Nehemiah 8: 1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm
19; I
Corinthians 12: 12-31a; Luke
4: 14-21
This is a homily by Fr.
Gene Tucker, emailed out to the members of St.
John’s Church, Huntingdon, Pennsylvania on Sunday, January 24, 2016. (Services this day were cancelled because of snow.)
“SELF-EMPTYING: THE LORD’S AND
OURS”
(Homily text: Luke 4: 14-21)
This morning’s gospel reading
relates to us the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, as He returns to his
hometown of Nazareth, where He reads from the prophet Isaiah these words, “The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to
the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of
sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the
Lord’s favor.”
Following the Lord’s reading of
these verses, He sat down, having said, “Today this scripture has been
fulfilled in your hearing.”
Though we do not read the verses
which immediately follow, we know from the reaction of those synagogue-goers
that day that they were incensed that the Lord would apply those verses to
Himself, for they round Him up and take Him to the brow of the hill just south
of Nazareth, so as to throw Him over the cliff to His death. Of course, the
Lord, Luke tells us, passes through the crowd and escapes.
This incident tells us a lot about a
number of conditions, beliefs and practices that the people of that day engaged
in. We would do well to examine some of these in more detail.
We could easily begin with the
worship practices in the synagogues in Jesus’ day:
- It is apparent from Luke’s account that the worshipers in the synagogues were reading not just the five books of Moses (the Law, or Torah), but they were also reading from the prophets, in this case, Isaiah. Some scholars suggest that the readings from the prophets were chosen because the texts from the Torah and the one(s) chosen from the prophets shared a theme.
- Apparently there was someone whose job it was to facilitate the flow of the worship, for Luke tells us that an “attendant” handed Jesus the scroll from which to read.
- At least three readers would normally read the selection, each one taking a short passage. (Since the text of Scripture wasn’t divided into verses until the sixteenth century, that may account for Luke’s report of the text that Jesus actually read, for Luke’s citation contains both Isaiah 61: 1-2 and 58: 6.[1] These may have been the portions of the text that Jesus actually read.)
In
the verses which follow this morning’s gospel text, Luke tells us that all
spoke well of Jesus. But then, the mood of the worshipers became quite ugly:
They demand that Jesus do some of the mighty works they had heard that He had
done in Capernahum.
Though we do not know
the exact flow of events (for Luke doesn’t narrate them for us), we do know
that those synagogue worshipers began to question Jesus, saying, “Isn’t this
Joseph’s son?” Then they try to take Him to the cliff which is south of town in
order to throw Him over it.
Why this opposition?
Several answers have
been proposed. One very plausible answer is that Jesus connects Isaiah’s
prophecy with His own ministry and mission.
It would be good for us
to unpack this just a little.
The prevailing attitude
among the Jews of Jesus’ day was that they were constantly looking back, over
their shoulders, at the great and mighty periods in their history. They
remembered Abraham, and claimed to be Abraham’s children. They remembered Moses
and God’s deliverance from bondage in Egypt. They remembered Kings David and
Solomon and the glory days of the united kingdom of Israel that had existed a
thousand years earlier.
All of those things
were in their past. But many Jews in that time didn’t seem to be able to
conceive that God would act in mighty ways in their own day. Many seemed to
think that God had become silent. Many seemed to think that the promises made through
the prophets ages before would come to pass in some long-distant time in the
future, but not in their own time.
So Jesus’ claim to be
the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy may have been a shock to the sensibilities
of the Jews of His day. We might frame their reaction in this way: They might say, “Who does he think he is,
claiming to fulfill Isaiah’s promise? What audacity!”
It is one thing to hope
for God to act. It is quite another to see God act right before our very eyes.
It would be good, at
this point, to turn our attention to the nature of Jesus’ ministry, as He
claims it from Isaiah.
Notice who will be the
beneficiaries of His ministry: The
poor. The captives. The oppressed.
