“And he began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. . . . When they heard these things, all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw him down the cliff. But passing through their midst, he went away” (Luke 4:21-30).
We should not be surprised if Jesus was rejected by outsiders and enemies. The unsettling truth of this story is that the greatest danger to the way of God in this world is posed by those who are closest to it.
Jesus is rejected not in Sodom and Gomorrah, but in Nazareth.
He is betrayed not by the devil, but by one of the Twelve whom he chose.
He is crucified not in pagan Rome, but in the heart of Israel at Jerusalem.
The rejection of Jesus repeats the rejection of God in the history of Israel, whose ultimate adversary was not Baal worship or foreign nations, but “my own people who are bent on turning from me, declares the Lord” (Hos 11:7).
“[Jesus] came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him” (John 1:11).
– James R. Edwards,
The Gospel according to Luke (emphasis added, 142).
MAGNIFY CHRIST 