The Third Sunday after the Epiphany, Year C, 2016 – Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21
Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
Today: an ordinary word, marking ordinary time. Today is the day we all go about our everyday lives. “What are you up to today?” I say to the kids on a Saturday morning (or more likely noon in their cases!) “Today” is the time of our ordinary lives.
Then Jesus walks into Nazareth and speaks from the prophet Isaiah, and “today” becomes suddenly extraordinary. For Jesus claims today for God, our today for the reign of God now breaking forth in Jesus’ words, in his acts, in his life; and so he overturns the world, and redeems the time.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
Jesus walks into Nazareth in the power of the Spirit. Four times in this chapter already we have heard about the Spirit: at 4:1, Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit (for the Holy Spirit has just descended upon him bodily at his baptism at the end of chapter 3); in the same verse (4:1) the Holy Spirit drives him into the desert. Jesus returns to Galilee, after besting the devil, in the power of the Spirit and he says to God’s people, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.”
In Jesus himself, the Spirit of God is abroad upon the land.
Why?
“Because he has anointed me
To proclaim good news to the poor…”
Jesus is the anointed one; anointed as Samuel anointed David to be King; anointed king by God in the power of the Holy Spirit.
And what a kingship this is!
He has sent me, (Jesus says, quoting Isaiah)
To proclaim release to the captives
And sight to the blind,
To let the oppressed go free—
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
This is the time of God’s act, the time that the people have been waiting for ever since Isaiah.
To a people captive and in exile, their temple destroyed by Babylon, Israel’s prophet spoke the promise, the coming salvation of God.
Isaiah 52
How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
Who brings good news,
Who announces salvation,
Who says to Zion, “Your God reigns.”
The messenger who brings good news: When Jesus in Luke’s gospel brings good news to the poor—the word “good news” is the same, in Isaiah 52 (and 61) and in Luke 4—he announces Isaiah’s promised salvation, the reign of God. This is Israel’s ancient hope—hope in the time of oppression for release; hope in the time of poverty for succor, hope for the redemption of their world.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? This was the cry of God’s people for generations—in exile and in return, in the poverty of the return: the law no longer known; the temple in its restoration no longer great, “And all the people wept,” Nehemiah recounts, “when they heard the words of the law”—for they had forgotten it; they had forgotten the Word of God.
They came back to their own country as Isaiah and Jeremiah had promised, and they found themselves in exile still.
How shall we sing the Lord’s song in a strange land? How shall we sing God’s song when we have forgotten it, when we live in the midst of a people that has forgotten it, that by and large no longer turns to God? We long for the reign of our God; we long for God’s peace, for all the captives in prisons of the body and of the soul, God’s blessed release. We long for God’s reign, and perhaps for us in a secularizing world it seems, as it did to Jesus’ neighbours in Galilee, rather a long ways away.
But it is precisely to this moment that Jesus comes.
This is the gospel, the good news that the Christ proclaims:
Today I come. Today in the power of the Spirit I come;
This is the day of God’s peace.
This is the year of the Lord’s favour, the golden Jubilee:
For the anointed one comes to release the captives, and he does it now.
In his own person he does it. In himself, in his life, our freedom given.
For the life that is lived in exile or behind bars is a sign of the prisons we all carry with us—bars of greed or selfishness or anger or lies; these bars that too often have a lock on our hearts.
Sin is a prison as strong as any cell, the place where we turn and turn and cannot find our rest in God.
This place, the shadow place, place of our wandering; this place is writ small and large in the world, then and now. It is writ large in the wars that ravage the land and in the greed that devours—an island of waste, plastic creation, bobbling like a canker on the ocean; imagine it! This place is writ large in the city, and it is writ small in our hearts. (And ,of course, the two are related.) From all monsters of the deep and of our own making, good Lord deliver us.
Today, he does.
In Jesus, he does. In Jesus the Christ, God’s king, he delivers us.
And he delivers us for today.
“Today” Jesus says in his hometown in Galilee, today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing. This is the day of God’s reign, when the poor shall rejoice and the captives shall be free and all the oppressed shall know release. In Jesus, God’s reign.
And how shall that be, when peace has not come and the darkness still gathers at the door?
It shall be, Jesus says, in him.
It shall be in his birth, and in his life, and in his death.
This is the good news—the great good news.
In this world, our world, our struggling hearts; even here, even now, God’s peace.
It is the shepherds who hear it first—some very ordinary shepherds in a field outside Bethlehem. “And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,
‘Glory to God in the highest,
And on earth peace
Among people of good will.’”
I bring you good news, the angel says to the shepherds: good news of great joy which shall be to all people. For to you is born today in the city of David a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.
Today, the Saviour is born, in the baby born at Bethlehem.
Today the good news is proclaimed, in the man who speaks in Galilee.
And “today” it is accomplished, in the man who dies at Golgotha.
The word “today” appears again at the moment of Jesus’ dying.
And one of the criminals—the “evildoers”, Luke says—who were hanging there with Jesus blasphemed him, saying, “Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us.” But the other rebuked him and said, “Do you not fear God? For you are under the same judgement. And we rightly so, for we receive the just penalty for our misdeeds. But this man has done nothing wrong.” And he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus said to him, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.”
In the death of Jesus, release even from the just penalty for our misdeeds. In the death of Jesus, forgiveness for the wrongdoer; the judgement overturned; the prison opened—and the possibility of the walk with God in the garden again.
Now is the captive set free, and the poor man finds joy: not justice, but forgiveness. From the cross the reign of God: the promise of paradise for the people who had turned away.
Today it is accomplished, in Jesus Christ our Lord. This is the year of the Lord’s favour. God has the victory, even over our worst prison, in the birth and life and death of Jesus the Christ. From the manger and from the cross, from the face of Jesus, God’s peace shining upon the land. In Jesus, God shines. In Jesus, God’s peace, shining in our hearts, shining over our lives, today.
That is, Paul says, what the church is about; what we are about as the Jesus people. We are those in whom Jesus shines. We are those in whom the victory of God may be seen, today, in the small things, this ordinary day. In each prayer for each other; in each hand reached out; in the honour we show the very least one among us, the very poorest, because that one is God’s beloved, lifted up forever into glory with Jesus on the cross. Today, Jesus said to the evildoer, you will be with me in Paradise. Today we live that promise: God’s reign in our own hearts, and springing up in our lives together a green place, the garden of God.
AMEN.
