Homily for the 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time
If you examine the particular extract from Luke read today, you will notice how artificial the actual selection is. Luke 1:1-4 is fair enough. This is Luke's introduction to his work in two volumes: what we know today as 'Luke's Gospel' is volume one; and what we know today as the 'Acts of the Apostles' is volume two. Both works seem to have been written for an individual rather than a community. Theophilus may have been a high-ranking member of the local community whom Luke had converted to the Christian way. Luke, by how own admission, is late into the field: 'Seeing that many others have undertaken to draw up an account of the events that have taken place among us...' Luke makes it clear that he himself was not a first-hand witness. Luke belongs to the 3rd generation of Christians. Perhaps he judged that the accounts he had access to as incomplete and imperfect. Perhaps he felt that the poor were being written out of the gospel story even at this early stage. Because Luke would rehabilitate the poor in his gospel in a dramatic way, his gospel is known today as 'The Gospel of the Poor'.
But the extract we have today breaks off after the four verses of the introduction and then skips to chapter 4. It skips over the annunciation, the birth of Jesus, the preaching of the Baptist, his baptism, and his temptation in the desert. Two Sundays ago, we celebrated the baptism of Jesus at the hands of John in the waters of the Jordan; Today's gospel reading recounts and celebrates the launching of Jesus as a public figure. Today, for the first time, we get some insight into how he himself viewed his life and his mission, how he perceived his own vocation. This in effect was the first homily preached by Jesus in his local synagogue, his first public address to his immediate neighbours.
His homily begins by recalling his baptism: 'The spirit of the Lord has been given to me for he has anointed me.' But the body of his homily consisted of a well known quotation from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah. Despite the fact that this is an Old Testament text, it remains the most brilliantly succinct summary of the Christian calling: "He has sent me to bring Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, and to set the down-trodden free." From this platform of compassion, Jesus launched his mission. This first public address contained a few surprises. And it was most surprising of all for what it did not say. There was no mention at all of the very foundation on which his own culture and religion was founded: faithful adherence to the Law of Moses. Like Ezra, the Old Testament priest in today's first reading, Jesus would have been expected to read from the Book of the Law, translate it and make sense of it for the people. This would still have been a priority in conventional preaching at the time of Jesus. It would have been the first expectation of his congregation. Instead he seems to have been deliberately selective in his use of the Old Testament. He avoided the Book of the Law entirely concentrated instead on the most socially-conscious of all the prophets, Isaiah.
Of course, texts about God's care for the weak and the underprivileged are abundant in the Old Testament. But his congregation would have been expected to have balanced these socially conscious texts with other texts from the Book of the Law. The Law was the measuring rod of the Jewish religion. Only through having the Law translated and explained to them could devout Jews ensure that they were 'getting it right with God'. What was shocking was the clear hint that non-religious values (like alleviation of distress, for example) took precedence over explicitly religious directives. What was more shocking still was the claim by this preacher that this was God's will for him and for them. Our extract ends at verse 21. By verse 28 we get the true reaction of his hearers: "They were filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong. But he passed through the midst of them and went away."
That message is as challenging to us today as it was to his first congregation in Nazara - because poverty, slavery, blindness and oppression are always with us. Admittedly, they will take on different shapes in different ages, locations and in different ages. Every human being is blind in a very personal way.
Every human being will be at some time a captive to some form of oppression, depression or compulsion. Poverty in some form, be it material, spiritual, psychological, will often be a companion. And for as long as these disabilities continue to plague our world, the message of Christ will remain fresh and compelling, and his person will continue to call forth and challenge that which is most noble in humanity. His mingling of realism and romanticism will always remain inspirational.