Third Sunday of the Year(C)
(Nehemiah 8: 2-4, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-14, 27; St. Luke 1:1-4;
4:14-21)
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Today this Scripture passage is
fulfilled in your hearing.
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, we
have in our Gospel reading today an incident that seems to have occurred
shortly after the marriage feast at Cana where Jesus had performed His
first miracle, having received His mother’s blessing for the inauguration of His
Messianic mission.
That first miracle meant so very much
to Jesus: it was not of His own choosing, but, if I might so speak, it was recommended
to Him by His heavenly Father at His mother’s prayer; and it promised the ultimate
triumph of His Messianic mission by foreshadowing -- at that local wedding
celebration -- His heavenly Father’s infinite goodness and generosity as Host
at the eternal banquet of the beatific family of God.
Here, in words spoken by Our Blessed
Lord Himself, Saint Luke wants us to understand, that all things had thus been
fittingly prepared for this most symbolic and important synagogue and Christian
pronouncement:
TODAY, this (supremely important and Messianic)
Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.
Why does the Evangelist insist so
emphatically that Isaiah’s prophecy was brought to its fulfilment by Jesus
reading the prophetic passage during that Sabbath assembly in the synagogue of
Nazareth on this very day?
It seems to me that here St. Luke is picturing something that St. John declared in direct words at the beginning of his Gospel (1:6-11):
A man named John was sent from God. He came to testify to the light so that all might believe through him; (for) the true light, which enlightens everyone, was in the world and the world came to be through Him but the world did not know Him. He came to what was His own, but His own people did not accept Him.
What John – considerably later in life
-- expressed as a mature, you might say dogmatic, theologian, Luke here expresses
as an evangelist, eager to draw attention to facts of Jesus’ human experience, facts
about His Personal human relationships with His mother and His own townspeople;
and in doing so he gives prominence to the ancient hopes and expectations of
God’s Chosen people.
Those words of Jesus:
Today this Scripture passage is
fulfilled in your hearing,
are immensely important for all of us today
who read the Scriptures searching for greater hope in God to strengthen us as
disciples in the fight against sin, and above all, for love leading to eternal
life with Jesus in the family of God.
Jesus Himself once said to the
Sadducees:
You are misled because you do not know
the Scriptures or the power of God; have you not read what was said to you
by God, ‘I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of
Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead but of the living (Matthew 22: 29-33);
We are thus assured that the Scriptures
are always capable of present-day fulfilment in the lives of those who are
humble enough to patiently wait and prayerfully listen for Him in the course of
their every-day Catholic and Christian lives; and many are the saints of Mother
Church whose lives were formed or transformed by such awareness and responsiveness
to God speaking to them personally in the Scriptures, such as St. Anthony the
Great whose memory we have just recently celebrated.
There is much else to be noted in our
Gospel reading which is also most appropriate for us today.
Salvation, it tells us, begins ‘at
home’, among those fellow citizens of Jesus at Nazareth and co-members of
the local synagogue and the Chosen People.
Likewise, any spiritual renewal for Mother Church today must begin, first
and foremost, deepest and most lovingly, in the hearts and minds of all her
apparently faithful children standing as Catholics and Christians before our
modern world.
For too long the awareness of the
individual ‘devout’ Catholic’s responsibility for the good name of Mother
Church and, indeed, for appropriate witness to our Catholic Faith in God, has
been downplayed to merely human endeavours to make Church-going popular,
and to an appreciation and acceptance of people, not as God’s loving creation,
as brothers and sisters in Christ, and possible supernatural children of God
the eternal Father, but uniquely as individuals with human
rights not including responsibilities; to the extent that a welcoming
and accommodating relationship with others is now regarded as ample justification for a
change in or break with ones response to God’s law, and even to the denial of
God Himself: witness all the ramifications of modern sexual expression: gay marriage
(I am not speaking in any way against same-sex friendships), sex and
gene modification, abortion advice and contraception facilities, and the ever-growing
lobby for the easy procurement of life ‘as one likes it’, and for death ‘on
demand’.
In today’s Gospel Jesus stands before
us putting first-things-first for all believers:
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, recovery of sight to the blind, (and) to let the oppressed
go free.
In our modern context that means that any
and every renewal in Mother Church must begin with a renewal of our
relationship with Jesus, our God and Saviour, the Light and the Glory of our
lives; and that renewal has to be a deepening, a ‘bettering’, as Jesus Himself
said to the Samaritan woman shortly before today’s synagogue event:
The hour is coming and is now here when
true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth, and indeed the
Father seeks such people to worship Him.
God is Spirit and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and
Truth. (John 4:23-24)
All human beings are – we know by faith
and experience – sinners; a priori, we accuse none as personal sinners, and
likewise, we excuse none as being worthy to take what should be God’s
place in our life. Some Jews once asked
Jesus
‘What can we do to accomplish the works of God?’ Jesus answered and said to them: ‘This is the work of God, that you believe in the One He sent.’
The Spirit of the Lord is upon Jesus, and our relationship of faith in Him
and love for Him, is absolutely essential.
We can only do good in our world for our fellow human beings in so far
as we share in that Spirit of the Lord by ever-deeper, closer, oneness
with Jesus.
Today’s Gospel has more absolutely
essential teaching for all seeking to be and become better disciples of Jesus; in
one, word:
Today, this Scripture passage is
fulfilled in your hearing.
TODAY! That one
word has its very own resonance for Jesus:
It is said: “Oh, that TODAY you would
hear His voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as at the rebellion.’” (Hebrews 3:15)
What was done at the rebellion? They heard God’s voice but they did not
welcome and embrace it as God-seekers, or believers; but as worldlings they PROVOKED
Him and TESTED His words:
And
we see they could not enter (into His peace) for lack of faith. (v. 19)
Scripture assures us that God speaks to
all human beings in accordance with their ability and willingness to hear and
learn from Him ... blessed, indeed, are those who, on hearing His ‘still, small,
voice’, calm their inner turmoil for just long enough to begin to learn from
Him and gradually follow Him; for He is not only the light and strength of our earthly
lives, He is the supreme joy and peace of our spiritual and eternal being.
