Reflection on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Nehemiah 8:2-10     Corinthians 12:12-30    Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

Today’s liturgical readings might best be read in the opposite order.  The third reading, the Gospel, poses a question which the second reading makes clearer and the first reading celebrates.  In the Gospel we hear Jesus speaking to his Nazareth neighbors, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”  Jesus seems to imply that he personally is the fulfillment, the long awaited Servant-Messiah, the Christ of God — and his neighbors, who remember him from earlier years, certainly hear him that way — resent it.  Paul’s letter to the Corinthians looks more closely at Jesus’ claim, teaching us that all who belong to God are collectively the Christ, the fulfillment of God’s promise, each in their own “today.” Taking Paul’s lesson to heart, we recognize this morning’s gathering as the presence of the Christ here and now, and so we are moved to quote the book of Nehemiah in saying, “Today is a holy day, a day for rejoicing.” 

What is the fulfillment of which Jesus speaks?  What is it that God promised?  Who and what is the Servant-Messiah, the Christ, in our time, for all time?  These are the deeper concerns raised by the Gospel passage.  Although they seem to be heavy, ponderous questions, the answers are embedded in the common everydayness of our lives.  

The promise which Jesus read from the book of Isaiah was first given to God’s chosen people, Israel, as a reassurance at the time of their captivity in Babylon.  In Jesus’ own time, his listeners could easily hear the Isaiah passage as God’s promise that they would soon be freed from Roman domination.  But how could Jesus be the one to fulfill such a promise?  He was just the hometown boy returned from his wanderings. The neighbors had good reason to doubt.

Let us be honest. We also doubt, don’t we? Captured as we seem to be by political and economic powers, do we hear liberty and justice for us in today’s Gospel? Oppressed as we may be by ill-health, family obligations, depression or addiction, do we hear glad tidings for us in the Gospel message? Perhaps we don’t doubt. Maybe we just have a hard time feeling the connection between what is read in church and what troubles us in the hours of daily life.

This past week Neil Tucker and I travelled to Kansas to meet with a community of Black farmers. We spent a full day with the group of about 50 adults who were gathered to celebrate recent accomplishments, learn new approaches to current farm problems, and, most importantly, to plan for the future for their young people. The multi-generational, multi-racial group bubbled with joy, laughter, enthusiasm and hope, with mutual encouragement and ready praise for the smallest efforts. They were in every sense a loving example of Paul’s description of the Christian community, many parts contributing to one body: “The parts … have the same concern for one another. If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”

We came away from that gathering of Black farmers and their allies with the conviction that their community is, in deed and in spirit, the body of Christ, actively living out God’s promise given in Isaiah,

to bring glad tidings to the poor.
… to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free.

Now I am on my way home, relieved for a time from my doubts and blindness. I have seen and do believe that every gathering of God’s people is anointed to fulfill the promises and is actively engaged in doing just that, in the smallest daily acts of peace as well as in the big efforts to restore justice.  That is a wonderful reason to rejoice today.