Monday, April 20, 2015

Monday, April 20, 2015

Luke 4:14-30

As a student I write a lot of papers. An important part of a good paper is having a clear introduction, and if possible, one that is also intriguing. Of course, in writing papers I need to do my research, so I end up reading a lot of books and journal articles. To quickly sift through materials I find that reading the introduction is a good way of quickly assessing a resource’s usefulness. In the introduction the author basically says something like “this is what I think; this is what is what I’m going to do; and this is how I will do it.” 

It seems to me that what we have today in Luke 4:14-30 is Jesus’s introduction. It’s a powerful and challenging passage in which Jesus not only reads from the Book of the Prophet Isaiah, but he also seems to embody its message! It reveals Jesus as someone who saw his ministry as following in the path of the great Hebrew prophets who called the people of Israel back to faithfulness to God. This didn’t just entail ‘being religious,’ like adhering to some sacrificial system, or acting piously: ‘looking’ religious, or speaking in well-worn religious clichés. Most often it involved living in a just and mindful way, allowing one’s faith to be incarnated in one’s everyday life, both personal and public. This happened individually, in the home, and in societal systems.

What does today’s reading tell us about Jesus, and how he saw himself? Simply look to verses 18 and 19. He brings “good news to the poor,” not self-satisfaction to the rich and smug. He brings about “release to the captives,” not punishment for punishment’s sake. His healing touch provides “recovery of sight to the blind,” not catch phrases, slick salesmanship, and propaganda that obscure the reality of life’s challenges, or cause us to create false divisions between our physical and spiritual selves. In essence, Jesus’s ministry and passion result in “the oppressed go[ing] free.”   

He concludes his reading/proclamation by inaugurating an age and way foreshadowed in the “year of the Lord’s favour,” the year of Jubilee as outlined in Leviticus 25. The Jubilee year ensured that the needs of all the people of Israel were looked after. Slaves were freed, debts forgiven, and land went back to the original owners, giving priority to fairness and equitable distribution over monopoly and uninhibited accumulation of wealth. 

Based on our reading we might ask ourselves some hard questions: 

Is our religion so comprehensive, encompassing our whole lives? Or do we compartmentalize our faith, dusting it off and bringing it out, say, once a week for an hour or so? 

Has our experience of the Jesus story inspired us to live in solidarity with the oppressed, or has it occasionally brought about a partisan or mob mentality in which we accuse rather than heal and forgive? 

Do our churches encourage and support us in performing acts of love and justice, those undertakings that proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour? Or do we relegate such initiatives to the back pages of our bulletins and once-a-year special events?  

How might our liturgies and worship spaces change if our faith wasn’t just in our heads and on our lips, but radiated from our hearts and into the world through the working of our hands and the moving of our feet? (Interesting that those are the places where the nails pierced the body of Jesus!) 

Throughout the season of Lent Bishop Terry Dance offered a Bible study series at All Saints’ in Waterloo and Trinity in Cambridge. I had the chance to attend a few sessions and to lead a group study in Brantford that made use of the same Bible study resources.  The big take home message that I got from the study was that Jesus was not a gentle wisdom teacher who dealt in uncontroversial platitudes. He was frequently bumping up against those who held power in this world. When he spoke about himself he wasn’t just puffing himself up; he was most often deliberately creating a juxtaposition between his Way and the way of the Caesar, the way of death. 

I find a similar theme in the writings of one of my favourite Anglican thinkers, the twentieth century Episcopalian lay-theologian William Stringfellow:

The Bible is about the politics of fallen creation and the politics of redemption; the politics of the nations, institutions, ideologies, and causes of this world and the politics of the Kingdom of God; the politics of Babylon and the politics of Jerusalem; the politics of the Antichrist and the politics of Jesus Christ; the politics of the demonic powers and principalities and the politics of the timely judgment of God as sovereign; the politics of death and the politics of life; apocalyptic politics and eschatological politics.*

What are the marks of living as a subject of the Kingdom of God, and not the kingdom of Caesar and other lesser principalities and powers? How do we navigate the fine line between being 'in' but not 'of' the world, living, as Stringfellow put it, as 'aliens in a strange land?' What are concrete ways in which we as Church can welcome in the Kingdom of God and participate in the Good News?

- Matthew Kieswetter

* William Stringfellow, An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land (Waco, TX: Word Books, Publisher, 1973), 14-15.