Gospel for Sunday, 26 January III Sunday C: Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21
JESUS, THE JUBILEE!
1 Since many have set their hands to lay down an account of the events that happened among us, 2 as those who witnessed them from the beginning and became ministers of the word have handed them down to us, 3 so I too have decided to research every circumstance thoroughly from the beginning and to write down for you an orderly account of them, illustrious Theophilus, 4 so that you may realize the soundness of the teachings you have received.
14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Holy Spirit, and his fame spread throughout the whole region. 15 He taught in their synagogues, and everyone gave him great praise.
16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up; and he entered, according to his custom, on the Sabbath day into the synagogue and stood up to read. 17 He was given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah; opening it he found the passage where it was written:
18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me;
for this he has anointed me,
and has sent me to proclaim to the poor a glad message,
to proclaim to the captives deliverance
and to the blind sight;
to set at liberty the oppressed,
19 and to preach a year of the Lord’s favor.
20 Then he rolled up the volume, handed it to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed upon him. 21 Then he began to say, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled, which you have heard with your own ears.”Lk 1:1-4; 4:14-21
Dear sisters and brothers of Misericordia, I am Carlo Miglietta, a doctor, biblical scholar, layman, husband, father and grandfather (www.buonabibbiaatutti.it). Also today I share with you a short thought meditation on the Gospel, with special reference to the theme of mercy.
THE PROLOGUE OF THE GOSPEL OF LUKE
The Gospels are not desk-written works, like a character’s biography. The Gospels arise from preaching that is passed down orally. The apostles, from the day of Pentecost, did not bother to write a “life of Jesus,” but threw themselves into the public squares and streets to “preach” to their Jewish contemporaries that Jesus, the crucified man from Nazareth, is the expected messiah whom God raised from the dead. To get an idea of this preaching, one need only read chapter 2 of the book of Acts, which records Peter’s first missionary speech (technically it is called “kèrigma,” i.e., announcement) on the day of Pentecost. The first Christians were Jews who attended the temple in Jerusalem and the synagogue in the other towns and villages. Here they heard the Word of God, that is, what we today call the Old Testament.
Luke is the only evangelist who prefaces his writing with a prologue in which he declares, in the first two verses, the sources on which he draws, “Those who were witnesses (”autoptai“) and became ministers of the word (”yperetai tou logou“)” (the apostles), and in the next two verses, the purpose and characteristics of the work he undertakes, “I have decided to research carefully and write an orderly account of it…so that you may realize the soundness of the teachings.”
In this prologue, Luke adopts a classical Greek style and vocabulary found identically in Hellenistic treatises of the time, in which he states the purposes for which a book is written and the method he has followed.
Luke specifies that he took care to place himself scrupulously in listening to the church tradition and to write an orderly account of it: “anothen,” “from the beginning,” and “acribòs,” “with care.” This last annotation does not primarily indicate a chronological order: rather, it is intended to make clear that the work illuminates the way in which God guides, event after event, his plan of salvation in history. Luke undoubtedly has a concern for historicity, but knowing the works of his contemporary Greek and Latin historians, let us try not to project onto Luke’s project the modern conception of historical research.
The work is dedicated to the “egregious Theophilus,” a convert of pagan origin, who perhaps held an important position in the Roman administration: or it is a symbolic name that recalls Christians in general, “lovers of God,” as the etymology of the name “Theophilus” implies. Luke’s intended purpose is to “convince Theophilus of the soundness of the teachings he received.”
Two notes. The first is that the transmission of the events of Jesus took place in a community of believers: this is the basic meaning of the expression “servants of the Word,” which Luke applies directly to the first witnesses, but also to subsequent witnesses. Servant of the Word says the attitude of one who submits to the Word and tries with all care not to betray it, and it also indicates that the witnesses become involved in the Word they transmit: they are disciples of the Lord, not neutral persons.
The second annotation is that it is not enough to state that the events of Jesus demand to be transmitted in a believing community. It is necessary to go further and to specify that the life of the community is intimately a part of the events themselves: in fact, a living Christ must be proclaimed, one who is presently at work, not a mere memory of the past. The community is the place where the events of Jesus become alive, present and saving again, become “Gospel today,” that is, salvation history happening “among us.” It is by virtue of this insight that Luke can speak, with great depth, of “events happening among us,” that is, in the Christian community, even though they actually happened in the past. And it is for the same reason that he feels the need to write, in continuity with the story of Jesus, the story of the Church: the Acts of the Apostles.
JESUS, THE YEAR OF GRACE
In the Old Testament (Lev 25:8-41), the Lord proposes Jubilee as the supreme form of protection for the dispossessed and destitute. In a society where the inexorable vicissitudes of life lead some to become rich and others to become impoverished, if not bankrupt, God exhorts Israel to periodically experience a year, called “Jubilee,” as a time of complete redistribution of goods and the recomposition of a society of equals. Every fifty years God proposes the complete wiping out of private property and a new distribution among brothers.
