4th.
Sunday (Year C)
(Jeremiah 1:4-5, 17-19; 1st.
Corinthians 12:31 – 13:13; Luke 4:21-30)
In our first reading the young Jeremiah, a somewhat
frightened and unwilling prophet it would seem, was called by the Lord:
Before I formed you in the
womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you; I ordained you a
prophet to the nations.
And, despite his protestations of youth:
Ah,
Lord GOD! Behold, I cannot speak, for I
am a youth
he was told:
Prepare yourself and arise, and
speak to them all that I command you.
Behold, I have made you this day a fortified city and an iron pillar,
and bronze walls against the whole land -- against the kings of Judah, against
its princes, against its priests, and against the people of the land.
From that you see that when God chooses someone for a
special work of whatever sort, He prepares and enables them to do that for
which He is choosing them. Let us now look
at Jesus, beginning in Galilee the work for which He had been sent by His Father:
He came to Nazareth and went
according to His custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to
read (from) a scroll of Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is
upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has
sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and
recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to
proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
He handed the scroll back to the attendant, sat down with the
eyes of all looking intently upon Him, and said:
Today
this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing!
In modern parlance one might say that that reading from prophet
Isaiah was the Messianic brief Jesus had been given, and we are about to learn
what Jesus’ understanding of His calling was.
We are told that, on ending that prophetic reading, Jesus then went on
to speak in such a way that:
When the people in the
synagogue heard this, they were all filled with fury. They rose up, drove Him out of the town, and
led Him to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl Him
down headlong. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away.
They tried to ‘hurl Him down headlong’ -- headlong and
backwards -- down one of the steep parts of the hills surrounding their
village, where nests of swallows can still be found. George Adam Smith tells us you cannot see
Nazareth from the surrounding country ‘for Nazareth rests in a basin among
hills; but the moment you climb to the edge of this basin, what a view
you have! Esdraelon, Carmel, the Valley
of the Jordan with the long range of Gilead, the radiance of the great Sea,
thirty miles in three directions, a map of Old Testament history!’
Make no bones about it, People of God, Jesus did not
inspire such anger and resentment by a slip of the tongue, so to speak. Not at all!
He heard many in the synagogue
praising Him before being silenced by the poisonous question, ‘Isn’t this the
son of Joseph’. This was a paradigm for
the best that Jesus – as Messiah and Son of God – could expect!! These were His own people, not
proud and exclusive Judeans who scorned them for both their accent and their
proximity to pagan towns and influence; not the influential Scribes and Pharisees
who despised their Galilean ignorance of the Law and their traditional
practices; these were the presumably humble and simple faithful in Israel who
had been praying for God’s messianic blessing for centuries!
Jesus answered them immediately with supremely purposeful
words that might disabuse them:
Amen, I say to you, no
prophet is accepted in his own native place.
Surely you will quote Me this
proverb, 'Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here in Your native place the
things that we heard were done in Capernaum.'"
To lay bare in such a way the personal attitude of those
present might have seemed enough, but no, Jesus went straight on to infuriate
them even more by exposing the ridiculous national and religious pride which tethered
them to those Judeans, Scribes and Pharisees who held them is such low esteem
as members of the People of God:
Indeed, I tell you, there
were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was closed for
three and a half years, and a severe famine spread over the entire land. It was to none of these that Elijah was sent but
only to a widow in Zarephath, in the land of Sidon. Again, there were many lepers in Israel during
the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed but only Naaman
the Syrian.
How is the mission of comforting and salvation foretold by
the prophet Isaiah in those words read and accepted by Jesus, to be reconciled with
what He subsequently said? For reconciled they must be, if we are to have some true
understanding and appreciation of Our Saviour, and His work for us today.
The eventual rejection and even the crucifixion of Israel’s
Messiah and God’s own Son are revealed as being deeply embedded and even cherished
in the People of God’s own hearts and minds as witnessed by these supposedly devout
synagogue-goers of Nazareth who had known and lived with Jesus from His
infancy, who had worked with Him, or had Him and Joseph work for them; people
whom Jesus from childhood had been taught to look up to with respect!
