Luke 4:14-21
Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor."
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Today.
Wendy Mogel in her book entitled The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children, speaks of the importance of Jewish thought for today’s generation.
This is what she says at the end of her first chapter entitled “How I Lost One Faith (that is her faith in psychology) And Found Another” (that is her Jewish faith).
“There is one question that sums up everything I have learned about the power of Jewish teaching to guide us in every generation. It’s a question that rabbis like to ask schoolchildren:
“What’s the most important moment in Jewish history?
The giving of the Torah on Sinai? No.
The parting of the Red Sea? No.
Right now (today): This is the most important moment in Jewish history.”
The gospel-writer Luke feels the very same way. The word “today” appears 12 times in Luke, compared with only 9 times in the other three gospels combined. It is in Luke that angels, telling the shepherds of Jesus’ birth say, “Today in the town of David a Savior is born to you.” It is in Luke that Jesus, encountering the tax-collector Zacchaeus, tells him, “Come down immediately. I must stay in your house today,” and later, “Today, salvation has come to this house.” It is in Luke that at the crucifixion, Jesus tells the thief hanging next to him: “Today you will be with me in paradise.” And finally in this morning’s text, it is in Luke that Jesus gets up in the synagogue, reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and then pronounces: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Today is the most important time in Jewish history, the rabbis say. Today is the most important time for Luke’s Jesus, and, yes, today is the most important time for us.
For some reason learning to focus on living today is one of life’s most elusive lessons. Maybe it’s just part of the human predicament in that we’re uniquely a species that can both remember the past and imagine the future.
I don’t mean to say that the past and future impinging on the present is unhealthy. Memory and hope are cornerstones of human experience and the life of faith. But they can also be bandits, stealing the importance and invitation of the present moment from us. When I think of how much I and others have lost in the present on account of either nostalgia for the past or anxiety or yearning about a future that would never come or would come in its own time, it makes me want to weep. A backward looking perspective or angst about the future can robs us of what is right in front of us, of what is coming up within us now, today.
And so I love that the first word out of Jesus mouth in his public debut in the synagogue is “today.” Today the scripture is fulfilled in our hearing.
But Luke’s message is not just about living in and receiving the current moment. Luke’s has a specific content that we’re asked to receive today.
Today the captives have been released
Today the blind have been given their sight
Today the oppressed have been freed,
Today God’s favor has come upon us.
How are we to receive these pronouncements when people are held captive, are blind, are oppressed, and seem supremely out of favor God? How are we to receive these pronouncements when on another level some of us here are living in captivity, some of us are stumbling around blind, some of us sorely oppressed, some of us disconnected and feeling outside of God’s favor?
Years ago I remember conversations with my friend Jan. Jan was a colleague of mine who I liked very much who worked with me at a small company that shall remain nameless. She was a talented scientist, who had had a falling out with the founder years before, but continued to work in the company feeling fearful, resentful and oppressed. Time after time, our conversations would go something like this: I would listen to all of her feelings about him, her misgivings about herself and her struggle with figuring out what to do—stay at the company or leave? And I would say, “Jan, you are a talented scientist, and a good human being, you can do anything you want to do.” And time after time, she continued to be held captive, neither settling into where she was nor making the decision to move on.
Two halls over sat the founder, a man I had affection for and who I worked with on a regular basis. He was a person who over time I realized was not really able to see and deal with people as much more than means to an end. Obsessed with the idea of his own creativity and not in touch with the impact of his decisions and behavior on others, he was feared on account of his mercurial and unpredictable ways, patterns that tended to hold others in the workplace in a kind of captivity. I would like to be able to relate one of our conversations to you, but I cannot remember them because they were all about abstract ideas or the next overblown plan that would often be so unrealistic that it would never actually happen.
This example of captive/captor, oppressed/oppressor pales in comparison to what Jesus would have been referring to in his own time. He would have been referring to societal patterns in which the desperately poor ended up serving as indentured slaves to wealthy land owners. Despite these differences, I hope you get my drift. Jesus’ proclamation that today the captives have been released, today the oppressed have been freed, today God’s favor has come upon us is a message that both those in captivity and those who are their captors are meant to internalize. Captives are to hear and to know and, where possible, to live into their freedom and worthiness in God’s eyes now. Captors are to hear and know that God’s favor rests on those they hold in thrall. And we, you and I, are to struggle with where we see ourselves in this and what we are to do about it today.
And so what do we want to do about it? Where do you need to claim the release, the freedom you are given now? Where do you need to enter into God’s activity of releasing and of freeing others around you, others who are thrall on account of the power you have and how you choose to use it? Or on account of the way society itself is set up?
Abraham Joshua Heschel once wrote that Judaism does not ask followers to take a leap of faith; it asks them to take a leap of action. I think what Jesus was doing in reading from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and in pronouncing that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” was to invite us to take a leap of action under girded by trust, a trust that God has acted first. God has created human beings who have equal status and do not deserve to be oppressed and are not entitled to be oppressors. But more even than this, God has identified God’s self with human life, the life of the oppressed and the oppressor, and has destroyed the death that both can be, dignifying our human nature—today.
Works Cited or Consulted
Wendy Mogel, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee: Using Jewish Teachings to Raise Self-Reliant Children
Brian Stoffregen, CrossMarks (an online resource for Biblical exegesis for lectionary passages.
