Why Do Christians Exclude People?

In our passage today, the people take a wide swing from amazement to anger. What does Jesus say that’s so offensive? What would make people so angry from these simple words?

All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked.

Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”

“Truly I tell you,” 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 off the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way. - Luke 22-30

The people Jesus mentions in his message were both non-Jewish, and on top of that, one was a woman and one was a leper. They were outsiders in so many ways. Rachel Held Evans once wrote, “What makes the gospel offensive isn't who it keeps out but who it lets in.”

When have you felt excluded by other peoples’ gospel? Who does your gospel keep out? What is Jesus saying to you today about welcoming others?