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THE PAIN OF REJECTION (Part 2)

Thank you Connie. The Bible is a limitless mine of inspiration. So it’s a real privilege to be able to share some time with you from day to day, searching the Scriptures, unearthing more and more of the gems of “truth and hope” that it contains. No matter how long you search, no matter how intently you search, no matter how educated or lacking in education, there’s always something fresh and inspiring to find. And God has this wonderful habit of pointing us to something that precisely meets the need we’re feeling at any moment of time. Haven’t you found that?

Yesterday, we opened Luke chapter 4, and discovered a gem that speaks to an experience we all have from time to time. We all experience rejection. We so much want to go somewhere, with someone, or a group of people, but no matter how much we desire it, it doesn’t happen, and we experience the devastating feeling of rejection.

It would be easy to say, Well, Jesus never felt like this. But He did! He experienced rejection from His own family, His own church congregation, His own neighbors. And because He experienced it, He understands how you feel when you come up against rejection, and He’ll support you through this crisis and bring you out the other side so you can continue to experience the sunshine of His love.

The story divides itself neatly into three chapters. Happiness in Homecoming, Humiliation in Homecoming, and finally, Heartbreak in Homecoming.

Some months after Jesus began His public life and ministry, He returned to Nazareth where He’d grown up. He went to synagogue one Sabbath, and read from a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. That didn’t cause any great problem at first. But when he’d finished reading, He announced that the prophecy had been fulfilled—that very day. These are the words His friends and family and neighbors heard Him say:

The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. . . Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:18, 19, 21, NIV).

It took a little time for that to sink in. But by claiming to fulfill the prophecy, Jesus claimed to be the Messiah. And some of the congregation began murmuring. Their first reaction was to shake their heads and comment, “No, this is just Joseph’s boy, He’s the lad that grew up in the carpenter’s shop. He’s no Messiah!”

But a lot of other information needed to be processed in their thinking. For example, all the reports that had come back to Nazareth from surrounding towns, and those as far away as Bethany, and Jerusalem in the south, miracles were being performed wherever Jesus went. Yes, the blind were seeing, the poor in spirit were finding the riches of heaven through the good news being preached. The oppressed found freedom from their burdens through the gospel: just as He had read from Isaiah. As Jesus read their thoughts, He knew they were asking themselves, “Why doesn’t he do it here, in blighted, poverty-stricken Nazareth? Let’s see it for ourselves, Jesus!’ So Jesus commented:

Surely you will quote this proverb to me: “Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum” (Luke 4:23, NIV).
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But He added:
I tell you the truth, no prophet is accepted in his hometown (Luke 4:24, NIV).

What an intriguing reality! Even the greatest of the prophets are not accepted by their home crowds. “No matter what I say or do,” Jesus was telling them, “you won’t accept me as a prophet! It’s always been that way.” And He went on to give them some compelling examples.

He asked if they remembered the needs of the prophet Elijah? Where could God find a widow to feed the prophet after he’d killed 400 prophets of Baal and been driven away by King Ahab and Queen Jezebel? Weren’t there any widows in Israel? Of course there were, hundreds of them. But where did God send the prophet? Way up north, beyond the land of Israel, into Zaraphath, in the heathen land of Sidon. So it was not a Jewish widow, but a foreigner, a Gentile, that performed the miracle of feeding Him for the last of the three and a half years of the famine.

And then He gave a second example. How many Jews had leprosy in the days of the prophet Naaman? Far too many. How many were healed? None. Yet up in Syria, God placed his hand on a leprous foreigner for healing through the prayers and prompting of a youthful Jewish servant girl. She sent him down to the River Jordan. It wasn’t as pretty and clean as a Syrian stream close to the mountains. But in Israel’s Jordan, the foreigner found healing from leprosy at the command of the prophet Nathan. So, Jesus concluded, prophets are not accepted by their own.

Then I imagine the exclamations of the congregation, “We ought not to let ourselves get carried away by all this talk. After all, this is only Joseph’s boy?” At first that would have been spoken in amazement, later with cynicism, and finally they spat out the words in hostility as they tried to humiliate Him. The crowd turned ugly, as Luke puts it,

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. (Luke 43:28, NIV)

Who did he think He was! Ah, friend, that’s the right question! Who did He think He was? Mary’s son? Yes, but certainly not Joseph’s son. He was the son of God, Who had come to show us the full and unconditional acceptance, not rejection, of the heavenly Father.

And with the cries of this hostile crowd, the second chapter closes and the third opens. First happiness, then humiliation, and finally, heartbreak in His homecoming as they rejected Him and tried to kill Him. The parishioners got up from their seats in the synagogue, drove Jesus out of town to the top of a hill where they intended to push Him to His death. That’s intense rejection! It doesn’t get more severe than that. But in God’s eyes, this was not to be, and Jesus quietly walked back through the murderous crowd to safety. His time had not yet come.

But what heartbreak Jesus must have experienced as He walked away leaving His family and former friends. Rejected by the people He knew so well, the ones He grew up with, the people He loved.

Now we fast forward to the closing scenes of Jesus life, as Luke describes the terror of the Garden of Gethsemane and Golgotha.

In the final moments of His life, while hanging on the cross, Jesus felt something He’d never experienced before. He felt the presence of His Father being withdrawn. It must have been terrifying. For 33 years of life, every moment had been dedicated to showing the love and acceptance of the Father. As He came to the end of a sinless life, He remained committed to serving the Father no matter what the cost. But at the very end, with the pain at its most intense, the burden of guilt the heaviest, the destiny of every believer on His shoulders, when Jesus needed God the most, He felt entirely rejected.

There are no words more filled with agony in all Scripture than those of Jesus, “Why, God, have you forsaken me?” They are almost too sacred, too sad to explore. But we need to understand what was going on, because at one level, Jesus knew exactly what was going on!

Intellectually, He knew He’d come to the world to take human nature, and at the end of life to accept the responsibility of bearing the burden of the sins and sinfulness of the world. Intellectually, He knew that the Father must treat Him as we deserve, so we could be treated as He, in His perfection, deserved. That meant separation from the Father’s comforting presence.

Also, intellectually Jesus knew the precise time limits that the darkness of death would encompass Him: just three days. Over and over again He had tried to comfort the disciples with this information. And on one occasion He threw this challenge at the religious leaders,

“Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days.” (John 2:19 NIV).

For centuries of Jewish national life after the Exodus, the annual services also enshrined this information. A Sabbath called Passover, predicted His death, the next day called Unleavened Bread, symbolized His burial in the tomb. And the following day, the third day, a Sabbath called First Fruits, foretold His resurrection. In the face of all this knowledge, how could Jesus question His Father and ask, “Why are you rejecting Me?” Because this is the language of experience and feeling. Even knowing what’s going to happen, doesn’t make us (or Jesus) immune to the blinding agony of feeling abandoned.
So how comforting to know how Jesus felt, and to be certain of His understanding when we enter the same experience of rejection. You can be sure He enters that experience with you. As Hebrews says, our Mediator doesn’t stand remote from the feelings of our experience, for He was tested in all points just like we are. So we are invited to approach Him in prayer on His throne where you can count on His comfort every day. God bless you.