Year C – Epiphany 3
Nehemiah 8:1-3,5-6,8-10
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a
Luke 4:14-21
Epiphany, as its name suggests, is the season of revelations and revealings – a season in which each Sunday we unfold another story about who Jesus was and what he came to do. Each week we hear the story of a different place, a different context, and a different group of people who meet Jesus and discover something of what he offers them of God’s promised Kingdom.
In our own journey through Epiphany, we too are encouraged to listen to passages anew, asking ourselves, ‘How might I see Jesus differently?’, ‘What new thing might God be saying to me?’, ‘How might my understanding of the Good News be broken open again for my life here and now?’
Epiphany reminds us that the Good News is not a static unchanging entity, fixed in stone for 2000 years, simply to be acknowledged and admired and assented to. Rather, we are reminded that the Good News of God’s Kingdom is an invitation into a living relationship, one which therefore changes and grows as we do, ever unfolding in new depths and riches, and always with more to be discovered. And that means we are called to be always open to new movements of the Spirit, and new challenges, and growth, and life in God’s love.
The people of Jesus’ hometown were called into such a new understanding in today’s Gospel. Here were a people who knew Jesus – who’d seen him grow and play and learn his craft, and who probably thought they knew the man he’d become. Gathered at that synagogue that morning were people with 30 or so years of relationship and knowledge of Jesus, and all that was about to be broken open anew.
Jesus himself, is at the beginning of his ministry, fresh from Baptism, having been tested in the wilderness and at the cusp of his public facing years. Luke’s Gospel uses the telling of this event in his home synagogue to introduce and to frame the whole of Jesus’ ministry. We are told that Jesus returns from the wilderness ‘in the power of the Spirit’ – something has changed in Jesus and God is clearly present with him, People are talking and wondering about Jesus – Who is this man now and what is his message?
The passage from Isaiah, which Jesus reads out and claims as his own, becomes both his inauguration speech and his manifesto. Through it, Jesus identifies his task as:
- Preaching good news to the poor
- Proclaiming release to the captives (Jesus in his ministry releases people from various forms of bondage – economic, physical, mental, political, and social)
- Recovery of sight to the blind (this, for Jews wasn’t just about the healing of physical sight, although we see in Jesus ministry that it was expressed in some cases in very practical healing – recovery of sight was also linked with prophetic vision – with the call to be a light to the nations, to have a renewed sense of God’s prophetic hope for their whole people.
- A promise that the oppressed would go free – that human power would not have the final word
- And to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour (which recalled the people to the Jubilee – the year after the 7th cycle of 7 years – the 50th year in which Leviticus tells us– ‘you will proclaim liberty through the land to all its inhabitants’ (Lev 25:10). This was about the full cancellation of debt, a rebalancing of society to a more equal economic footing – a socially just renewal of the basis of society.
Particularly in Luke, we see Jesus demonstrate God’s specific concern for the poor and the marginalised – if God’s Kingdom is not Good News for everyone, then it is not Good News at all; it is instead merely a replica of human power, biased towards those who already have; a lottery of birth and circumstance.
This promise of Jesus’ is hopeful, radical and practical stuff! It is also, as we see in the rest of the Gospel, not just rousing words. Jesus then spends the rest of his ministry living this out, shaping his life and his actions around the promise of God’s freedom and encouraging others to do the same.
For Luke, the Good News of God is liberating. God’s gift to us is freedom from all that holds us captive and removed from God’s love and justice, whether that be us as individuals or us as our wider communities.
I wonder what it would take for us to be able to read that passage from Isaiah, as we have here this morning, and be able to affirm as Jesus did, that ‘today this Scripture has been fulfilled?’ Where do we already see signs of God’s liberating goodness in our life and the life of our community? Where are the places where change might need to happen for people to be more free? More cared for? More loved.
Maybe we might also need to take a step back and ask what liberation might actually look or feel like – sometimes we’ve never even stopped to imagine what God’s freedom might look like here and now. What about for you, in your life? Where do you need more freedom? Where do you feel stuck or trapped? What might God’s change look like?
Equally, what might liberation look like for our communities here? For our city of Lincoln? Our county or Diocese? Where do we long to see people freer and more fulfilled? How can we create a society in which that happens more?
Both our Old Testament and New Testament readings remind us that this journey into God’s gift of freedom isn’t a journey we take on our own, as an individual. As followers of Christ we are called into communities of hope, and our freedom is bound up in the freedom of others – none of us have all the skill and capacity to do it on our own, and nor should we. As Paul reminds the Corinthians, we are bound together in a body, we need each other in order to be whole. God’s kingdom is a kingdom of diverse community.
So as we seek to discern what God’s task of liberation is for us, here in this community and at this time, let us pray that we might be attentive to God’s call on our lives and find the courage to journey together into new understandings of ourselves and our life together. Amen