Be a threat; think outside the box like Jesus

Published: February 06, 2010

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor

By Bishop Anthony B. Taylor

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor delivered the following homily Jan. 31 at the Cathedral of St. Andrew in Little Rock.

One of the buzz words -- or buzz phrases -- current these days encourages us to "think outside the box."

The idea is that creativity requires us to move beyond limited conventional expectations. For instance, up to about 10 years ago almost all cars used only gas or diesel, except a few experimental cars that used only electricity -- and couldn't go more than 100 miles before having to be plugged in and recharged. Gas or electric, those were the options. Then someone thought outside the box and came up with a gas and electric hybrid where the gas engine recharges the batteries when extra energy is being produced -- say going downhill -- and the electric motor supplements the gas engine when more energy is needed -- say going uphill. I have had a 2003 Honda Civic Hybrid for seven years now and it's great: four cylinders, five passengers and it gets an average of 50 miles to the gallon. I've already put 180,000 miles on it -- think of how much gas I've saved.

In today's Gospel we have our first glimpse of Jesus as a person who thinks outside the box. The people of his hometown were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth in part because he went way beyond how they had remembered him as a child --Isn't this the son of Joseph? But Jesus had already moved way beyond their limited conventional expectations. They had heard he had worked some miracles in Capernaum and since those claiming to be faith healers were as common then as they are still in some parts of the United States today, they were willing to accept -- if given proof -- that he might indeed be a faith healer.

But that was the limit to what their small town piety was able to imagine. And here was Jesus, who as we know from the other Gospels was unable to work any miracles there due to their lack of faith -- here was Jesus, the miracle worker who worked no miracles, claiming now to be a prophet! And by so doing, he had stepped outside the box.

And what a convention-upsetting, boundary-crossing message it was: God loves, sometimes even preferentially, the gentiles whom they regarded as enemies and unclean. God who had already used both Elijah and Elisha to extend his saving love to a widow from Sidon in Lebanon and to Naaman from Syria, was now going to use Jesus to do the same thing, to bring God's saving love to the gentiles, their enemies.

Those who think outside the box often threaten those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo -- oil producers prefer gas-guzzlers because they'd sell only half as much gas if we all drove hybrid cars -- and the people of Nazareth felt so threatened and infuriated by Jesus' message that their enemies were included in God's plan of salvation that they tried to kill the messenger, by throwing him over a cliff. But Jesus got away and continued to proclaim the Good News of universal salvation elsewhere.