Lectionary blog for Jan. 24, 2016
Third Sunday after the Epiphany
Text: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19;
1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21
The Epiphany was not a part of my childhood religious experience. We country Metho-Bap-terians were not a liturgical people. (My family participated in three congregations when I was young: Slate Mountain Baptist, Hatcher’s Chapel United Methodist, and Mary Horner Walker Memorial Presbyterian.) We didn’t really follow the church year except for knowing when Christmas and Easter were, and on those days the worship service wasn’t any different than any other Sunday.
We did have a Christmas play in December and a big cookout and Easter egg hunt on the Saturday before Easter, but that was about it for congregational observances.
The only thing I remember about Epiphany from those days is my daddy giving driving directions from our little town to a shopping center in Winston-Salem. “You take Highway 52 into Winston, then … (complicated turns and switchbacks described) … and a ways after that Epiphany Lutheran Church you turn back to the right.” Only he didn’t say “Epiphany.” He said, “Epp-uh-fanny,” causing his children to snicker loudly, even though we didn’t know how to pronounce it either.
I actually learned about “epiphany” in English class, where I learned the word referred to a sudden realization or awareness – an “Oh, now I get it!” experience. The word also has the element of something being unveiled, or opened up, or, perhaps more exactly, being shown. The expression, “Now that sheds a whole new light on the subject” really gets at it. An epiphany is when you see something in an entirely new way, in such a way that you feel like you are seeing it clearly for the first time. Some new knowledge or awareness has come upon you.
In church calendar terms, the Epiphany is the unveiling of Jesus as being both a very real, and in some important ways very ordinary, human being while at the same time being the Son of God, the Messiah, the Savior of the world. The Gospel lessons we have read thus far in Epiphany – the star in the sky that led the magi to Bethlehem, the descending dove and the voice from heaven at his baptism, his turning water into wine at the wedding, today’s story of reading Scripture and teaching in the synagogue where he grew up – these are the stories of the Epiphany season. Each one reveals to us who Jesus is other than a mere carpenter’s son from a little town in the middle of nowhere.
The Gospel writers tell these stories to show us that Jesus is someone extraordinary who has come from God and what it is that God is up to in the world.
There are two basic things that Luke tells us in these few verses: 1) Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, and 2) what it is a messiah is supposed to do.
First, Jesus is the Messiah – the text that Jesus quotes is Isaiah 61:1-2, part of a chapter in Isaiah known as “a servant song.” Since the time when it was written, many years before the birth of Jesus, many of the Jewish people had begun to see the promise of a “servant of the Lord” as the promise of a savior, a messiah, an anointed one.
So, the Gospel lesson begins by saying that Jesus is “filled with the power of the Spirit.” This indicates he is a prophet, a spokesperson for God. But then Luke doubles down with the quote “he has anointed me,” which is what “messiah” means, “the one anointed.” And then after reading, Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” claiming this anointing for himself, claiming to be the Messiah.
But we knew that, didn’t we? That Jesus is the Messiah, the Savior, the Christ. Though that was new to the people he grew up with, it’s not new to us. But we do often seem to get confused as to what exactly it is that a messiah was sent to do. And tied to that is our occasional confusion as to what we are called to do as followers of the Christ, as Christ-ians.
In many and various ways, many and various voices have told us that Jesus came to save us from our sins, to die on the cross so we don’t have to. So being freed from the threat of death and eternal punishment for our misdeeds and bad behaviors, we are free to live and to love without fear.
Well, yes, good enough as far as it goes. But is dying on the cross all that Jesus came to do, or was there something more? And is there more to the Christian life than living freed from the fear of hell?
Well, Jesus said that he came to “bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free” (Luke 4:18).
If we take that seriously, that’s an ambitious and very this-world agenda. Not a word in there about sin and salvation, but a lot of stuff about tending to the needs of those who are not in a position to tend to themselves.
I have heard people try to avoid the implications of this text by saying that “good news to the poor,” isn’t about economics, it’s letting people know God loves them in the midst of their poverty. Or “release to the captives,” they say, is about people being released from captivity to their sins, and “letting the oppressed go free,” refers to the aforementioned freedom from fear of punishment in hell, etc.
Is this a legitimate interpretation of this text? Well, as St. Paul would say, “By no means!” Jesus clearly intends to be about the business of changing not only people’s hearts but also their lives, the way the world is structured, and the way people treat one another in the very real world in which we live. No “pie-in-the-sky by-and-by” but rather “let’s roll up our sleeves and plunge into the nitty-gritty” of making a difference here and now.
If this is what it means for Jesus to be the Christ, then it must be a part of what it means for us to be followers of the Christ. Jesus was an Epiphany who pointed to God and to the coming of God’s kingdom. We are invited to be an Epiphany people – people who point to Christ, people who shine the light of God’s love into the all the dark places of human existence.
Amen and amen.
