This is part seven of the Lost Gospel of Jesus series. I'm trying to show you the Gospel, the message, that Jesus preached. It is a message that is supposed to change everything. In part one we saw that Jesus preached the Gospel. In part two we saw that when Paul and the disciples and Jesus preached the Gospel miracles, healings, supernatural manifestations happened. In part three we looked at what it was that Paul preached. In part four we saw what Jesus preached and what he taught his disciples to preach. In part five we looked at the actual words that Jesus and his disciples used when they preached the Gospel. In part six I showed you a longer version of the Gospel of the Kingdom of God as Jesus preached it. Now I want to show what happened when Jesus preached the Gospel of the Kingdom of God in Nazareth.
I like to imagine Jesus on the road to Nazareth thinking about what was getting ready to happen in his hometown. It hadn’t been that long since he left, months maybe or even weeks. I imagine him remembering all the people in Nazareth who needed God’s help, who needed God’s power to show up in their lives. Old Mrs. Matityahu whose son had been blind from birth… Mr. Gedalya who’d been laid up in bed since he fell and injured himself while doing construction work up in Sephoris… The Shimon family, they’d never had anything, they were so poor they thought poor was normal … today was going to be their day…today God’s power was going to deliver them … today was the day God’s promises were going to be fulfilled … good news, good news, GOOD NEWS!
Unfortunately the people in Nazareth weren’t as thrilled at Jesus' good news as you might have expected, though pretty much every translation gives the impression that Jesus was well received: