Late again. However, guilt is a marvelous motivator, so Saturday morning I am typing this while waiting for the walls to dry before I paint my office. The idea has been with me all week, but somehow I never made myself sit down and write it. My focus today is almost completely on the gospel, though the reading from Paul does put in an appearance.
Today’s gospel is the immediate continuation of the reading from Luke last week. Then, we heard about Jesus’ return to Nazareth. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and was asked to be a reader. He chose to read the prophet Isaiah, who proclaimed the coming of the Messiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” And that gospel concluded with the opening lines of today’s gospel: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” With these words, Jesus identified himself with the Messiah, the promised king of Israel, who would rule the nations with justice and mercy.
Luke’s account of the reaction of the people gathered in the synagogue is very compressed. At one moment they are praising his “gracious words”: marveling that the son of Joseph the carpenter, someone they have known since childhood, could speak so. Then, suddenly, Jesus is rebuking them, refusing to perform any miracles in their midst, and strongly implying that gentiles and foreigners were more worthy of God’s mercy than Israelites. Their praise turns to anger and they attempt to kill him.
Why the change? Luke does not say. Was it something they said: did their praise turn to demands for “signs and wonders”? Or did Jesus read their hearts and realize that their praise was not grounded in who he really was, but rather in what they were expecting him to be? By proclaiming himself the fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah, Jesus was accepting the mantle of divine kingship. But he never want to be king: or rather, he never was going to be the kind of king the people were expecting. They wanted an earthly king, one who would drive out the Romans and re-establish the ancient kingdom of Israel, someone who would make Israel great again among the nations.
If this was the kind of king the people of Nazareth were imagining Jesus to be, then their expectations would have been equally misplaced. Kings traditionally showered favors on their hometowns and on their friends and neighbors. Did they expect great palaces and public works to be built in Nazareth? Did they expect to receive influential positions in the new government? Did they hope that they would become rich and powerful, and be able to lord it over the neighboring towns? If this were the case, it would explain their fury: Jesus told them the gifts of the God’s kingdom would be poured on strangers and foreigners, and withheld from them. In their anger, they could not hear what Jesus was really trying to tell them: that God’s kingdom has no boundaries, there are no outsiders, no foreigners. As St. Paul later put it, in the kingdom “there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free…all are one in Christ Jesus.”
In listening to the gospel today, we might marvel at the reaction of the people of Nazareth, and perhaps we feel a bit smug about their misunderstanding. But if we were really honest with ourselves, we should stop and ask: what are we expecting from Jesus? Doe we accept him and his message as it really is, or do we want him to be something different, a God and king made in our own image? When we see Jesus “face to face” do we hope, as the mother of James and John did, to win a seat at his right or left, and to sit in judgement on others? Or are we just expecting that we will be with the sheep instead of the goats, with those chosen to enter the kingdom, rather than those (others), who are rejected by God?
These are the childish things that Paul warned about in the second reading. We think that we are looking upon God, but we see him, as the King James bible puts it so beautifully, “in a glass darkly”: unclear, distorted by our own dreams and ambitions. We need to put these aside and strive to see him more clearly, as we will on the day of judgement when we see him face to face. Daily, we need to remind ourselves that we serve a crucified king. To enter into God’s kingdom is not to expect royal favor, but to accept a cross.
We accept this cross accepting Jesus’ message of love: “love one another as I have loved you.” And we must understand that this love should express itself concretely in the works of mercy to our brothers and sisters. Love is not simply a warm fuzzy feeling towards others, a show of emotion or of support with nothing behind it. Love is an act of will, the conscious decision to sacrifice in ways large and small for the good of others. Love is not easy: it must “bear all things, hope all things, believe all things, endure all things.” To quote a line from Dostoevsky that was beloved by Dorothy Day: “Love, in reality, is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.”
Love is hard, but it is possible. It is a spiritual gift: God’s love for us makes it possible for us to love. Today, we receive God’s love in the Eucharist. Open your hearts in thanksgiving to this love: God loves you now, as you are. Strengthened by this love, share it with others. Love them as they are: in their sinfulness, in their brokenness, in their struggles. Share this love by reaching out to someone who is finding love difficult: a parent with a wayward teenager, and adult child dealing with a parent crumbling from old age and dementia, someone damaged by a broken or abusive relationship. Express your love concretely. And if you do this, then today the scriptures will be fulfilled.
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