New Year, Jesus, Favour, and the Unexpected

We're only into the 9th day of the New Year...
I'd like to share some of my thoughts on some familiar Scripture that I've been studying over the last couple of days.

Jesus is led into the desert by the Holy Spirit and then Luke sees Him go back to Galilee where he was brought up, and there he enters the Synagogue. Jesus is given the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah. He unrolls it and finds the place where it is written:
"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour".
Jesus then goes on to say that the fulfillment has come.
Jesus sees the words of the prophet as his own personal mission. Good news indeed, for those on the margins of society, for those in need, for those who are helpless and have no hope.

The mission of Jesus (according to Luke chapter 4) - was to proclaim (in word and deed) the year of the Lord's favour! A Year of grace and favour from the part of our Creator God.

The folks in the Synagogue found it hard to believe that Jesus - was the chosen one. He was too familiar to them - he had grown up in the same town, they knew his father and presumably his mother, brothers and sisters.

Jesus then goes on to anger them by saying this:
"Look I'll tell you the truth, no prophet is accepted in his own town. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one was cleansed - only Naaman the Syrian."
These words angered them so much that they wanted to kill Jesus! But why?

Jesus annonces the time of God's favour upon the 'unexpected'. God's favour rests with the destitute and the other. Jesus quotes examples where God favoured those outside the familiar - for Jesus' listeners these were the non-jewish, Gentile dogs. The syrian enemy soldier and the foreign pagan widow.
They found it hard to accept that God's favour was for such as these.

Who are those that you consider 'outside' of God's favour? Why?


May this year be one of favour and grace,
healing, reconciliation, freedom and insightfulness.
That God may surprise us with the unexpected,
As we follow Him in the Way that is often on the edge.
Amen