Daily Word Of God
Luke 4:24-30
Jesus came to Nazara and spoke to the people in the synagogue: ‘In truth I tell you, no prophet is ever accepted in his own country.
‘There were many widows in Israel, I can assure you, in Elijah’s day, when heaven remained shut for three years and six months and a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to any one of these: he was sent to a widow at Zarephath, a town in Sidonia. And in the prophet Elisha’s time there were many suffering from virulent skin-diseases in Israel, but none of these was cured – only Naaman the Syrian.’
When they heard this everyone in the synagogue was enraged. They sprang to their feet and hustled him out of the town; and they took him up to the brow of the hill their town was built on, intending to throw him off the cliff, but he passed straight through the crowd and walked away.
Today's Pointers on God's Word
As you read the passage what words, phases or meanings caught your attention?
- The Jews rejected Jesus as a prophet because they could not believe that a carpenter’s son, even though he preaches with much wisdom, can be the awaited Messiah.
- More importantly, Jesus was rejected because the Jews were too self-righteous to believe that non-Jews could be saved. Their narrow and rigid views of salvation blinded them to the Truth that Jesus is their Messiah.
- We all need humility to realize that as God loves us very specially and personally, He too in His infinite love can do the same for others. Are we open to the challenges of the Gospel that is being proclaimed?