Monday in the Twenty-Second Week of Ordinary Time, August 31

Luke 4:16-30

Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: “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 captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”  Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They also asked, “Is this not the son of Joseph?” He said to them, “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.’” And he said, “Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place. 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.” 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 he passed through the midst of them and went away.

From now until the season of Advent, the daily Gospel readings will come from the Gospel of St. Luke.  Luke’s Gospel, as we shall see, is aimed at convincing the Greeks that this Jewish man is the Savior of the world.  In order to accomplish this, Luke takes a different tack than, say, St. Matthew, who wrote for the Jewish Christians of Galilee.  For instance, he places the Lord’s return to Nazareth at the beginning of his ministry rather than at some later time, as we find in the Gospels of Matthew and Mark.  In doing so, Luke shows how the rejection of Jesus by the Jews began soon after he started to preach and continued through the final rejection by the Sanhedrin in Jerusalem.  This paved the way for him to show how Jesus came not just for the Jews, but for all people, and that the rejection of the Jews opens the door to salvation for the Gentiles.  This theme became very important for St. Paul in his work among the Greeks, in fact dominating his letter to the Greek speaking Christian church in Rome.

We first notice in this reading that Jesus is in the synagogue on the Sabbath and is given a scroll to read.  Synagogue services were much less formal before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem than now.  On the Sabbath, the Jews would gather in a meeting wall where they would discuss the Law and the Prophets.  Visiting rabbis or scribes would be invited to speak.  Jesus, who has made a name for himself as a preacher, is asked to speak on this occasion.  Handed a scroll containing the prophecies of Isaiah, he looks for and finds the passage on which he would like to preach.  The passage the Lord quotes is from Isaiah 61, 1-2, although he may have quoted many verses beyond these: “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 captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”  Luke’s rearrangement of the order of events allows him to show that the first words we hear from the mouth of Jesus at the beginning of his ministry are these, and they act as the banner under which he will work until his Death, and under which his disciples will work after Pentecost.  These words, although coming from a Jewish prophet, speak not merely of the Jews but of all people: the poor, captives, the blind, and the oppressed.  Matthew provides an account of this event in very nearly the same words, but we can see how Luke frames it with the Greeks in mind.

“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”  The verb here translated as “fulfilled” can also mean “completed”, as though completing an action that was already begun.  We might think of the Prophet writing his words in faint pencil and the Lord coming along later and inking in the letters of those words with beautiful flowing color.  And the Lord did not simply “fulfill” the prophecy and then move on.  When Jesus touched the Jordan River at the time of his baptism, he changed it; it did not change him.  He entered it so as to render water capable of conferring eternal life, with the formula he would give his Apostles before his Ascension (cf. Matthew 28, 19).  This remained true even after he climbed up out of the water.  Similarly, when the Lord Jesus “touched” the bringing of glad tidings to the poor, proclaiming liberty to captives, and caring for the blind and the oppressed, he made our performing these actions, done for his sake, capable of making us like him.  His fulfillment of the words of the Prophet endures to the present time in us.

“And all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They also asked, ‘Is this not the son of Joseph?’ ”  We see their divided opinion here.  The people — his neighbors and relatives — struggle to reconcile the Jesus they had known with the Jesus they had recently heard about.  This reminds us of how little we really pay attention to people as we run around, absorbed in the business of our own lives.  When we hear that an old friend or acquaintance has become a world-class athlete, or actor, or scientist, we wonder about it.  Thus, the synagogue crowd sees only two alternatives: either Jesus was a greater man than they had thought or he was a fraud.  And in their pride, they thought him a fraud.  

“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.”  The brow of the hill is some distance from the old town of Nazareth.  It would have taken quite an effort even for three or four men to carry a grown man out to it.  This, then, was not a sudden act committed in haste.  The crowd, or at least a large percentage of the crowd, had decided to kill him.  We might ask why they would want to do this.  What had he said that had inflamed them so that they wanted to commit murder?  He had spoken of Elijah’s work among the Gentiles.  Were they responding to that?  It would seem that this was how Luke understood what had happened here: Why did the Jews, at the time and afterwards, seek to kill Jesus?  Because he showed his intent on going to the Gentiles.  While a valid interpretation, the Jews’s murderous hatred still seems an overreaction.  St. Cyril of Alexandria taught that what roused them like this was their belief that Jesus had compared himself to the prophets, and so he deserved to die.  This also may explain it.  

“But he passed through the midst of them and went away.” His hour had not yet come, and so he disentangled himself from them and walked away.  Perhaps as the people neared the brow of the hill their enthusiasm for their intended action sagged and they set him down.  And then Jesus, without a word, got up and walked away.  He would never return to his childhood home.  We see that Jesus invites all, speaks to all, but forces himself on no one.  When he is rejected he does not call down fire and brimstone, as two of his Apostles will want him to do later, but neither does he return, unasked.