Year C

Luke 4:14-21

The Very Rev. Denise Vaughn

The Shocking Mission

Today after this service we have our Annual Meeting and it seems the texts today fit in and speak quite well to what is discussed at an Annual Meeting. Each text today presents a challenge to any community of faith to look at where they are truly committed to their priorities, vision, or mission. That is, where do they spend most of their financial, time on the ground, and capital?  Jesus sets the tone today by giving us his understanding of what our priorities, our vision, our mission should be about, and we are invited to rejoice in God’s word, fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

In the past two weeks, we’ve followed him as his ministry is getting underway. We experienced his baptism in which the Holy Spirit affirmed him as the Son of God, the Messiah. We saw him turn water into fine wine at a wedding in Cana as a sign that the kingdom of God was in their midst; and they believed. Today, we see Jesus empowered by the Holy Spirit formally announce his mission-God’s mission,-a proclamation that the time of God’s fulfillment had come and that he would be the one to fulfill it. This event in Luke’s gospel takes place directly after Jesus’s experience in the wilderness following his baptism, where he overcame temptations by the evil one and defined his understanding of his vocation.

He then begins his ministry in Galilee empowered by the Holy Spirit. He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. News about him spreads through the whole countryside. Here was a local boy who was going to make a difference for them. No doubt he would put the hated Samaritans in their place, affirm the party line and champion the best causes. His friends would be the right people and their enemies would be his enemies, and their values his values. But as we know that isn’t what his mission from God was about or what he would do.

He leaves Galilee and travels to Nazareth where he had grown up. It was the Sabbath and so he goes to the synagogue as he usually did. And because he was a rabbi he is asked to read a scripture. The worship service would have looked a lot like the beginning of our services that included prayers, the reading of several scripture passages, and comments on the readings. Jesus asked for the scroll of the prophet Isaiah which was his choice for the reading. He unrolls it to the 61st chapter and begins to read “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me” a fact that had been made clear at his baptism.

He returns the scroll to the attendant and sits down to begin his first sermon to his hometown congregation. He had their complete attention therefore he began to teach them and spell out what the text means, by saying, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” He was anointed to be a herald of joy to the poor, to release the captives and oppressed, to bring sight to the blind, and “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor”. By the end of his sermon they were ready to lynch him. They run him out of town, take him to a nearby cliff and would have thrown him headlong to his death had he not escaped. Why the anger, because they had already defined him and what he was going to do.

He defined his mission in terms that were not only different than what they had assumed, but downright scandalous! He had come to spend his life with the poor who would receive the good news. He had come to serve the prisoners, the sick, the blind, and the afflicted. His mission would be as a liberator, who would set free the oppressed and if how he put this mission in his sermon wasn’t bad enough, the rest of Luke’s gospel describes how he did it. His friends were prostitutes, sinners, and tax collectors. His heroes were a no good son who squandered his father’s inheritance, a Samaritan woman, and a beggar whose sores the dogs licked.

These first public words of Jesus in the synagogue clearly proclaim the ministry for which he had been empowered. Shocking them, and shocking us when we come to realize that his mission is our mission now. This mission is what all of us are called to as we seek to live as faithful disciples. So how do we carry out the mission that Jesus spelled out for us? Paul sets us straight today. He says, “You are the body of Christ.” Everyone who is in Christ belongs to that one Body. We share diverse gifts of which we read about last week, but all our gifts are to be used to build up the one body to bring Christ to the world.

Paul uses the example of the body to emphasize the importance of the unity of the community. The image of the church as the one body of Christ is one that stresses diversity while maintaining essential unity. We belong to each other because we belong to Christ, and we manifest our belonging to Christ in and through belonging to each other. In and through the body, we participate in Christ’s mission. As members of his body we are given to the world as Christ is given; salt, leaven, light, healing, instruction, nurture.

Like the people gathered around Ezra, shaken to their core at the reading of the Law, the revelation of our own identity in the body of Christ should shake awake our consciousness. We are called to respond and cooperate with the Spirit that continuously anoints and sends us as Christ’s own presence to a broken and waiting world. The world needs to see Christ clearly today. That means the world needs to see the church clearly because we may be the only Christ it will ever see. In defining who he is and what he was to be about, Jesus defined who we are and what we are called to be about.

For, as the Spirit of the Lord was upon Jesus, so it is upon us to ‘preach the good news to the poor, release to the captives, give sight to the blind, and liberty to the oppressed. Jesus sets the tone today for our meeting by giving us his understanding of what our priorities, our vision, our mission is to be about and the texts invite us to rejoice in God’s word, fulfilled in Jesus Christ. Good news of God’s favor: a message of love, mercy, grace, and forgiveness to all who seek it.