3 rd & 4 th Sundays of Ordinary Time C cycle, 2016 1 st Reading Isaiah 61:1-6 [The Spirit of the Lord is upon me] Responsorial Psalm 71 [You are my hope, O Lord] 2 nd Reading 1 Corinthians 12:12-13:13 [You are the Body of Christ; The greatest gift is Love] Gospel Luke 4:14-30 [The Good News of healing and life is sent to all] We are many parts, we are all one body, and the gifts we have, we are given to share. May the Spirit of love make us one indeed. One the love that we share, one our hope in despair, one the cross that we bear. God of all, we look to you, we would be your servants true, Let us be your love to all the world. That song is very appropriate for the week of prayer for Christian Unity which ended on Jan 25. It also reflects the 12 th chapter of Paul s 1 st letter to the Corinthians. The words of Paul give us practical wisdom about how to respond to the Gospel. We are called by our Baptism to bring Good News to the poor by being who we are, the Body of Christ. I like to paraphrase St. Augustine when I hold up the host and cup before communion, Behold the body and lifeblood of Christ. See who you are, & be what you receive. The consecrated bread and wine is only one meaning of the Body and blood of Christ the original meaning is the one given us by St. Paul in today s reading. We, the disciples of Jesus, are the body of Christ. When we say Amen after receiving communion we are professing our faith that we, together, are the body of Christ, with his lifeblood flowing in our veins. And the consequence of that faith is that we are called and empowered to treat each other the way we would treat Jesus in our midst. Today during the Eucharistic Prayer I will invite you to commit yourself to living the call of your Baptism by singing: We are the body of Christ. Paul makes it clear that we need each other, like the parts of our body need each other. It is also true that the Body of Christ is more than any one parish or faith community. We are all members of his body, not just as individual believers but as communities of believers as well. And we cannot put down or neglect other parts of the body which are different from us, or weaker or more vulnerable, whether they are individuals or communities. As members of the Body of Christ, we are called to do what this song sings about: Let us build a house where love can dwell and all can safely live A place where saints and children tell how hearts learn to forgive Built of hopes and dreams and visions, rock of faith and vault of grace; Here the love of Christ shall end divisions: ALL ARE WELCOME, ALL ARE WELCOME,...ALL ARE WELCOME IN THIS PLACE! The song echoes the message of Jesus to the people in his home town. Jesus tells them that the Spirit of God has sent him as a prophet to proclaim good news to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed and a year of favor from the Lord. That was last Sunday s Gospel.
And what is this Good News to the poor? The word Gospel means good news & the poor are the anawim, those who sense their spiritual hunger & seek God In both the reading from Isaiah & the Gospel, the poor are not primarily those who have nothing. The Gospel is about liberty to captives, sight to the blind, freedom for the oppressed & mercy to the whole human race. [The verse that you heard in the reading from Isaiah about release to the prisoners is ambiguous in Hebrew & Jesus translates it as recovery of sight to the blind. ] The Gospel passage given for today completes the one we heard last week they are 2 parts of the same story. Jesus was in the tradition of the great prophets of Israel. The passage he quotes is from Isaiah 61 and the 2 nd reading is by another prophet named Paul. Anna I came across a saying & made a sign of it for Fr. Peter s refrigerator but Hurricane Irene took it A prophet reminds the establishment what it was established for. It reminds us of just what a prophet does: [like our friend, Pat the Porcupine].. A prophet is someone who comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. And that s what Paul is doing, when he challenges the people of Corinth to put love first; to build a house where love can dwell where hearts learn to forgive where the love of Christ shall end divisions. That s what Jesus is doing in today s Gospel. He quotes from Isaiah at the beginning of the passage then he recalls 2 stories that the people would know. He is reminding his friends & family in Nazareth, & us here of the message of Isaiah, Elijah & Elisha that the love of God goes out to all people. Notice that Jesus unrolls a scroll like this one and he not only reads the passage from Isaiah 61, part of the 1 st reading we heard today he edits his own Jewish Scriptures as he reads it. He takes a verse from Isaiah 58:6, which is on the same scroll to let the oppressed go free & he includes it in his reading of Isaiah 61 The last verse he reads is to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord. He is announcing a year of jubilee. A jubilee year for the Jews of Isaiah s time was a time when slaves are released, debts are cancelled & prisoners set free. Peter But then Jesus shocks the people in the Synagogue by leaving out the verse that follows: a day of vengeance for our God. Nazareth was a town settled by Jews in a Gentile territory, not unlike modern Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, & Jesus is skipping what the people of his home town would think was the punch line of that beloved passage. Maybe that s why they resisted the message of mercy for Gentiles & Jews that Jesus brought. He refuses to be the messiah so many expected, the one who would bring a day of vengeance by destroying the gentiles. Over the centuries there have been too many wars, crusades, jihads & persecutions which have been justified by interpreting the Bible (and other sacred scriptures) through the lens of a certain prejudice or ideology or desire for control. If we today are to understand the Bible, both Old & New Testament, we need to read scripture the way Jesus did.