Jesus’ liberation of
these people is deeply caught up with the business of holiness and
acceptability before God. This comment needs some explanation:
In Jesus’ day, the Jews
were deeply concerned with purity and with holiness. Consider the attitudes of
the Pharisees, who were a lay group that took diligent steps to ensure that
they – and everyone else – observed the Law of Moses down to its smallest
detail. To do this was – in their eyes at least – to be pure and holy in God’s
sight.
Attendant to this
attitude was another attitude: These
Pharisees believed (along with many others in the Jewish culture of the time)
that if a person was healthy or was wealthy, they were in that condition
because of their spiritual purity before God. Put another way, the attitude of
the Pharisees was: A person is blessed
because they’ve done all the right things.
So the flip side of the world view of many Jews in Jesus’ day is also
important for us to remember: If a
person was sick or ill, or was poor, it was because of their impurity before
God, which has brought down judgment on that person.
The Pharisees’ concern
was not only to ensure ritual purity, but also to figure out who’s “in” and
who’s “out” where God is concerned. These Pharisees were quite deterministic in
their approach to sorting out who’s good and who’s bad, for a person who was
impure, who was “out” as far as God was concerned, was – most likely –
permanently impure and “out”.
Into this view of
things, Jesus enters. He deliberately challenges these attitudes, declaring
that it is to these outcasts that He has been sent. God’s anointing rests upon
Him to do these things.
Implicit in Jesus’
challenge is the declaration that no one is outside of God’s power to love and
to redeem. Just as God had liberated the ancient Israelites from bondage in
Egypt, not because those ancient Israelites were so good that they deserved
liberation, but simply because God loved His people and had decided to free
them from slavery, now God – in Jesus – was going to do the same thing all over
again.
So, guess what, all the
stuff the pious Jews of Jesus’ day were doing to try to earn God’s favor didn’t
amount to anything, for Jesus’ message was that everyone was important in God’s
sight, and everyone deserved release from bondage and from oppression.
At this point, we need
to make an important point: Jesus’
message of freedom, of release, wasn’t just some social program to lift up
those who were at the bottom of the social ladder. His wasn’t just a program to
make life better for the poor, the blind, and the other outcasts of His day.
Jesus’ message of liberation
carried with it a call to holiness, not just liberation. The background to the
truth of this part of Jesus’ message can be seen in God’s previous liberations
of His people. God had redeemed His people from slavery in Egypt, in order that
they would make their way into the land which He had promised them ages before.
The purpose of their release ensured that they would come back to the land He
had set aside for them in order that they would worship the God who had led
them and who had freed them. Likewise, the release from bondage in Babylon
carried the same sort of message: God had used the Persian king Cyrus to
proclaim the liberty of God’s people, in order that they might return to the
land promised them, in order to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem, that they
might be a holy people to the Lord.
The human beings that
God has created, down through time, have always had a need for God’s
liberation. This is a liberation from sin and a call to holiness before God. It
is a liberation from oppression, no matter what form that oppression might take
(political, economic, military, etc.). To liberate from temporal oppression
without declaring God’s liberation from sin is to achieve only part of the
total liberation that God desires for everyone.
For no one is outside
the bounds of God’s love. No one is beyond God’s reach of liberation. No one is
undeserving of freedom.
Just as God has liberated us from the permanent estrangement from Him
that sin brings about in the waters of baptism, so God continues to liberate
each one of us from the hardened attitudes that we share with the ancient
Pharisees, in order that we might see Jesus’ message of freedom and liberation
is for all people everywhere, and in every time. To be created in the image and
likeness of God (as Scripture tells us) is to be worthy of release from every
form of slavery and bondage, for God’s deepest desire for everyone is that each
one will come to know true freedom, a freedom that only God can provide.
AMEN.
[1] Luke gives us the version of Isaiah 61: 1-2 and Isaiah 58:6 in the Greek
version of the Old Testament, known as the Septuagint. Most New Testament
quotations from the Old Testament are in this version, for the Septuagint was
more widely disseminated than the Hebrew version of the Old Testament was in
this period.
