A Puppet God (Luke 4:18-28)

My wife as a little child loved to visit her Grandmother’s. One of the special toys she loved to play with was Teto, the marionette.  You may remember him.  A marionette is a puppet on strings.  It was a special privilege to be allowed to manipulate the puppet and make it dance, and twirl it around. By altering her voice she could make it talk.  Now Teto is long gone, probably thrown in the trash with all the other broken toys.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have an all-powerful puppet god?  Then when we have a problem, or need something, we take god off the shelf, manipulate the strings, project our voice, and voila – we get what we want and hear what we want to hear.  When we don’t need god anymore, we put our puppet god safely back in his box on the shelf until we want him again.  In the mean time we warn all our friends not to touch the puppet, as we wouldn’t want him broken. 

A puppet God - that is exactly what the people of Nazareth wanted.  Maybe it was because of their familiarity with Jesus who had grown up among them, as the carpenter’s son and as their carpenter.  Perhaps some of them had items in their homes that Jesus had made.  Their home-town boy, turned god. 

It was the Sabbath, and eagerly everyone in town had shown up at the synagogue.  Jesus was back in town, and would read from the scriptures like he had before.  They were eager to hear and see the performance.  After Jesus read the assigned scripture for that week they waited with baited breath to see their home-town boy perform some miracles. Surely they could pull the strings of their hometown boy turned ‘god’ for a few miracles like he had done in Capernaum.  After that he could go home and make them more things in the carpentry shop.

But no – that wasn’t God’s plan.  God’s plan was totally different!  A plan based on God’s infinite wisdom and love!  What a shock when Jesus states that he was the fulfillment of this Scripture he had just read.  This wasn’t what they expected… that “The Spirit of the Lord was upon” their home-town boy so that he could:

            Proclaim good news to the poor
            Proclaim freedom for the prisoners
            Proclaim recovery of sight for the blind
            Set the oppressed free
            Proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
This isn’t what they wanted; they wanted a puppet god, a miracle worker.  They tried to pull his strings, but it didn’t work – so like a broken puppet, they were ready to get rid of him. 

What if Jesus had done as they wished?  Would he have gone on to the cross?  Would you and I know that our sins are forgiven?  Would you and I have a personal relationship with Christ today? Would we know that we are loved unconditionally?  Would each day be a new adventure of faith seeing God at work in our midst? 

A fragile puppet god, to manipulate and entertain!

That would be perfect …

or would it?