I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling, and
my message and my proclamation were not with persuasive words of wisdom, but
with a demonstration of spirit and power, so that your faith might rest not on
human wisdom but on the power of God. 1 Corinthians 2:3-5
When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were
all filled with fury. They rose up,
drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their
town had been built, to hurl him down headlong.
But he passed through the midst of them and went away. Luke 4:28-30
Piety
Following his temptation
in the desert, Jesus begins his ministry in the temple of his adopted
hometown. Only the initial amazement
soon turns to rejection. The people who
have walked in darkness expect a King with riches to lead them. Instead, they get the embodiment of Micah 8: “You
have been told, O mortal, what is good, and what the LORD requires of you: Only
to do justice and to love goodness, and to walk humbly with your God.”
Study
Still in the early pages
of the Good News as passed down by St. Luke, what got the people in Nazareth so
riled up? It appears that the ministry
of Jesus the Christ could end almost before it began. Luke uses this incident to foreshadow the
entire ministry of Jesus. However, the
initial admiration of the people turns to rejection over a few critical words
which Jesus intentionally left out of the passage from Isaiah.
Here is the passage from today at Luke 4:18-19: “The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to
captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and
to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”
Here is the source passage from Isaiah 61:1-2. Note in BOLD the missing phrase: The spirit of the Lord GOD
is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me; He has sent me to bring good news
to the afflicted, to bind up the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the
captives, release to the prisoners, To announce a year of favor from the LORD and a day of vindication by our God.”
After years of slavery,
occupation, and oppression, the people – who knew the words of the prophets in
their hearts and minds – were anticipating a conquering savior-king who would
bring vengeance and vindication. Not
only did Jesus not intend to deliver upon that human demand, his ministry,
while fulfilling the terms of the prophets, started out in the least possible
way that could never be considered filled with power or traditional
kingship.
Jesus came to them “in
weakness.” He was born to a poor girl and
carpenter-father and initially raised as a refugee in a foreign land. How would he expel the belligerent Romans
from the Holy Land? How would this
Jesus, this carpenter’s son “rebuild the ancient ruins” or “restore the
desolate cities” that had been in tattered for generations of generations.
If Israel was punished
double for infidelity, then the blessings of its restoration that the people expected
would also be double. Yet that is not
what Jesus promised in Nazareth that fateful day. He did not deliver on human
wisdom and power but rather on the wisdom and power of God.
Action
What is your Fairfax
Manifesto? Or Arlington Manifesto? This passage in the temple today helped to
identify the ministry of Jesus with a concern and attitude toward the
economically and socially poor. According
to the notes in the New American Bible, “At times, the poor in Luke’s gospel
are associated with the downtrodden, the oppressed and afflicted, the forgotten
and the neglected, and it is they who accept Jesus’ message of salvation.”
How do you identify with
the poor of Luke’s gospel and the poor of today?
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