Luke 4:14-21 (NRSV)
Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
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.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
~
"The Isaiah passage is one excerpt from a long recitation of the blessings that will accrue to the Jews when God vindicates them finally and forever. The original passage included the announcement of “the vengeance of our God,” which pointedly Luke leaves out of his quotation. Even in the final judgment of God upon the nations there is for Luke's Jesus no vengeance, but for the Jews who wrote these self aggrandizing “prophesies” the riches, freedom, miraculous medical care and terminal unburdening were for them, and the divine revenge was for the Gentiles. All those who had treated the Jews badly would feel the cold steel of God's vengeance, while the Jews felt the warm embrace of his vindication.
"Not so for the Jesus of St Luke! He quotes from these prophesies to change their purport from ethnic to ecumenical, and before that more subtle move, to banish flatly and firmly, any hint of revenge in the dealings of God. Indeed, there is not even a whisper of revenge in this Gospel passage because Luke leaves out the line about vengeance altogether! This fact is of major importance: no vengeance in or from God! No divine keeping score so God can fit his revenge to our crimes!"
- Robert Hamerton-Kelly, from sermon delivered on January 24, 2010 (source no longer available online)
~
"More and more of us have begun to see what was incredibly obvious all along, if it weren't for our thorough Greco-Roman “civilizing” (or mind control): that the good news proclaimed by Jesus Christ wasn't primarily a way of integrating Plato and Aristotle, spirit and matter, perfect being and fallen becoming, or even law and grace - even though, in a sense, it does all these things. More essentially, it was a fulfillment of the three prime narratives of the Hebrew Scriptures.
"First, to accept the free gift of being “born again” into “life of the ages” or “life abundant” meant participation in a new Genesis, a new creation, interrupting the downward death spiral of violence and counterviolence and joining an upward, regenerative movement.
"Second, to follow Jesus meant embarking on a new Exodus, passing through the waters once again (this time, baptism instead of the Red Sea), eating a new Passover meal (the Eucharist), and experiencing liberation from the principalities and powers that oppress and enslave.
"Third, to enter or receive the “kingdom of God” meant becoming a citizen of a new kingdom, the peaceable kingdom imagined by the prophets and inaugurated in Christ, learning its ways (as a disciple) and demonstrating in word and deed its presence and availability to all (as an apostle).
"In this way, the most striking single element of Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom may have been “The time has come!” The kingdom of God is not a distant reality to wait for someday, Jesus proclaims; the kingdom is at hand, within reach, near, here, now (Mark 1:15).
"Everyone agrees the poor and downtrodden should be helped someday, oppression and exploitation should be stopped someday, the planet should be healed someday, we should study war no more someday. But for Jesus, the dream of Isaiah and the other prophets - of a time when good news would come to the poor, the prisoners, the blind, the oppressed, and the indebted - was not five hundred or a thousand years in the future: the dream was being fulfilled today (Luke 4:18-21)."
- Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christianity, pp. 139-40
~
"So what do we have here? We have captives, or those amongst the captives from Judah, watching very very closely at the one who has returned to finish the work of the house of the Lord. You can see how very carefully Luke is framing this reading. Luke is giving a filled-out account of what Mark had said when he announced [...] at the beginning of [his] Gospel was: “the time is fulfilled.” That's what is being described in this scene. He's talking about the word, the word from Isaiah, the word from Ezra - all of that about the coming in of the one who is going to build up the house of the Lord - that is what's being fulfilled in their sight.
"So what is it like to listen to the Lord? It's like sitting under a huge act of communication which very subtly comes amongst us, showing what it's going to do by fulfilling something even though the fulfilment is in some ways an excess of what was described before. But the fulfilment is going to happen in very small, precise things that St Luke is now going to show us. This I think is part of the joy of reading Luke. He is a very very rich painter - people have sometimes said they thought he must have been a painter because of the ways that rather than just give the words he gives very rich images to allow us to imagine what it was like to undergo this.
"So we have one sitting in the synagogue fulfilling the promises [...] and all of this is to do with the building up to the completion of the house of the Lord, which is what Jesus is now beginning."
- James Alison, from video "Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFRBuBmN5BE)
[Source of Brian McLaren quote and link to Robert Hamerton-Kelly sermon, and for further analysis and discussion on all this week's lectionary texts: https://girardianlectionary.net/reflections/year-c/epiphany3c/]
No comments:
Post a Comment