Today there are many people like those at Nazareth, with secret
attitudes restrained by only skin-deep levels of social awareness and
conscience, ready to burst out into violence under minor provocation: people ready to
join any mob or demonstration ‘for the love of it’: yelling ‘racist’ with, at
times, convincingly hateful intent; blocking roads and toppling statues;
anti-whatever is considered too authoritative or institutional, too traditional
or ‘stupidly’ normal! In all, people deeply
uncultured not because of intellectual ignorance, but by personal arrogance and
spiritual pride.
Dear People of God, do not be led astray by such ‘evangelists’
of modern thought and morality! To live
in today’s world -- which the celebrated physicist Stephen Hawking warned was
in danger of destroying itself in the next 100 years -- as true Catholics and Christians,
as children of God, and members of the Body of Christ, we ourselves need to be dis-abused
by Jesus’ word and actions.
St. Luke’s Gospel today tells us that no one’s
sincerity and fidelity can be presumed. Humble and persistent personal prayer and
sacramental worship, along with sincere selflessness, are ever-more necessary for
us in our endeavours to witness to and promote Jesus’ ‘Good News’ in our
wilfully godless society of today. And
we can only do that if we have truly firm confidence and trust in God’s
saving and loving grace, grace unfailingly present in the worship and
sacraments of the Catholic Church which is His Spouse and our Mother, grace
whereby He is preparing blessings beyond any earthly measure, for all who will
ultimately and eternally find themselves sitting at the wedding feast of
heaven.
What is grace, however?
Christian grace is a gift, a blessing of the Holy Spirit, and as such is
HOLY, leading us to do God’s will, for our fellows’ good on earth, and our own
spiritual and personal fulfilment and eternal salvation, that is, life in Jesus
for the Father in His heavenly kingdom.
Saint Paul waxed lyrical in our second reading about the Christian
virtue of charity, translated as ‘love’ in modern parlance; but what is the love
Paul speaks?
Such 'love' is not an emotional feeling; it is not a
sexual need; it is not a complaisance; it is not even a merely
human commitment; it is a transcendent Christian virtue properly called ‘charity’,
because it is a participation in God’s own personal Being and eternal life; in
our human context, it is a response to God’s call leading us to seek His good
pleasure for one’s self, His great goodness for our fellows, and above all, it
is a thanksgiving and commitment to the service of, and supreme delight in, His
greater glory.
On this Sunday Jesus -- raising high His standard as He entered
upon the public mission for which He had been sent by His heavenly Father for
our salvation -- spoke plain words that scandalized those members of His own
synagogue whose religion was tainted by their desire for popularity; so too
today, we must, as Christians, understand the truth about what is so
popularly misconstrued by so many around us.
Jesus’ words and actions could be hard as well as gentle:
He would help but never cajole, He wanted obedient love not popularity, He had
come to redeem not excuse, to raise up human beings, not to indulge their
weaknesses (Luke:12:49):
I came to send fire on the
earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!
For Jesus holiness was simply and solely, totally and
wholly, love for His Father and fellowship with all our brothers and sisters in
Christ; He lived and died for His Father’s glory and for the fulfilment of the Father’s
will for our salvation, though it cost Him the agony of death upon a Roman
cross.
Much good is done in the public sphere today, such
‘goodness’, however, is not Christian charity: great efforts are made
and much money spent to improve public health, but that does not prevent
living children having been and still being aborted in their millions now; loving
relationships are always publicly acceptable, most even laudable, but that
does not prevent much sexuality being publicly practiced for selfish and even degrading
reasons; education is considered of great, perhaps, the utmost,
importance, but knives are now much more common and are murderously used by
young people; infants and children are taught nothing about God, and they
are thereby taught that men and women such as they see every day around them are
the best they can hope for, that nothing is right or wrong, good or bad, unless
others think so, unless the police or the law say so. RIGHT OR WRONG IS ONLY WHAT PEOPLE THINK. Mental health is also said to be so
important, and seriously so, but while psychology admits that people can suffer
from what may be paranormal, what is supernatural and beneficent – God and His
love for us -- is inadmissible and ignored.
Dear People of God, today we have been invited to – and you
have come to – participate in what is supremely spiritual and God’s most
sublime testament of love for us: His enduring Word, His abiding Gift of the
Spirit, and His only begotten and most beloved Son’s perennial and eternal offering
of His own Self-sacrifice of love for His Father and for us. May His blessing come down upon you, ever abide with and sustain you, to heaven's portals.
