January 27, 2019
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Chapter 4:14-21 of the Gospel of Luke, which we hear today, begins in the desert, where Jesus is tempted by the devil. Having emerged victorious from the trial, Jesus returns to Galilee (Lk 4:14), and from there He begins to bring that very liberation He first experienced in the desert.
The episode of Jesus in the synagogue of Nazareth speaks precisely of this beginning, and is particularly important because it is a in a small way the key to reading the whole Gospel, the manifesto of Jesus’ program. It’s as a seed that will develop over time, but which bears in itself, in short, the remainder of the account.
Jesus is first led by the Spirit to Galilee, to the various synagogues, that is, the citizens’ meeting centers, places where people gathered to pray, to proclaim the Word of God, but also simply to meet up. It is there that Jesus is led by the Spirit, where He goes to announce the fulfillment of the Old Testament promises described by the prophet Isaiah.
Led by the same Spirit, He arrives in His city, the place where He was raised and known as the carpenter’s son. Here as usual and as He did in the other synagogues of Galilee, He goes to pray and meet people, but His people do not recognize him.
We pause on two considerations.
The first concerns the difficulty of His fellow citizens in recognizing Him. While in the other synagogues of Galilee all were glorifying Him (v.14), here in Nazareth they remained amazed and moved, but they could not accept the truth in their hearts. For them He was the carpenter’s son and that’s it.
The Nazarenes, like the Pharisees and many others in the Gospel, even though they saw, were unable to recognize the newness that He brought. Their hearts were closed to it. They awaited the Messiah, but in practice, they were not free to receive Him, because their idea of Messiah prevailed over the person they had in front of them and so they made the work of the Spirit impossible, of recovering sight, of looking at life in a completely new way. To welcome Jesus, to see Him in His truth, we must be small, become poor. The good news is announced to them (Lk 4:18 He sent me to evangelize the poor). These are the poor of the Gospel, those capable of making room for newness, without prejudices. They are the little ones, the poor, the privileged, because they are able to allow themselves to be healed, they accept being in need of recovering their sight, like the man born blind or the inhabitants of the villages of Galilee quite the reverse of the Nazareth inhabitants of that time.
The other consideration concerns the expression “today”.
This announcement is made here and now. It is not a memory of the past. Today, Jesus announces to the poor. To those of the here and now, and not to those of the past. Our God is not a God of memory, Who has done great things in the past and we remember. He is not even a God that we await Who comes in an indefinite future, or that we will meet, will see, after our death, in the beyond.
Here and now the Spirit leads Jesus to us. Nothing is further from the spirit of the Gospel than this continuous reference to yesterday and most of all to tomorrow: the Gospel lives in the here and now, and in the gray, modest today, opaque but mine, it finds the dwelling of God.
Therefore we must not lose awareness of the things we manage to find. Today the Spirit gives us a new vision by which to see and love the world with a new heart.
Our God lives in the now. Only with this awareness can we live our daily story sanely.
+ Pierbattista
