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Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany — February 2, 2025

Walter Canter reflects on unanswered prayers, healing, and holding love and anger in tension.

A graphic with the words "Looking into the lectionary"

Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany
Luke 4:21-30
Year C

Confession: Sometimes I want to throw Jesus off a cliff.

When Jesus highlights the fact that there are a bunch of people out there who are suffering, but that God only decides to intervene in a few of their lives for the better, that wild impulse comes on strong.

My mother died of lung cancer in 2011. She was diagnosed in 2008. In 2008, the five-year survival rate for lung cancer hovered around 1 in 5. So, there was an 80% chance my mother would die before 2013. And she did. That’s how life and death works in our world, and I understand that. Of course, everyone who loves anyone with a fatal disease prays and hopes that their loved one is one of the 20% who live beyond five years. But the odds are not in favor of such an outcome.

I can accept that.

I can accept that until Jesus, who has exhibited the power to heal, stands in front of me and tells me, in an off-the-cuff sort of way, that there were many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them were cleansed except Naaman the Syrian (v. 27). I can accept the reality of random death, but when Jesus preaches that there were five women with lung cancer and God plucked one of them – specifically, not my mother – to be healed, I am filled with rage.

I relate with the people in this passage, who become angry and violent when he essentially says they will not receive special treatment. What’s the point of having the Messiah, God’s chosen One, God’s son, God in the flesh of fleshy human fleshness, being from your hometown if he refuses to show partiality toward you and your neighbors?

Leviticus says love your neighbor. Jesus can do something selfless for his neighbor, but he’s refusing to do it. What a jerk, Jesus’ former neighbors say. Let’s run him out of town and push him off a ridge, they say.

I get it. Sometimes I want to throw Jesus off a cliff.

But I don’t.

And it’s not just because every time I want to, Jesus just walks past me in the other direction as if the raging mob that is my grieving faith is non-threatening. I don’t throw Jesus off a cliff because, at some point, deep within my rage-isolated mind, I think: “Damn. To be someone who loves Naaman the Syrian. To be someone who was hoping and praying for the against-the-odds healing of a cancer. To be someone who was starving in a famine and given food. To find Naaman the Syrian sitting in your living room with clear skin and a smile bursting with good news. That such things happen at all. That there are people in this world who have experienced such improbabilities and impossibilities. That despite the inevitability of death, there are statistical anomalies that allow life. That about one in every five people diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in 2008 actually lived five more years. That’s wonderful. That’s glorious. That’s a beauty that is beyond this world.”

So, I don’t throw Jesus off the cliff. And, somehow, the world is better for it.

Questions for reflection on Luke 4:21-30

  1. When has your prayer not been answered? When have you or someone you loved not been healed? How did it feel? How do you continue to hold faith?
  2. What injustice is causing you to fill with rage? How does this text challenge and recontextualize your rage?
  3. The lectionary pairs this story with 1 Corinthians 13 about love. How and where are we holding rage and love in our church communities?

View the corresponding Order of Worship for Luke 4:21-30.
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