“Jesus
taught in their synagogues and was praised by all.” What a wonderful way to start our Ordinary
Time walk through the Jesus’ earthly ministry, guided this year by Luke. We start out hearing of Jesus teaching, to
universal praise and acclaim, becoming a revered teacher given an overwhelmingly
positive reception. We know that that’s
not going to last. In fact, by the end
of this very chapter, the people who hear him teach react so negatively that
the try to push him off a cliff! When I
started praying with this lectionary selection and preparing myself to preach,
it seemed a little odd to me that the lectionary really cuts one story in
two. It almost feels like we should have
ended with a ‘to be continued’ sign, because the negative reaction that’s soon
to come is the reaction to this inaugural Nazareth sermon that we hear. But, as I sat more and more with the reading,
and the lectionary’s choice of how to carve up this pie, I began to see the
wisdom.
It’s
right for us to start out with joy. It’s
right for us to start out refreshed and buoyed up by hearing of Jesus receiving
such praise and adulation. Because it
would be so easy to skip over those two little summary verses, which tell of
Jesus’ return to Galilee, his teaching in synagogues, and the great praise with
which his teaching was received.
Partially, it would be easy to skip over them because they are summary
verses, sandwiched in between two tales which are much more vividly painted:
the Temptation of Christ in the desert (and his temporary defeat of Satan, in
foretaste of the permanent defeat to be wrought later), and the inaugural
sermon in Nazareth, which results in the attempt to throw him off the
cliff.
But, it’s
more than just the vividness with which the scenes are painted, it’s their hue. It can be easy to focus on the strength of
the opposition, on the challenges, and the sorrows Jesus knew for love of us,
and lose sight of the joy and the wonder and the praise. And that’s part of what Jesus came to set us
free from. That’s part of what constitutes
our captivity and our blindness, that we let the joy get overshadowed by the
threat and the sorrow.
And I’m
not saying we should read the world as “Polyanna”s, that we should ignore the
darkness Christ’s light came to cast away, the injustices, the binding from
which he came to free us. I’m saying we
can’t let those things keep us from the Joy of the Gospel. In his first apostolic exhortation, Pope
Francis writes of the power of Christ’s “offer of salvation to set [us] free
from sin, sorrow, inner emptiness and loneliness” and fill our hearts instead
with joy.
So, that’s
how I see this choice of the lectionary as wise, as choosing to delay to next
week the end of the episode, the violent reaction Christ faced, and give us
this week to concentrate on sharing his joy at the positive reaction he
received. There’ll be plenty more time,
especially as Lent comes so soon this year, to think of how God’s love for us is
disclosed in Christ’s relentlessly acting to save in the face of rejection and hardship. Today, we rejoice with him in remembering the
good days, and rejoice with our world, that it gave our Lord so many good days. That joy that can be shared, engendered and
multiplied, is itself a fruit of the Spirit, the Spirit in whose power Jesus
acted, whose anointing we share through our initiation into Christ’s
Church. That joy is a force for evangelization,
as the Holy Father has reminded us through his words and through his example,
and it’s a way in which God effects our sanctification, our being freed from the
scripts of pessimism the world can try to foist on us.
This
week we’ve been confronted by event after event that reminds us that we and our
world still have a long way to go to receive that gospel freedom Christ
promises: we’ve had Martin Luther King day, when we’ve remembered that for all
our advances, his dream is still far from a reality; we’ve had the week of
Christian Unity, where the pain of our Christian fraction can be most apparent;
we’ve had the anniversary of Roe vs. Wade, when we remember innocent lives
lost. To survive in a world like this,
we need that Gospel Joy, and in each of these observances a tremendous source
of it for me has come in all the people who have come together to pray and to
make a difference in whatever way they can.
God always gives us cause to rejoice, and the Spirit acts to free our
hearts and open our eyes to see it.
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