Today This Has Come True

He came back into Galilee with the power of the Spirit on him, and the news about him went out through the whole of that countryside. He taught in one meeting house after another, and everybody said how good he was. And then he came to Nazareth, the little hill town where he had grown up, where everyone had known him since he was small. On the Sabbath day he went into the meeting house, the way he had every week of his life, and he stood up to read. The attendant handed him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled it, and found the place he wanted, and read it out loud to them: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to poor people. He has sent me to announce that the prisoners are let out, and that the blind can see again; to set free the ones who are crushed down; to announce the year when the Lord welcomes his people.”

Then he rolled the scroll up and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. Nobody moved. Every pair of eyes in the meeting house was on him. And he began to speak, and what he said was one sentence: “Today this writing has come true — in your own ears, while you sit here listening to it.” Those words had been read out in that room every year for hundreds of years, and everybody in it was waiting for the day they would happen. He had just told them that the day was this one. At first they thought it was wonderful. They talked about how well he spoke, and how kind the words were that came out of his mouth, and they said to one another, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” He knew what was underneath that. He answered the thing they had not said out loud yet: “I expect you are going to quote me the old saying, ‘Doctor, heal yourself.’ You will say: we heard what you did over at Capernaum — do it here at home too.” “Amen, I tell you: no prophet is ever welcome in his own home town. There were plenty of widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months and there was a great hunger over the whole land. And Elijah was not sent to a single one of them. He was sent out of the country altogether, to a widow at Zarephath, in Sidon. And there were plenty of people with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and not one of them was made clean. Only Naaman — and Naaman was a Syrian.” Two foreigners. Their own scriptures, their own two greatest prophets, and both of them sent past Israel to somebody outside it. The room went from proud to furious in about four seconds. They got up, all of them, and pushed him out of the door and out of the town, and drove him up to the edge of the hill their town was built on, where the ground drops away — to throw him over it. And he walked through the middle of them and went on his way. Whatever happened on that hilltop, they did not lay a hand on him, and he did not go back to Nazareth for a long time.

He went down to Capernaum instead, a fishing town on the north shore of the lake, and that became the place he worked from. On the Sabbath he taught in the meeting house there, and the people were astounded, because he taught like a man who had the right to say it, and not the way the teachers of the law did, forever quoting somebody else. And there was a man in the meeting house that morning with an unclean spirit in him, and right in the middle of the teaching he screamed out: “What have we to do with you, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are — the Holy One of God!” Everybody in that room had grown up hearing about spirits, and about the long words and objects that were supposed to be needed to get rid of one. Jesus used six words, in the tone you would use to a dog that was barking in the night: “Be quiet. Come out of him.” And the thing threw the man down in front of them all and gave one loud cry and came out of him, and left him lying there, not hurt at all. And the whole meeting house started talking at once: “What is this? A new teaching — and with the right to give the orders! He tells the unclean spirits what to do, and they do it.” By that afternoon the news of him was running around every village in Galilee.

They came straight out of the meeting house and along the lane to the house where Simon and Andrew lived, with James and John following. And Simon’s wife’s mother was in bed with a high fever, and they told him about her the moment he was through the door. He went in and stood over her, and took her by the hand, and lifted her up, and the fever left her — and she got up and made them all something to eat. That was the first thing she did. Then the sun went down. The Sabbath ended as soon as the first stars came out, and the moment it did, the whole town came. They carried people up the lane on mats; they led old men along by the elbow; mothers came with children in their arms. The whole town was gathered at the door. And he healed them — not in a great sweep of the hand, but one at a time, putting his hands on each single person, all evening long. And unclean spirits came shrieking out of a good many people, shouting, “You are the Son of God!” And he told them sharply to be quiet, and would not let them say another word, because they knew who he was. It must have gone on very late. And then, a few hours later, while it was still black dark and everybody in the house was asleep, he got up. He went out of the house, and out of the town, and away to a lonely place where there was nobody at all, and there he prayed. When Simon woke up and found him gone, he and the others went hunting for him, and when they found him they said, as if he had somehow forgotten: “Everyone is looking for you!” And he said, “Let us go somewhere else — to the country towns near here — so that I can tell them there too. That is what I came out to do.” Which was not the answer Simon wanted. There was a whole town at the door of his house. But they went, and they kept going, all round Galilee, meeting house after meeting house, town after town.

One morning he was standing at the edge of the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd pressing in to hear him was so thick that he was being backed up into the water. There were two boats pulled up on the shingle, empty, and the fishermen were a little way off washing their nets after a night out on the water. So he climbed into one of the boats — it was Simon’s — and asked him to push out a short way from the shore. Then he sat down in the boat and taught the crowd from the water. A boat for a pulpit, and the flat water carrying his voice up the beach to all of them at once. And when he had finished speaking he said to Simon, “Put out into the deep water, and let your nets down for a catch.” Now, Simon was a fisherman and had been one all his life, and this man was a carpenter from an inland town. You fish that lake at night, in the shallow water. You do not fish in the middle of the morning out in the deep. And he had been up all night already and caught nothing at all, and had just finished washing and folding the nets he would now have to wash again. “Master, we worked hard the whole night through and took nothing. But if you say so, I will let the nets down.” And they let them down. And the nets came up so full of fish that they began to tear. They waved to their partners in the other boat to come and help, and they came, and the two boats were filled up until they were so low in the water that they were beginning to sink. And Simon Peter let go of the net and got down on his knees in the bottom of a boat full of fish, in front of him, and said, “Go away from me, Lord. I am a sinful man.” He was not frightened of the fish. He had just worked out who was sitting in his boat, and he did not think he could stand being that close to him. James and John, Zebedee’s sons, who were his partners, were as astonished as he was, and neither of them could say anything at all. And Jesus said to him, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will be catching people alive.” And they rowed the boats in to the shore, and pulled them up on the shingle, and left everything lying there — the boats, the nets, the biggest catch either of them had ever made in their lives — and went with him.

And in one of those towns a man came to him who had leprosy. He had a disease of the skin that nobody could cure, and because of it he was not allowed to live in the town or go into the meeting house or come near anybody. He lived outside, and when people came along the road he had to call out to warn them off. Nobody had put a hand on him for years — not his mother, not his wife, not a friend. He came right up to Jesus, which he was not supposed to do, and went down on his knees, and then flat on his face in the dust, and begged him: “Lord — if you are willing, you can make me clean.” Not ‘can you’. He had no doubt at all about whether the man could do it. What he did not know was whether the man would want to. And something moved right through Jesus when he heard it. And he put out his hand and touched him. He could have said the word from where he stood; he had told an unclean spirit to leave a man without going near him. He touched this one first, before he said anything, and then he said it: “I am willing. Be clean.” And straight away the leprosy went out of him, and he was clean — standing there in the road with clean skin on his arms, and the feel of a hand still on his shoulder. And Jesus sent him off at once, and was very firm with him about it: “See that you say nothing about this to anybody. Go and show yourself to the priest, and make the offering for your cleansing that Moses laid down, as a proof to them.” And the man went out and told everyone he met, all the way down the road, which meant that Jesus could not walk into a town openly any more. He had to stay outside, in the empty places — and the people came out to him there from everywhere, in their hundreds. So that is where he kept ending up: out in the lonely country, with a crowd finding him. And early in the mornings, before they did, he went off by himself into those empty places and prayed.