Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all. He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4.14-21)
As we might expect, the relatively new start to the current liturgical cycle that we have on this Third Sunday in Ordinary Time offers us a passage from the Gospel of Luke that also presents the start of Jesus’ public ministry. It is taken from Chapter 4 of Luke’s text, the earlier chapters devoted to the annunciation to Mary by an angel of Jesus’ impending birth, her visit to her cousin Elizabeth, Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, his presentation in the Temple, the finding of the boy Jesus in the Temple when he is twelve-years-old, and then in Chapter 3 his baptism in the Jordan. At the end of Chapter 3, Luke tells us “Jesus, when he began his ministry, was about thirty years of age, being the son, as was supposed of Joseph.”
Faithful to the other synoptic writers, Luke has the baptism of Jesus immediately followed by the temptation in the desert, that event told to us in the early verses of Chapter 4. Now, in these verses that we have today, Jesus begins his public ministry, words and works that will soon enough spell out his mission in the world.
However, by the fact that Luke tells us at the start of this story about Jesus’ return to his hometown of Nazareth that “news about him spread through all the surrounding area and he taught in their synagogues,” we can infer he has already been busy about his business. Nevertheless, Luke intends this story of Jesus’ return to Nazareth to participate in the sabbath service at the synagogue to be his inaugural speech.
Luke’s placement of the story is intentional, wanting us to understand this story to be the introduction to Jesus’ missionary activity, an overture that contains in a nutshell his mission statement. If we want a condensed version of the gospel as a whole, then we will find it here in the synagogue service when Jesus takes a scroll that contains the words of the prophet Isaiah and reads them aloud to the people gathered before him.
And what does the prophet have to say? Luke provides us with the words that Jesus takes from the text. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”
Were there any doubt as to what Jesus’ intentions were in selecting this passage from one of Israel’s ancient prophets, it is dismissed at the start when Jesus begins with the verse, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me,” the words casting him in the role of the prophet or appointed spokesperson for the Most High God. It is confirmed at the end when he rolls up the scroll, sits down, and says aloud to the people, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
In other words, the promise of good news to the poor, liberty to captives, the recovery of sight to the blind, and freeing the oppressed is about to be fulfilled, beginning today. The remainder of Luke’s gospel will show Jesus in action, doing exactly as he has said he would do, bringing good news to the very people who never hear any good news.
It is not coincidental that the first group promised the good news by Jesus is the poor, a group that will be front and center throughout Luke’s gospel, beginning with a poor girl in Nazareth who is picked by God to give birth to his son in the humblest of circumstances and ending with a criminal on the cross who is promised Paradise because he has rightly seen Jesus as innocent of wrongdoing.
For Luke, the poor are synonymous not only with those who suffer economic hardship but also with those who are in any way pushed to the margins or excluded from the community. Perhaps the word that comes closest to capturing the concept of poor in Luke’s mind is outcast, any person who is castigated, excluded, or oppressed.
Therefore, Jesus’ ministry will be directed towards the blind, the lame, the hungry, and the powerless. As his work continues, we will find the poor in the face of Lazarus who is starving at the rich man’s gate, in the blind man who begs for handouts on the outskirts of Jericho, and in the widow who gave two coins to the Temple treasury. Jesus sees these and others whom society has turned a blind eye towards, finding value in those who are deemed as without any intrinsic value, rescuing those voted off the island by the tribal chieftains who disdain the poor, the defenseless, and the foreigner.
For Luke, even the sinner is presented as a beneficiary of Jesus’ mercy. A tax-collector loathed by everyone is summoned by Jesus from his perch on a tree limb to sit at table with him. A woman looked down upon because she is sinful is praised by Jesus for her love as she anointed his feet with her tears. A leper whose body was covered in sores and shunned by people everywhere is made clean by Jesus who hears the man’s cries and touches him. Each was excluded by the structures and norms of the times, but Jesus includes each of them in his outreach.
Already in Chapter 1, Luke has shown his hand when he has Mary say to her cousin Elizabeth, “God’s mercy is on those who fear him. He has shown strength with his arm, he has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he has put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree; he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away.” That pronouncement will be proven true in each subsequent page of Luke’s gospel.
With that said, what does that tell us, especially if we are intent on appropriating the words and works of Jesus as our own mission in the world? Fundamentally, it means we see ourselves also as anointed or set apart as he was to bring good news to the outcasts wherever we find them, whether in the poor who have nowhere to go for help, or in the lost who have no one to show them the way, or in the beaten down who have nothing left to live for.
These are the very ones whom Jesus made the beneficiaries of his mercy and his love, and they are the same ones whom we are called to serve by whatever means available to us, including our money, our time, and our presence. If we fail to make them the focus of our following in the footsteps of Jesus, then we have turned them into nobodies, our treatment of them no different than that done to them every other day by the world at large.
All things considered, the operative word may be relief. When choosing that passage from Isaiah the prophet to encapsulate his entire ministry, Jesus unequivocally positioned himself as someone who would bring relief to those in distress, to those disheartened, to those disenfranchised in any way. Clearly, the breadth of his mission was wide, encompassing anyone who needed relief from anything and anyone oppressing them.
The same can be said, then, of those of us who want to imitate his ways, people who take seriously our allegiance to the mission of Jesus. We are called to bring relief to the poor in the same way that Jesus did, freeing them from oppression in its many forms, particularly from those social structures and social stigmas that diminish their freedom, their dignity, and their rights.
Should we have any question as to when to start, if we have not yet begun, then the answer is found in a single word that Jesus speaks. The word is today. He said to the people, “Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” Our outreach is not tomorrow, not next week, not when it is convenient. It is today. If we delay in helping the poor, providing ourselves with excuses and explanations, then we have failed the test of the true follower of Jesus.
For the poor, delay means one more day that they are hungry, hounded, and hidden on the fringes of society. It means no food in their stomach, no clothes on their back, no sense of safety in their world. Our delay in reaching out to them is yet one more burden they must bear, their birthright as children of the Most High God denied to them by our inaptness, our inability to do our work, our incapacity to show compassion.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Anglican bishop and civil rights activist who spent his life fighting against apartheid in South Africa, once said people who have never experienced oppression have no understanding of what it means to be free. Oppressed people, he said, wake up every morning asking themselves if they have the money for a meal, or have the pass required of them to travel, or have the permission to go somewhere in the town.
He told of the time he walked past a playground with his young daughter and had to stop her from playing on the swings. She said to him, “But there are other children there.” He answered, “Yes, there are other children there, but they are not quite like you.” Say that to a child, he pointed out, and you understand what oppression feels like.
Of course, it is easy enough for us to point fingers, believing nothing of the sort happens here. But we would be very wrong, willfully blind to the same oppression that is all around us. Just this week I received a notice from one of the national psychological organizations of which I am a member, the newsletter asking us to be aware of the changing landscape of public policy, explaining that many young people in our country, particularly those from minoritized and marginalized backgrounds, are facing increased fears for their future because they are being denied access to safe and supportive schools.
For no other reason than that they are seen as different from other children in some way, alienated and apart because of skin color, place of origin, or any other convenient label, they must face each day on the fringes, fearful of what might happen and afraid to enter the school hallways. What is our answer to them? Is our only answer the same that Archbishop Tutu gave to his young daughter, “Yes, there are other children there who can walk freely without fear, but they are not quite like you.”
So long as our answer to the poor is that they must be content with their lot in life because others in the world–the privileged, the powerful, and the well-positioned–“are not quite like them,” then we have utterly failed to do the job that Jesus gave us to do, little else that we do showing any inkling that we have understood that our job is to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives, give sight to the blind, and to let the oppressed go free.
–Jeremy Myers
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