NOTES for Luk 4:22-30
The Lord comes to the one to whom He Himself wants to come. God's coming into a person's life is not a reward for one merit or another, whether ascetic feats or perfect piety. The Lord comes to those who need it as a matter of life and death. But there are many who are in need. Or does He choose the most humiliated among them? Perhaps that applies in some measure to the widow of Zarephath in Sidon, but hardly to the commander of the Syrian king's army. So the Lord chooses in some way unknown to human beings. No one will ever find a pattern here. The Lord is living, and everything living cannot be fully fitted into laws. For us, however, law is the mind's only support, the only thing that gives us any confidence. Yet that very confidence is what fails us. How sure the people of Nazareth were that they knew, knew well, this man, Jesus. But that confidence kept them from seeing God in Him.
We should not think that the Lord is somehow playing with us, or simply trying to surprise us, because everything here is far too serious. Human lives are at stake. Of course, that is not what this is about. It is simply that we, precisely we, do not understand God's providence or the whole complexity of His ways. "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord" (Isa 55:8). This mismatch is what sometimes makes us wonder why grace came down on this particular person, why in just this way, just at this time, when it is obvious to us that there are people around who are much more worthy or more needy. We simply have to try to believe that everything that happens by His will happens in the way most needed for the paths of grace.