Words. Actually kind of meh about this one, but oh well. These things happen.
Luke 4:14-21; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Psalm 19; Nehemiah 8:1-10
It’s often said that the hardest sermon anyone has to preach is the one at the place where the preacher grew up. You get to tell people who knew you as a kid things about God that, in theory anyways, they had a hand in teaching you. So it always brings me comfort to know that Jesus had to do the same thing, and it really didn’t go all that well for him either.
This week’s gospel comes right after Jesus’ baptism and subsequent temptation in the desert. Once the devil left him after the temptation, he went to Galilee and started teaching in the churches. Word spread about him throughout the region, and one morning he found himself in his home town of Nazareth. Jesus read a bit from Isaiah, which ordinarily wouldn’t be so weird, except for how he ended the reading. This passage from Isaiah is one which was commonly interpreted as talking about the Messiah; the one who would bring about a change in fortune for God’s people. The reading continues with such imagery as “Instead of their shame my people will receive a double portion” and “All who see them will acknowledge that they are a people the Lord has blessed.” It’s good news; news that the people would be quite familiar with.
But then Jesus did something odd. When the reading was over, he started his teaching by saying, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Usually a preacher won’t say that they’re the person a reading is talking about. I mean, how odd would it be if I said, in the midst of a sermon, that something was talking specifically about me, especially when it’s a passage that is talking about someone as important as the Messiah.
Now what’s interesting about this is what happens in our reading from next week, which you’ll just have to come back to hear, so I want to talk about the bit that Jesus actually read. Remember last week when I was talking about spiritual gifts, and I challenged you to spend some time with God figuring out how you can use your gifts to help others? Well, this bit from Isaiah gives us some “hints” on that as well.
Part of our call as Christians is to preach the good news, proclaim freedom for prisoners and sight for the blind, to set free the oppressed, and to tell others that God’s time is now, and the Spirit gives us gifts to empower us to do that.
Now, as I mentioned, things get interesting for Jesus after he says this. I’ll talk about it a bit in more detail next week, but short story shorter, they end up wanting to throw Jesus off a cliff. Oddly enough, and this is a bit of an aside, I noticed for the first time reading this that it’s right after the devil told Jesus to jump off the roof of the Temple to “prove” who he is that the people in Nazareth threaten to throw him off a cliff. Both times Jesus was able to avoid the issue, once by countering with Scripture, and again by just “walking through the crowd.”
But back to the topic at hand. Jesus tells the people of Nazareth’s synagogue that he is the fulfillment of a Scripture about the Messiah. But you might be wondering, if Jesus is the fulfillment of that Scripture, why does that become our job? If Jesus did it, why should we?
Well, that’s where 1 Corinthians 12 comes into play again. Paul talks about the body of Christ, and how we are all parts of the body. As Paul writes, God has given us each gifts to fulfill our part of the call.
Saint Teresa of Avila, a carmelite nun from the 16th Century said, “Christ has no body on earth but yours, no hands but yours, no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ’s compassion for the world is to look out; yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good; and yours are the hands with which He is to bless us now.”
Through the Holy Spirit we are set apart to do Christ’s work on Earth, to follow his example. When his example is to preach good news to the poor, proclaim freedom to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind, release the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, we probably ought to be doing the same.