“Today
is holy to the LORD your God. Do not be sad, and do not weep”— for all the
people were weeping as they heard the words of the law. He said further: “Go,
eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks, and allot portions to those who had
nothing prepared; for today is holy to our LORD. Do not be saddened this day, for
rejoicing in the LORD must be your strength!” Nehemiah 8:9B-10
Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of
it. 1 Corinthians 12:27
He stood up to read and was
handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the
passage where it was written: 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. Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the
attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at
him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your
hearing.” Luke 4:16C-21
Piety
“Christ has no body
now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through
which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks
to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world. Yours
are the hands, yours are the feet, yours are the eyes, you are his body. Christ
has no body now on earth but yours.” (Teresa
of Ávila)
Study
All this
prophesying but not a word about the future.
Each reading today is in the present tense.
Nehemiah is the
central figure of the Book of Nehemiah, which describes his work in rebuilding
Jerusalem during the Second Temple period. He was governor of Persian Judea
under Artaxerxes I of Persia. That
places his life in the five hundred years before Christ was born. Yet he is not
preaching about a heaven in some far off distant time and space. He is preaching in the present moment to his
congregation. “Today is holy to the LORD your God.” Sharing with the
poor is central to celebrating the strength that they get from the Lord.
Jesus, too, was not taking a futuristic
approach to the Kingdom. Although he
reached back to the prophet Isaiah, seven centuries earlier. Yet, in conclusion, Jesus preaches fulfillment
in the here and now when people hear the words now. “Today this Scripture passage
is fulfilled in your hearing.”
However, the people
did not accept the words Jesus preached.
In fact, this very preaching in his hometown directly led to his
rejection. This is the last we see of
Jesus in Nazareth. Yet the manifesto he
delivered perfectly outlined his mission and public ministry. However, that ministry would be marked by a
relationship with the poor to whom he preached Good News.
The Spirit of the
Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the
poor. Tidings is an old-fashioned word for good
news. If someone says "I bring you good tidings!" it means they
have information to share that you'll probably like. Glad tidings is “good news
to the poor.” The relationship Jesus had with the rich and powerful
was, for the most part, bad news. Just
ask Divas, the rich man who ignored Lazarus at the gate and was left begging
for water for eternity.
This first sermon
in the temple gives people the assurance that they would be healed, that their
sins would be forgiven, that their debts would be cancelled in a Jubilee
Year. Jesus offers a new beginning, a
new life, to those who would listen and act upon his word. Yet most preferred
to act upon their own words, not the words of the Lord.
The people in the temple
who heard this Nazareth Manifesto certainly acted – just not upon it. They acted against it. They rejected it outright and attempted to
through Jesus off a cliff. They tried to
fulfill the Buddhist maxim, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” They
cannot because the spirit of the Lord is upon Jesus. It is only when Jesus commands his spirit to
return to the Father that his life ends – of his own choice. As long as the spirit of the
Lord is upon him, no one can kill him.
Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Father, into your
hands I commend my spirit”; and when he had said this he breathed his last. (Luke 23:46)
What leads to the rejection? A comparison of Luke 4 to Isaiah 61 gives us
a hint. In Isaiah 61 2B, we can clearly
see that Jesus left out a line. He skipped
the part about revenge: “a day of vindication by our God.” The people in the temple were waiting for a
powerful King who would rise up and expel the belligerent Romans from their
land. But that is not the new Jesus
delivered. He delivered everything else
they expected from Isaiah – except Jesus drew the line at vindication. With that, he changed everything.
Action
If we are part of Christ’s body, perhaps the
two most important parts are…our ears. Because
unless and until we actually hear the word here, we cannot be Christian. That is not to minimize our hearts and minds,
nor our arms and legs. We can use all of
those for the wrong reason. We can all
answer the “What am I to do?” question differently. However, Jesus gets pretty specific.
The Spirit of the
Lord is upon YOU because the Lord has anointed YOU to bring the good news to
the poor. The Lord sends YOU to free those captives of sin and to open the eyes
of people who are blind to the plight of the poor around them. The Lord commands you to help those who are
addicted to any sin and open their eyes to a life free from what controls and oppresses
them, reach out to the downtrodden, the oppressed and afflicted, the forgotten
and the neglected and to proclaim a Jubilee year of mercy and forgiveness acceptable
to the Lord.
While our ears are the most important part for the first step on the journey,
our hands and hearts and minds quickly overtake the ears – once the ears do
their job. Because the rest of your body has to take over. You are all that is left to bring that good
news to the world.
