“Do not weep … rejoicing in the LORD must be your strength!”
When Ezra read from the Law after returning from Babylon as a priest-scribe, the people who had been left behind in the exile, the nobodies that weren’t worth taking captive, wept at hearing these words. The text suggests the words of the Law disheartened them as they realized how far they were from what God expected. But the great words of good news, “Do not weep…rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength” are words of great comfort and encouragement; God is almighty, but also compassionate.
Today’s gospel from Luke seems to parallel the Old Testament text with Jesus as proclaiming from Isaiah
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 captivesand recovery of sight to the blind,to let the oppressed go free,and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Proclaiming that this has been fulfilled in the hearing suggests Jesus was revealing that he was the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, and laying out the nature of his mission. In short, Jesus was proclaiming himself the Christ, the Anointed One. Jesus’ ministry, then, was to one that welcomed the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed. But rather than interpreting this as a political mission of social justice, it was theological in that Jesus’ goal was not to end the plight of the poor, heal blind people, and free those in jails, but to reveal something unexpected about the nature of God and God’s relationship to humanity; however, this is not to suggest that corporal works of mercy are not important. These works do more than meet a physical need, they meet the greater need to experience a love that begins with a human touch but leads to a divine one.
God becoming human is at the heart of all Christian understandings of true evangelization. Because of this central truth, what we, purveyors of Good News must accept, is that meeting the immediate need of the one who seeks our help is the Good News of the gospel. The power of Christ to change lives is betrayed when we expect conversion as the end product of our help. As evangelical Christians (there really is no other type, I suppose), the Good News is that true salvation does not lie at the conclusion of a tract, a testimonial, or a creed; it lies at the bottom of a bowl of soup.
.
—Fr. Todd
No comments:
Post a Comment