If you are in a church that follows the lectionary (we are not), then this Sunday, one of the readings will be Luke 4:14-21. I saw one person on Facebook ask whether a legitimate application was thar despite all of its problems, Jesus was there in the established church of his day.
Now, I suspect that this was intended tongue in cheek and probably to specifically wind up people like me who don’t believe there should be an established church and think that evangelicals would be better off out of the CofE. However, although it should be very funny, I’m afraid that there might be too many who would take it as a serious option. This includes not just the temptation to use the passage to support staying in the CofE but also a potential approach to urging people to keep attending their local free church.
There are some fairly obvious reasons as to why we shouldn’t take this approach. The primary ones are first that the Synagogue wasn’t the equivalent of the local Church of England Parish Church, that’s a rather anachronistic overlay. Secondly we are not the equivalent of Jesus here, this isn’t a “look for WWJD moment (if there ever is).
If you’re not persuaded yet and are still ready to deliver that sermon, then here are a few more things to consider. First, that there were issues with regards to the Synagogue’s leaders but the places were orthodox in line with the revelation that they had at the time, they were functioning prior to Christ’s atonement. Secondly, the crucial issue for them was whether or not they were willing to receive Jesus, to listen to him and obey him or whether they would reject him. That question is of course answered in the Gospels by what happens where Jesus shows up. The reality was that Jesus and after him, his followers were rejected by the Synagogues. Instead of following him, the leaders and members sought to kill him.
So, if you do want to draw some side, tenuous applications then you need to at least think through where your church stands in terms of rejection or acceptance of Christ. This of course be as simple as an outright denial of him but anything that undermines the truth of the Gospel should be seen in those terms. And of course, if they are rejecting followers of Jesus then they are rejecting him.
Hopefully though, most of us would recognise that in this case, that kind of application is a non-starter. Yet, the risk is always there that we can miss the point of what is going on in any Bible passage and force fit our own agenda into the application.
Faithroots 