Jesus teaches us in practice how to understand the Bible. He consistently ignored or even denied texts in his own Jewish scriptures that called for war & hatred for enemies & retribution in favor of passages that emphasized inclusion, mercy, & grace. He knew what passages were creating a highway for God & which were merely cultural, selfserving, paranoid, tribal, & legalistic additions. Jesus read the scriptures of his synagogue in a spiritual & highly selective way, which is why he was accused of teaching with authority & not like our scribes. If we are to understand our own Scriptures, we must put on the mind of Christ and read them through the lens of his life & his words. Anna Jesus wants to make sure that the people from Nazareth & all who would become his disciples that is, all of us - will live lives of compassion & mercy & inclusion. Even today some try to restrict the grace of God to one group or one religious tradition. We are called to overcome that tendency. We share the gift of baptism with all of our Christian brothers & sisters. That s really clear in this congregation, where you invite preachers like us from other traditions to reflect with you on the Word of God. The bottom line is that all of us who are baptized are called to do what Christ did to bring Good News to the poor, proclaim release to captives & recovery of sight to the blind. To let the oppressed go free & to announce a year of favor from the Lord. Peter This is very clear in the case of the Life issues of our time: The Gospel challenges the culture of violence which makes random killing & mass murder all too common. Any change in attitude or law that lessens violence and killing is Good News for those grieving the loss of a child or a spouse or a friend who was killed by gun violence - whether in a school or a movie theater or on the streets. The Gospel invites us to reform our prison system which is the largest in the world so that it is less a school for crime or an instrument of vengeance and more of a place of rehabilitation and prevention of crime. This is a modern way of proclaiming liberty to captives. I have seen first hand the injustice of that system when I visit someone in prison & help them deal with it, but I have also experienced the love of Jesus who walks with the oppressed & gives the grace to overcome injustice. The March for Life in Washington that took place last Friday is a way to bring recovery of sight to those who have trouble seeing the beauty & value of every human life, from its beginning to its end and at all points in between. And the same blindness to the ineffectiveness and injustice of capital punishment has been challenged by Pope Francis & his predecessors as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church in our own time. To announce a year of favor from the Lord includes the responsibility to care for the earth itself and the unborn generations who will live on that earth as Pope Francis has beautifully reminded us in his Encyclical, Laudato Si on care for our common home.
Anna After Jesus tells the people of his hometown that the Messiah they are looking for is right there in front of them, as he says, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. Then he refers to 2 stories that the people of Nazareth are very familiar with. The first is the story of how the prophet Elijah was welcomed into the home of a poor widow from Sidon a woman who was not a Jew. She was running out of food during a drought, and she and her son were about to starve. Elijah arrived at her home and asked for something to eat. She told him that there was only enough for herself and her son for a few days, but she put her faith in the God of Israel & took the risk to love giving him a part of the little she had. The prophet promised that she would not run out of food until the rain returned, and the three of them were able to eat for three years. The prophet even raised her son from the dead by prayer. The second story is about another Gentile, Naaman, a military general from Syria, again someone who was of a different culture and religion than the people of Nazareth. Another prophet, Elisha, healed this man of leprosy, even though he was a part of a nation which was, and still is a traditional enemy of Israel. Imagine a story about an Israeli helping a Palestinian & you ll get the picture. And how did the people react to those stories? After Jesus claims to be the Messiah, they are a bit taken aback by the way he used their scriptures. They are not expecting the kind of Messiah he is describing. But when he told those two stories they got really angry an anger rooted in fear & mistrust & a narrow vision of who God could love. Peter What we hear most clearly from the Gospel and from all the readings today is that the love of God is poured out to the nations. When you hear that word in the writings of the Prophets & the Psalms, it means people who are not Jews, that is, people of the whole world. The love of God described by Paul and Jesus is offered to the whole human family. The people of Nazareth were delighted to receive the healing, loving, forgiving word of God for themselves, but they did not want that same word to go too far beyond their borders, too far beyond their ideas about who could be saved by Yahweh. That s why they got angry with him, and, some say that s why they eventually crucified him. The same thing has happened to prophets before and since. But Jesus says, you can t have it both ways. You do not possess the love and truth of God as your private good. If God s love can get through to you when you admit your need & your hunger, the same love is offered to the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the unborn and those on death row, the gay and the straight, those who have come through a divorce and those celebrating their 50 th wedding anniversary, to Republicans and Democrats, to Jews and Palestinians, Christians and Muslims, believers & atheists. God sent Isaiah, Elijah, Paul and Jesus as prophets to all peoples. The Spirit of Jesus reminds us, the Church of today, why we were established. We are called to be Church, that is, to be the Body of Christ, to love one another as Christ still loves us, to be an instrument, a delivery system of God s love, truth and healing to the whole human race.
Anna That is why religions & churches were established; that s the purpose of faith formation for adults, teens & children to teach us to practice what Jesus preached, to sing in word & deed: Let us build a house where hands will reach beyond the wood and stone To heal and strengthen, serve and teach, and live the Word they ve known. Here the outcast and the stranger bear the image of God s face; Let us bring an end to fear and danger: ALL ARE WELCOME, ALL ARE WELCOME,...ALL ARE WELCOME IN THIS PLACE!
A Reading from the Holy Gospel according to Luke Anna Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and entering the synagogue on the Sabbath, as he was in the habit of doing, he stood up to do the reading. When the book of the Prophet Isaiah was handed to him, he unrolled the scroll & found the passage where it was written: Peter The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; for the Most High has anointed me: Sending me to bring good news to the poor, To proclaim release to the captives, And recovery of sight to the blind To send forth the oppressed in freedom, And to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord. Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant & sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, & he began by saying to them, Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. All who were present were talking about him, and all were surprised at the words of mercy that came from his mouth. They also asked, Isn t this the son of Joseph? Jesus said to them, Surely you will quote me this proverb, Physician, heal yourself, and say, Do here in your native place the things that we have heard you have done in Capernaum Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in their own native place. Indeed, let me remind you, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, (when the sky was closed for 3 & a half years and a severe famine spread over the entire land.) It was to none of these that Elijah was sent, but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon. Again, there were many lepers in Israel during the time of Elisha the prophet; yet not one of them was cured, except Naaman the Syrian. When the people in the synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove him out of the town, & led him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, intending to hurl him over the edge. But Jesus passed through their midst & walked away. The Gospel of the Lord. [Luke 4:16-30]