.

So when he wasn’t, they were angry enough at him that they drove him to the edge of town, to the brow of one of those hills that he loved to pray in during his ministry, and probably had done so since he was a boy. Their plan was to throw him off the edge of that hill, violently ending his life simply because he refused to meet their expectations: “If you will not be who we demand, then we will end you.” They did not succeed in ending his life. But they did succeed in ensuring that he never stepped foot in his hometown again.

The folks in the Two-Way [Sermon Discussion Group] last week recognized that their sin is our sin as well. How many of us have expectations of Jesus, based more on who we want Jesus to be than what he actually was?

• How many of us expect Jesus to be the champion of our own ideology or political persuasion? A “mascot Jesus” for our political platform? Our own “tribal deity”?

• How many of us expect Jesus to be our “Santa Claus”? As long as we are more nice than naughty, we should get everything on our list that we want.

• How many of us expect Jesus to be the same Jesus we met as a child, or a teenager, or that moment where we first believed in him? Instead of growing in our relationship with him, we expect a “artifact Jesus,” preserved behind glass just like we left him? Just like we want him to stay.

The Two-Way understood that all of us tend to box in Jesus much in the same way that the good citizens of Nazareth did. This isn’t a Judaism vs. Christianity thing. In fact, scholar Fred Craddock suggests that this story isn’t about a conflict between Jesus and Judaism, or the Church and Judaism, but between Judaism and its own scriptures: their Scripture had taught them to be inclusive…they just didn’t practice it! The Two-Way recognized the same conflict between Christians who claim the Bible is their guide, but ignore what it says about Jesus. I think the lesson here is that we can all have some version of a mascot Jesus, or Santa Jesus, or artifact Jesus. And just like the good people of Nazareth, we react with violence and hatred when that version of Jesus doesn’t show up.

 

So, instead of Santa Jesus, mascot Jesus, or Jesus-behind-glass, what if today’s text were to reveal Jesus as… Jesus? For that, we need to go back to the first part of the text. Before things went south, Jesus went into his hometown synagogue and worshipped there. He was invited to read the text of the day and comment on it, as any adult male might be. It just so happened that the text of the day came from the scroll of Isaiah, specifically Isaiah 61 where God is describing the call to engage in a lifestyle of caring for the vulnerable in their midst.

Again, this is a reminder that the Old Testament is not irrelevant or antithetical to the mission of Jesus…it is the core of the mission of Jesus. Everything that Jesus taught came from the Old Testament, and he saw himself in the same vein as the Old Testament prophets, who also talked about justice for the poor, for those suffering from oppression or imprisonment, and those dealing with physical challenges. Old and New, there is one message that we are a people meant to care for the most vulnerable in our midst. If we do not, we are not fulfilling the call of the book.

Jesus had likely heard that call for the first time in that very synagogue, taught by the religious leaders in his hometown. We cannot be clear about how the Spirit led and guided him to understand his own special mission and identity, but what we can be clear about is that he believed that that mission and identity were tied to the prophetic teachings which he found in Isaiah 61 and peppered throughout the text of his Scriptures. Scholar Carol Lakey Hess calls it his “plumbline,” the central purpose of his ministry. It is no accident that Jesus announces this work as the mission statement at the beginning of his ministry. He has just left the temptation in the desert, where he has clarified things that his ministry will NOT be about. In contrast, now he defines what it WILL be about.

You’ll notice that the people did not freak out when he told them that he was the living incarnation of that Scripture. They had already heard about that power. Some had likely seen that power on display. They were actually pretty pumped that he had that power. But what freaked them out is when he said that that power was not just for them and the people that they like. In their mind, Jesus could be a miraculous prophet, as long as he was their miraculous prophet. Their mascot, their Santa Claus, and their glassed-in artifact. When Jesus refused their expectations, that’s when things got ugly.

 

Let’s go back to this question of your expectations for 2025. If there is a worthy goal for us in this year, perhaps it is to let go of our expectations of Jesus, and instead reconnect with the Unexpected Jesus of Scripture. The Unexpected Jesus that is has already told us who we are, and how we are to live. His plumbline is our plumbline, too! Jesus is inviting you to join him in his work, his open-handed work of caring for the vulnerable in our world, even when it is not convenient for us.

So, maybe it’s time to let go of some of those imposter Jesus figures, looking instead to the Jesus who is:

• Maybe that Jesus isn’t our mascot; maybe he won’t be on the side of those that we pick out for him. But his justice extends to even those who we would call “enemy.”

• Maybe that Jesus isn’t Santa; maybe he doesn’t give you everything on your wish list. But he is still at work meeting the needs of the whole world.

• Maybe that Jesus isn’t where you left him in the museum of your past; maybe he is not the exact Jesus that you met when you were a child. But he is big enough to be there for whomever you are becoming.

This week, we as a nation grieved the loss of Jimmy Carter. I referenced Carter a couple of weeks ago, specifically Carter the Sunday school teacher, referencing his lessons that he taught while president, gathered into a book by our former member Christy Harlan. At that point, I tried to make a point less about his politics and more about his personhood—who he was as a lay theologian and teacher. This week, as we remember him, I would suggest that he followed this plumbline, given by Jesus. Perhaps he can inspire us to do the same.

• The Unexpected Jesus told us to care for the poor. Carter strapped on a tool belt and hammered 2x4s in place next to Habitat for Humanity residents.

• The Unexpected Jesus told us to proclaim release to the captives and set free the oppressed. Carter spent much of his life advocating for peace in places around the world that didn’t need a politician as much as they needed a peacemaker

• The Unexpected Jesus taught us to care for those who are physically vulnerable. Did you know there is a thing called a Guinea worm, that used to infect 3.5 million people a year? But then the Carter Center took aim at eradicating it, and guess how many cases there were last year? Fourteen! Carter followed the Jesus that is the one who brings sight to the blind.

Consider Carter our construction worker, who holds out the plumbline of Jesus, our guide and model. This year, don’t let the world of media tell you what you need to be with your life. Trust the one who created you, who leads you, who guides you to be who you were meant to be. Trust the Unexpected Jesus.