Day 16 - On Missing Out

"I tell you the truth," he continued, "no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed--only Naaman the Syrian."

All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way. Luke 4:24f

It is easy for us to agree with the sentiment that no prophet is accepted in his hometown; indeed, it has become a well-known saying in the world. We are, all of us, not listened to nearly enough!

But much more saddening is the realisation that God knows it, too. He does not send his kingdom people to save the religious and he does not send the religious to be saved by kingdom people.

His kingdom walkers, those who walk like Adam and Eve in Eden, in simple friendship with, and trust in, God, he does not send them to bring kingdom riches to the religious and neither will they come to them.

The benefits of the kingdom are for those who throw away their religion and come to worship in spirit and in truth, and for those who as yet have no religion at all.

Should you, like Jesus' hearers, be furious at the thought? If you are, then you may be defending your religion in the face of God's friendship offering to us in Bethlehem's manger.

Surely we have no need to follow the general view, to observe the accepted rituals; do we need to defend and cling to what we know about God and religion in the face of revelation?

Jesus reveals that both Elijah and Elisha, men just like us, were great miracle workers in their day. They knew how to spill the riches of heaven's kingdom onto open hearts. But the very ones who we would have supposed would benefit, would not.

The question has often been posed by philosophy,' if a tree falls over in the desert, and there is no one there to hear it fall, will it make a sound as it hits the ground?'

A modern equivalent of this thought might be, 'If the kingdom of God is flushing the world with the rain of miracles, then why do we not see them?

Not seeing and hearing them is given in evidence that the sound, or the miracle, never happened. Rudimentary anatomy shows us that a noise only becomes heard when its sound waves hit our ear drums. If we take the trouble to go and stand by the tree and listen, as metaphorically did Naaman the Syrian, we would surely hear it fall.

Naaman could well have stayed at home, discussing the relevance of leprosy miracle working with his army colleagues until the cows came home, but he would not then have ever seen one.

It is such a sad thing, but it is only a closed heart that blocks out miraculous help to those who suffer. If these things do not happen around us, it is only because our own hearts are sufficiently shut up to prevent their entry. Interestingly and sadly enough, Jesus proposes to this church congregation that it is we very children of God ourselves who are always missing out.