The oldest idea in religion is that God has a favorite. There is an inside group and an outside group, and heaven cares more about one than the other. A lot of people still believe it quietly.
Jesus went home to the town he grew up in and told his own neighbors that it was false. God had been going to outsiders the whole time. They tried to kill him for it that same day.
Luke tells this story in chapter 4. It comes right after Jesus spends forty days in the wilderness being tempted by the devil, and just before he drives an unclean spirit out of a man in the town of Capernaum.
The morning in the synagogue
It was about the year 28. The place was Nazareth, a small hill town in Galilee, up in the north. Galilee was not ruled from Rome directly. It was ruled by a man named Herod Antipas, and Rome ruled him.
Nazareth was tiny. Everybody knew everybody.
It was the Sabbath, the rest day. Jesus walked into the synagogue, the small building where the town gathered to pray and hear the scriptures read. Luke says it was his custom to go there. These were the people who had watched him grow up.
He stood up to read.
The attendant, the man who kept the scrolls and handed them out, went and got the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He passed it to Jesus.
Jesus unrolled it. He found the place. He read out loud that the Spirit of the Lord was on him, that he was sent to preach good news to the poor, to heal broken hearts, to tell prisoners they were free, to give blind people their sight, and to set bruised people loose.
Then he rolled the scroll back up. He handed it to the attendant. He sat down.
Every person in that room was looking at him.
He said, this day this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.
And they loved it. The whole room spoke well of him. They were amazed at the kind words coming out of his mouth. They turned to each other, proud, and said the thing people say about a local boy who has done well.
And all bare him witness, and wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth. And they said, Is not this Joseph's son? (Luke 4:22)
What he said next
He did not stop at the nice part. He knew what they wanted from him. They had heard about the healings he did in Capernaum, a town by the lake, and they wanted a show at home. He said it to their faces.
And he said unto them, Ye will surely say unto me this proverb, Physician, heal thyself: whatsoever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in thy country. And he said, Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country. (Luke 4:23-24)
Then he kept going.
He told them about a famine long ago, back in the days of the prophet Elijah, when the northern kingdom of Israel really was a kingdom by that name. The sky stayed shut for three years and six months. No rain. The crops died. People went hungry across the whole land.
There were many widows in that kingdom, he said. Many. Hungry women with no husband and no help, praying to the same God, in their own country.
But unto none of them was Elias sent, save unto Sarepta, a city of Sidon, unto a woman that was a widow. (Luke 4:26)
God sent Elijah past every one of them. He sent him north, up the coast, out of the country, to a town called Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Sidon was where Queen Jezebel came from. Her father Ethbaal was the king of Tyre and Sidon, two cities up the coast. That was Baal country, the home of the very family that was hunting Elijah down.
That is where God sent him. To a foreign widow in the enemy queen's own homeland. She fed the prophet before she fed her own son, and her jar of flour never ran out.
Then Jesus said it a second time, with a different story, so nobody could call it a slip of the tongue.
There were many lepers back in the days of the prophet Elisha, he said. Many. Sick people at home, waiting, hoping, covered in sores. Not one of them was cleaned up.
And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Eliseus the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, saving Naaman the Syrian. (Luke 4:27)
The one who was healed was Naaman. Naaman was a general from Damascus, the commander of the army of Aram. His soldiers had raided villages and carried children off as slaves. One of those stolen girls, working as a servant in his house, is the one who told him where to go for help.
That is the man God cleaned up. The enemy commander.
The room turned
Nobody argued with him. Nobody quoted a verse back at him. There was no debate at all.
The room went from proud to furious.
And all they in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, And rose up, and thrust him out of the city, and led him unto the brow of the hill whereon their city was built, that they might cast him down headlong. (Luke 4:28-29)
The men on those benches stood up. The neighbors who had watched him grow took hold of him and shoved him out through the door and out past the last house of the town.
Nazareth sat on a hill. They walked him up to the edge of it, to the brow, where the ground stops and drops away. They were going to throw him over.
