Sunday, January 23, 2022
Luke 4:14-21
We return to the primary Gospel for the year, Luke, though we continue, as in previous Epiphany weeks, with a theme of revelation: Jesus was revealed to the magi, was revealed at his baptism, was revealed by turning water to wine, and here, he’s revealed in his hometown synagogue. And you’ll note that he doesn’t reinvent the wheel here. He reads from the scroll, from his, and our, scriptures. He points to himself (by perhaps adopting the stance of the scripture writer, and by saying the scripture has been fulfilled), but he’s also pointing beyond himself, to what he in many other places will refer to as the Kingdom, or Reign, of God, which is basically the action of God in the world, or the plan of God for the world, or as I like to put it, the dream of God for the world; a dream, he says, that’s coming true.
If we were to ask what this Reign of God is like, we might look to the Prophet Isaiah, whom Jesus quotes, or to Nehemiah, from which we heard, and we’ll get an idea that the Reign of God is like the exiles in Babylon finally able to return home. It’s like the community being reconstituted and re-formed as they relearn their stories; we get that sense from the first reading. It’s like the Mosaic Law’s year of Jubilee (sort of the Sabbath writ large) in which slaves are freed and debts forgiven. It’s like, as Jesus says, experiencing healing and freedom. (Something we’re yearning for right now.) It’s a new start.
The challenging thing is that a beginning implies its eventual continuation, or fruition. And people being people, we are sometimes going to have different ideas on to make even a commonly-held dream a reality. Roughly around the time of Jesus you had the Zealots, a guerrilla sort of group that thought that they should seize power by force. Take the kingdom back, or build the Kingdom yourself.
And then at the opposite extreme you’ve got the Essenes, the group we know from the Dead Sea Scrolls, who went out to the desert, away from everyone else, and wanted to leave the dirty world to burn itself away, and they’ll be the remnant out of which a better world will come.
That first group wants to force change by might, and the second wants to wait things out, and pray things in. But then we have Jesus and his group that continually confounded others, because they were unpredictable: sometimes coming across as having inhumanely high expectations, and other times, being overly inclusive and even rule or taboo-breaking.
There seems to be a difference here, in being caught up in God’s dream, and using that to shape your actions, and being tied down to an ideology, which is predictable, and rigid. There’s a difference, too, between being caught up in that dream, and loathing your neighbour. Sometimes we want to preserve the purity of our dream, or our community. That’s what the Essenes were preoccupied with. And yet we look at the life of Jesus, and he not only goes to the cast aways of polite society — that’s in line with a lot of our compassionate values — but he also reaches out and engages with the tax collector, and the occupying soldier. Demond Tutu once said: “If you want peace, you don’t talk to your friends. You talk to your enemies.” We’ll see next week, as we finish the story, that the crowds that hear Jesus aren’t immediately enamoured with him and his message.
There’s a contemporary Christian thinker, James K. A. Smith, who writes a lot about how our Christian stories and Christian worship is instrumental in forming us as people to live a distinct sort of way. And he says that our imaginations need to be caught up in God, and God’s vision, God’s dream. He says “It won’t be enough for us to be convinced [on a mental or ideological level], we need to be moved.” And perhaps we’re at a disadvantage right now, with our primarily online way of being, but think about how our fuller Christian worship experience involves movement and motions, it engages our senses of hearing, taste, and sometimes smell, and while people out there in the world might think that we go to church to get lectured and indoctrinated and have fingers waved at it, I think it’s a lot more about opening ourselves up to a grand story: the story of God’s relationship with people, and how that story even includes us. All of these things shape us, and can move us. But not in a cookie cutter sort of way. The goal isn’t a bunch of automatons… The goal is to be taken up into the dream and imagination of God, and to see the clearest realization of God’s dream in the person of Jesus. He is God’s new beginning. And that implies that there is more to be played out in our lives, and in our world.
© 2022 The Rev’d Matthew Kieswetter