Luke
4:14-21
In today’s Gospel story, Jesus gives his inaugural
address in his home synagogue, in Nazareth, where he grew up. He knows these
folks; they know him; many have known him since he was a child.
Jesus has been living in Capernaum, getting to
know the people there so he could select and recruit disciples. He has now been
travelling around, preaching and teaching and healing. He is getting well-known
in the area, and when he’s near Nazareth, he is invited to preach in his home
synagogue.
The lectionary divides the story of this episode
in two parts. The first half is sort of a triumph for Jesus. Our text leaves
out the first response to Jesus, which was at first very positive. The CEB
says, “Everyone was raving about Jesus.” They
were very impressed with him, and that he was one of them. Next week, we’ll see
that it turns out badly after the folks have had a few minutes to think about
what he has said. But at first, it’s a great moment.
We don’t know if Jesus reads the passage from
Isaiah as his choice or if it happened to be the lectionary text for the day. We
do know that this Isaiah text is the theme for Jesus in Luke. Remember the
songs we read and talked about in Advent and just before: Hannah, Zechariah, and Mary all sang about
God lifting up the oppressed, giving sight to the blind, and so forth.
This is what Jesus is about, from the beginning to
the end in Luke. Jesus’ focus is on making sure that the poor have enough, the
prisoners are set free, and the blind recover their sight. Those who are poor,
imprisoned, and blind receive this as very good news. The imprisoned here does
not refer to those who have committed murder, but about those who have been
sent to prison for debt, or for stealing a loaf of bread to feel their families.
Jesus probably gave a sermon on the meaning of
this text, a longer message than what we have here in Luke. At the end of his
sermon, Jesus goes beyond quoting Isaiah and reminding the folks about God’s
vision. He goes beyond quoting what other rabbis have said. Jesus says, “This
vision is fulfilled today, as I speak.” The intent is to say, “This vision is
fulfilled in me!”
One way of interpreting this text is to ask ourselves
if we are poor, oppressed, blind. Most of us in this room are none of the above.
A few of us live close to the poverty line, but most of us are comfortable,
financially. We are not oppressed; even if our candidate lost the election, we
still have the freedom to campaign and vote again in two or four years. Many of
us have vision problems, accommodated by glasses, large print materials, a few
minutes of surgery, and so forth. Those who are totally blind in our culture manage
to live a full life, unlike the blind in Jesus’ day, who were considered
defective and forced to beg.
Mike and I saw the movie “Les Miserables” on Friday.
I was struck by the portrayal of the extreme poverty and misery of 19th
century France. Fantine had a job; her young daughter worked essentially as a
slave in a hotel. When co-workers caused Fantine to lose her job, she was
forced lower and lower into poverty. She sold her hair; she sold her teeth; she
became a prostitute. She had to pay the owners of the hotel to keep her daughter
there, with a roof over her head, no matter how terrible the conditions were. She
died, essentially of her poverty.
Charles Dickens wrote of similar conditions in 19th
London in many of his novels. Harriet
Beecher Stowe chronicled the life of slaves in the 19th century in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Upton Sinclair wrote
of similar conditions in turn-of-the-20th-century Chicago in his
novel, The Jungle. Country-Western
songs often highlight the challenges of living in poverty. Elvis Presley’s In the Ghetto, Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues, and Tennessee Ernie
Ford’s Sixteen Tons all speak about
the tragedy of living in poverty. A lot of rap and hip-hop music comes from the
conditions of living in the poverty-stricken parts of our country. The Occupy
Wall Street movement arose out of the same issues.
Those who live in poverty find it hard to get a
job, hard to find housing they can afford, hard to purchase nutritious food,
hard to get medical care. There are always people ready to exploit the needy,
enticing them to sell drugs, join gangs, become angry and violent, and get
killed or sent to prison.
What difference has it made that Jesus says, “This
scripture has been fulfilled!?” The part we often miss is that Jesus called people,
men and women, to be his disciples and help him fulfill the promise of Isaiah. We
see, in Paul’s letters and in the Acts of the Apostles, that the early church continued
this mission, feeding and clothing the hungry, healing the blind and disabled, reaching
into all classes of society to create change.
As the
spiritual descendants of the first apostles and disciples, we are called to do
the same. Jesus calls and sends us to do what we can to feed the hungry, clothe
the naked, free those who have been unjustly imprisoned, and tell the good news
to those who need to hear it.
This is my text; I had it read at my
ordination, and at my installation as pastor. If I die tomorrow, tell the
preacher to use this text. These are issues I am passionate about. Healthy,
growing congregations are passionate about responding to this text.
This is what we at Hope should be about. Our
mission statement makes that clear: we are called to know Christ and to make him
known. If we will truly know Christ, we must remember his purpose, so clearly
stated in his inaugural address in Nazareth.
We do a lot to know Christ and to make him known.
I suspect there will be more ways for us to serve in the future. As we
inaugurate our 41st year as a congregation, we can ask ourselves,
what is God calling us to do at Hope? How, today, is God sending us 21st
century disciples out to reach the poor and oppressed, the hungry, the needy? It
should be an interesting year.
Please pray with me. God of promise, you call us
into adventures we are not sure we want to take on. You promise to fulfill your
commitment to the hungry, the blind, the oppressed. Guide us into the future,
and send us out in your name, to do your ministry. Amen