He walked straight through the middle of them and went on his way.
Why that sentence
He picked those two stories on purpose. He knew exactly what they would do to that room. Every man there had heard them since he was a boy.
This time Jesus made them hear what those stories meant. He said that God fed a widow in Sidon and healed a general from Damascus. And for that, men reached for murder.
People do not try to kill a man over something mild. If he had preached that God loves his covenant people, they would have nodded and gone home to eat. If he had preached that God would punish Rome, they would have cheered. Their reaction tells us which sentence was dangerous.
It was this one. God helps people who are not us.
A rule God never made
The idea that God has a favorite people was a man-made rule. It was written into their laws: who was clean, who could come near, who was in and who was out. Jesus went after it in his very first sermon at home, on purpose, in front of everyone who knew him.
That rule took a room full of men who prayed every week and walked them up a hill to kill the man who said God loves foreigners too. That is how foolish the rule was. It did not come from God, and Jesus never once obeyed it.
He never took it back
He kept doing the thing that nearly killed him. He healed a Roman officer's servant. He sat at a well and talked about God with a Samaritan woman. He listened to a foreign mother argue with him and told her she had won. He ate with a tax collector. He promised paradise to a thief dying beside him.
Years later, Peter, one of his closest friends, finally said it out loud. The book of Acts tells it. Acts picks up where the Gospel of Luke, one of the four accounts of Jesus's life, leaves off. Peter said this in the house of a Roman officer.
Of a truth I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: But in every nation he that feareth him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him. (Acts 10:34-35)
Peter did not reason his way there. God kept showing up in the wrong houses, in front of the wrong people, until Peter ran out of ways to explain it away.
Peter said it and still could not do it
What happened to Peter later is the part that makes him worth loving.
Some time after he said that, Peter was in a city called Antioch, eating dinner with foreigners. Then a group of strict men arrived, sent from James, the brother of Jesus, who led the church in Jerusalem. Peter got up and moved away from that table. Paul, a leader who carried the good news to foreigners, called Peter out in front of everybody. Paul wrote about it later in his letter to the Galatians, the churches of Galatia, a region in what is now Turkey. Here is how he described it.
For before that certain came from James, he did eat with the Gentiles: but when they were come, he withdrew and separated himself, fearing them which were of the circumcision. (Galatians 2:12)
The same man. He had already said out loud that God has no favorites. And when the room filled up with people who expected him to act better than that, his feet moved him away from the table anyway.
He had been raised his whole life to believe he was one of the chosen and other people were not. The Spirit of God was waking up inside him, and the old training was still in there too, and the two things were fighting. He got it right in words before he could do it in his life.
If that man struggled with this, nobody listening should feel disqualified for struggling with it.
The word that is missing
Christianity ended up with plenty of names for the people outside it. Heathen. Infidel. Unbeliever. Some of those were not only insults. They were written into law, and they were used to take people's freedom.
But go back to the man himself. That word is not in the mouth of Jesus. It is not there anywhere.
He argued hard with the teachers inside his own house, and he called them hypocrites to their faces. He never made a name for the people outside. He called them children of God, the same way he was the Son of God. That is why he knelt on the floor and washed his friends' feet, including the feet of the man about to sell him. He was showing them that the body holding the Spirit of God is not a better body. It is the same kind of body everybody else has.
The difference between him and us is not the body. It is how awake the Spirit of God is inside it. His was fully awake. Ours is still waking up, and he showed us how.
If you have ever been the outsider
If you have ever been the one who did not belong in somebody else's holy story, born to the wrong parents, raised in the wrong town, carrying a past that follows you into rooms, then that sermon was about you.
He stood in front of the people who raised him and told them God had always gone to people like you.
They walked him to a cliff for it.
He said it anyway, and he kept saying it for the rest of his life.
The next time you meet someone who is different from you in some way, the Spirit of God is in that person too. Treat them badly and you are treating something of yourself badly, because you are both children of the same Father.