There is a passage in the New Testament that explicitly recalls the Jubilee prescribed in Leviticus: it is the one in which Jesus, in the synagogue at Nazareth, applies to himself the oracle of Isaiah (Isa 61:1-2), announcing that he has been anointed to “preach the year of the Lord’s favor” (Lk 4:16-21). The year “dektòs” (Lk 4:19. 24; Acts 10:35), that is, “accepted,” “acceptable,” or, as our Bibles translate, “of grace,” is in fact the Jubilee year, the year that fulfills God’s dream of a world of free, equal, truly brotherly men: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me; therefore he has anointed me, and sent me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind; to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to preach a year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18-19). Jesus thus announces that he was “sent to proclaim a glad message to the poor”: for the Jews this “gospel” was par excellence the news of the end of slavery.
In exegesis of this most important proclamation, with which Jesus connotes his mission, we note that the he actually modifies the text of Isaiah (Is 61:1-2): he omits the “to bind up the wounds of the brokenhearted” (Is 61:1), perhaps so as not to give rise to excessive spiritualizing, and adds “to set at liberty (”àphesis“) the oppressed,” a verse taken instead from another passage in Isaiah (Is 58:6), precisely to emphasize the utmost concreteness of his deliverance intervention. He also neglects to mention the “day of vengeance for our God” (Is 61:2), the day of condemnation of the pagan nations, thus giving a universalistic dimension to his jubilee proclamation. Jesus’ intent is clear: to declare liberation (“àphesis”) from all social inequality, from all suffering, from all anguish, to finally proclaim “blessed” the poor, the hungry, the afflicted (Lk 6:20-21), from all the nations of the earth
But in the New Testament the term “àphesis” will acquire an eminently religious interpretation: in fifteen of the seventeen passages in which it appears it identifies the “forgiveness” of sins (Mk 1:4; Mt 26:28; Lk 1:77; Acts 2:38; Heb 9:22…). This means, in the overall New Testament proclamation, that only reconciled to God does one become capable of building a world of justice and freedom; only freed from sin, filled with God’s love, can one “console those who are in any kind of affliction with the consolation with which we ourselves are consoled by God” (2 Cor. 1:4); but also that there is no forgiveness of sins unless conversion transforms one into a doer of justice toward the marginalized.
Beware, then, of the movement of this revelation: conversion, reconciliation, is demanded, but not for an intimistic sense of being saved, but to enfranchise already as of now all the oppressed of the earth; and our human righteousness is the indispensable basis for making divine justification operative in us; certain, however, that divine Salvation is not exhausted in the space of this world, but that it transcends human deliverances in the divinization of man in God (Rom 8:17). In Nazareth, Jesus, after reading the above passage from Isaiah, makes a fundamental announcement, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled” (Lk 4:21): the characteristics of the Jubilee year are now fulfilled in Christ! Jesus, who is “the beginning and the end, the alpha and the omega” (Rev. 21:6), now initiates the “last times” (Heb. 1:2), the “last hour” (1 Jn. 2:18), for in him “the Kingdom of God has come among us” (Mt. 12:28). In Jesus Christ the Jubilee “year of grace” is now fulfilled, the brotherhood and equality among people dreamed of by God from time immemorial is realized.
THE MESSIAH OF THE POOR
From the very beginning of his public life, Jesus thus proclaims that he has come for the liberation of the poor and oppressed. And when John the Baptist sends him to ask if he is the Messiah, Jesus says, “Go and report to John what you have seen and heard: the blind regain their sight, the lame walk, lepers are healed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the good news is proclaimed to the poor” (Luke 7:18-22). Jesus’ response to the Baptist’s messengers is divided into six signs: the one non-miraculous one stands last, but it is the most important, for it sums them all up: “To the poor the good news is proclaimed” (Lk 7:22). Jesus comes for all the needy, for those deprived of health, life, possessions….
His life was all about concretely helping those in suffering: “He passed by benefiting and healing everyone” (Acts 10:38). All the Gospels insist on his activity as an extraordinary thaumaturge, on his miracles: “They led to him all the sick, tormented by various diseases and pains, those who were possessed with demons, epileptics and paralytics: and he healed them” (Mt 4:24; cf. 9:35); ‘Many followed him, and he healed them all’ (Mt 12:15; cf. 14:35-36; 19:2; Mk 1:32-34; 6:54-55; Lk 4:40); ‘The whole crowd sought to touch him, for out of him came a power that healed everyone’ (Lk 6:18-19; cf. 9:11; Jn 5:21)…
Jesus not only concretely rescues the tribulation sufferers he encounters: he came to “evangelize” them, that is, to let them know that they are loved in a special way by God, and that God will bring an end to their suffering through the incarnation, death and resurrection of his Son.
Happy Mercy to all!
Anyone who would like to read a more complete exegesis of the text, or some insights, please ask me at migliettacarlo@gmail.com.