Jn Luke 4, we see Jesus at a synagogue being praised and admired by his fellow Jews as long as Jesus presented himself as an especially gifted teacher who affirmed their sense of being exceptional in the eyes of God. But watch that adulation turn on a dime when Jesus points his listeners to some basic realities in the Hebrew texts on which they based their faith.
“Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown,” Jesus says. “But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. (See 1 Kings 17:8-24.) There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.” (See 2 Kings 5:1–15.)
That enraged the listeners in the synagogue so much that they tried to chase Jesus out of town with the intent of pushing him off the edge of a cliff to his death. Somehow in the melee, though, he escaped.
In both cases, Jesus was showing how God had worked to bring healing and wholeness to individuals who were not citizens of what the Jewish religious authorities deemed to be a divinely privileged nation—Zarephath living in what is now Lebanon and Naaman in northern Africa.
The notion that God extends divine love and grace to “them” as well as “us”—and in fact will move past the “us” who take God’s grace for granted to those who will more fully appreciate that grace and respond accordingly—still enrages people today. But if you are among the “them,” do not be deterred. God’s love is for everyone; that was the whole point of Jesus’s life, including his sacrificing his life on the cross.
There are queer Zaraphaths and Naamans in our midst right now—you may well be one of them—who by showing hospitality to someone who needs it or by standing up against negative forces in their community are demonstrating God at work across lines of ethnicity, gender, identity, and especially across human-made lines of the chosen “us” and the supposedly unchosen “them.”