Reading: Luke 4:14-22
After the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, Mary and Joseph moved back to Nazareth in the northern province of Galilee. Jesus grew up there, and except for one story about him travelling with his parents to the Temple in Jerusalem when he was twelve, the Gospel of Luke has no other stories about Jesus until he is thirty years old.
That’s when Jesus, like many others, goes to be baptized by John in the Jordan River because they believe the kingdom of God is close at hand. At Jesus’ baptism, the Spirit comes down upon him like a dove, and a voice from heaven tells him he is God’s beloved Son.
For the next forty days, Jesus disappears alone into the wilderness where he is tempted by the devil with different ways of bringing the kingdom of God to be on earth. Resisting the devil’s temptations, Jesus clarifies his commitment to God’s way of healing the world, and then he returns to Galilee to begin God’s work.
He travels around the whole province, teaching about the kingdom of God. Now he is back home in Nazareth, and people are looking forward to seeing him in his home-town synagogue.
Two things in story are helpful to know.
One is that the weekly readings in the synagogue were not assigned. The teacher of the day chose the reading he wanted to talk about.
The other is that the teacher stands to read – showing respect for God’s Word, and then sits down to offer teaching about it – showing humility about his own words.
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.
He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom.
He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because
he has anointed me
to
proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and
recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Meditation
(After reading
the Gospel at the pulpit, the minister leaves the pulpit, comes down from the
platform, sits in a chair on the floor level of the sanctuary – the same level
as the congregation.)
I thought for this week, I’ll follow the pattern of movement in synagogue worship as it’s told in the story we just read. With the reader starting at the lectern standing in that special sacred place, to read the Word of God for the day. Then closing the scroll, leaving the lectern, and going to sit down to offer a teaching about it.
Up there, things sound pretty good.
According to Scripture, the Spirit of God is at work in the world anointing a servant to bring good news to the poor, free those who are bound, make the blind to see, and let up those who are kept down.
And the poor in mind here are not just economically poor, but all who suffer exclusion from community and have no place at the table for any reason – be it gender, race, education, occupation, illness, disability, social acceptability or anything else. According to the Scripture Jesus chooses for his inaugural address, the day of the Lord’s favour for all who are bound up, pressed down, broken in spirit, and hungry for good news is coming.
I wonder how things sound – how things seem, down here.
this week I talked on the phone with one of our church members about our lives and our losses, about illness and change, and about uncertainty and fear and the way it reshapes a whole household. We talked about other members and families of our church who also have suffered brokenness through illness, accident, bereavement, or simple ongoing isolation. The stories were so endless that at one point all we could say was, “We’re all so broken.”
Exactly what my sister wrote in an email yesterday, that “brokenness seems to be a theme for friends and family right now.”
I also talked with someone else about catastrophic loss of health, mobility and independence of living. The word that made sense to her was the word “crumbled.” It felt like everything she had built up over a lifetime, in just 2 or 3 quick years has crumbled to dust around her, until now – especially in the lockdown of the place where she lives, it actually seems a burden that she will live for many more years in the condition she’s in.
And how many people live in similar situations of brokenness – broken hearts, broken dreams, broken bodies, broken lives? How many around us and around the world live daily, yearly, and all their lives with the crumbs that fall from a table of abundance at which only some have a place?
Omicron is still cutting a swath through us, overwhelming our health care institutions. And alongside it, are all the other challenges of our time – wars and threats of war, violence of all stripes, the catastrophic effects of climate change, racial injustice and economic inequality, breakdowns in civility and kindness, and rising epidemics of anxiety, depression, addiction and despair. Is the daily news any different from our personal stories?
Does the view down sound at all like the view up there? Or does it make a lie of what was read?
Does it make us think that the good news of God’s good will for all who suffer is meant maybe for some future time? Either some Golden Age still to come, or maybe as a reward in heaven after life on earth is done?
Does it make us maybe reduce the good news to something spiritual, metaphoric, not to be taken literally? So we don’t get disappointed or lose our faith, when it doesn’t happen the way it says literally?
Or … do we take it seriously? Take it the way Jesus does? Do we come down from up there and say with all confidence and commitment as he does, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in our hearing of what is being done in so many places around us … and in our own doing and acting in accord with God’s will. Praise be to God.”
In this, it’s important we understand “the year of the Lord’s favour” rightly. What it is, and what it is not.
For the people of Israel, “the year of the Lord’s favour” was “the year of Jubilee,” that was part of the law God gave to the people of Israel when they first came into the Promised Land. It’s in Leviticus 25 in the midst of all the other laws God gave for keeping things right and good for all in the promised land.
What it says is that every 50 years, a giant re-set button is to be pushed in society and all across the land so all who have lost out, been pushed out, or have fallen to the bottom of the pack have a chance to start fresh again. All debts are to be forgiven. All land that’s accumulated in the hands of the fortunate and powerful is to be given back to its original owners. Every family and every household is to be able to go back to their original holdings, and have once again a chance and the resources they need to provide for themselves – a chance equal to anyone else around them.
It was to be a giant re-set of society every fifty years. An equalization. A rebalancing for the good of all, of what had become tilted in favour of a few. A way of honouring and making real the unity and community of all God’s people, and the care of each one for the well-being of all.
That’s what it was.
Which means it was not the restoration somehow of an endless Garden of Eden. It was not the appearance of an eternal Paradise. It was not the beginning of a Golden Age once for all that would last for a thousand years. It was not the end of imperfection, suffering, loss and sorrow.
Rather, it was the commitment in the midst of these things, in the midst of the imperfection of life and of humanity, to set things right at least once every 50 years. In the midst of brokenness to bring support and healing. In the midst of crumbled lives and dreams, to bring comfort and new life. In the midst of division and exclusion, hierarchy and the imbalance of privilege and oppression to recognize and act out community, and our sharing together of the whole human lot.
And isn’t that what we are about in our life and our mission as a church in the name of Jesus, and in the power of his and God’s Spirit? Isn’t this what we share in, in the ways we reach out to others in need? In real time, in the real world, down here, bringing to fulfillment what we read and let ourselves be reminded of up there? Day after day and year after year, however and whenever the opportunity arises, living out the Lord’s favour for all who feel far from it, because folks who know the news of the day down here, also need to know the good news for all, including them, that comes to us from up there.
Not to make the world perfect, not to end all suffering, not to usher in a golden age of endless possibility and wonder once and for all. But day by day, week by week, year by year to bring good news to the poor, to help set free those who are bound, to help people see themselves and others in new and fuller ways, and to let those who are oppressed rise up and be empowered with new strength and hope.
Making today, each day – as Jesus says – a day of Jubilee, a day of the Lord’s favour somewhere and for someone who needs it.
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