THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME C

[cappie]

We witness in today’s liturgy the creation of a new people of God. Ezra started reading at dawn of the first day of the Jewish new year. Jesus also proclaims a “sabbath,” a great year of Jubilee, a deliverance from slavery to sin, a release from the debts we owe to God.

The people greeted Ezra “as one man.” And, as today’s Secon Reading teaches, in the Spirit the new people of God—the Church—is made “one body” with Him.

Our  Gospel recalls the First Reading. Like Ezra, Jesus stands before the people, is handed a scroll, unrolls it, then reads and interprets it (compare Luke 4:16–17, 21 and Nehemiah 8:2–6, 8–10). Jesus this week declares that Isaiah’s prophecy is fulfilled in Him.

 Jesus has been baptized by John, has called his disciples to his ministry, and has wrestled mightily with the tempter in the desert. Triumphant after defeating the temptations of earthly power, of easy miracles and magic, he returns home to Nazareth. He knows who he is and what his mission from God is. He also knows that the people hearing him remember him as the son of their own Mary, of Joseph the carpenter, the brother of several men and women who live in their midst. With the assurance of a prophet, he chooses to read from Isaiah, those powerful, familiar passages of the Servant Song. He proclaims his mission, here in the town where he grew up: he has come for the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. The categories fit the poor people of Nazareth as they fit the poor people of captive Palestine under the Romans and their collaborators among of the higher clergy. It is an electrifying moment when he says, “Today, this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

Jesus does the unexpected, the unimaginable, on that memorable Sabbath morning in Nazareth. In today’s jargon, he claims those ancient prophetic words as his own personal mission statement. The reason God’s Spirit came crashing down on him at his baptism was to empower him to do precisely this: bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind; let all the oppressed go free; announce the sweet Jubilee Year when God’s justice will reshape society.

Jesus takes all this as his mission statement, and he is not content to leave it as only a string of high-sounding words. Everything that follows in his life, as presented to us in the gospel, amounts to the living out of the prophecy he claims for himself that Sabbath morning in Nazareth.

He keeps doing these things every chance he gets, every time he turns around, until finally it kills him. Some people welcome what Jesus does, but others do not because it upsets their unfair advantage, questions their complacency, and pushes them to recognize their habitual infidelity to God. They find their discomfort increasingly intolerable and think that his judicial murder will bring an end to the matter. They are wrong, of course. Jesus rises alive from the dead and continues today to do what he talked about that Sabbath morning long ago.

Now the way he works is through his mystical body, the church. Through each of us and all who are baptized into his body, Jesus strives still to live out his mission statement, bringing good news to those who don’t have any, setting free those chained in captivity, opening blind eyes, helping the oppressed and exploited find a life, and unrolling the floor plan that sets out God’s reign where justice and peace prevail.

Jesus still does these things, because his church does them. The poor gain hope, whether it’s their souls or their bodies that are starved. The captives experience freedom, whether they are prisoners in a jail or prisoners in a mansion. The blind receive sight, whether it’s cataract surgery at the church hospital or the scales of prejudice falling off the eyes of a bigot. The oppressed are set free, whether oppression is a political regime or a chemical dependence. When Jesus reads that passage in the Nazareth synagogue, he announces a mission statement for himself and for his body, the church.