Recently Pope Francis caused some furore with an off the cuff opinion regarding children and pets. I was rather surprised by how many professional commentators talked or wrote about it. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been because I once caused quite a stir when I referred to my dog in my sermon; in fact, it was one of precious few times when anyone has been spurred to talk about anything heard in my sermon. It is surprising how people can pay a lot of attention to one tiny, relatively unimportant aspect of a speech while completely ignoring the rest. Maybe it’s the speaker’s fault, or maybe it’s subconscious selective hearing by the audience. In that respect, Jesus in today’s gospel reading managed to touch a nerve, so much so that it nearly cost him his life. Which is startling because everything had started so well: “he won the approval of all, and they were astonished by the gracious words that came from his lips.”
To understand such a dramatic change in the audience’s attitude towards Jesus, we need to recall last Sunday’s gospel when Jesus read out a passage from the prophet Isaiah: “The spirit of the Lord has been given to me, for he has anointed me. He has sent me to bring the good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour.” (Luke 4:18-19) To our ears, it might sound like a lovely message and captivating manifesto announced by Jesus. To his Jewish audience, it referred to the Jubilee Year, a tradition mentioned in the Book of Leviticus, part of the Jewish Law or the Torah. To cut a long story short, once every 49 years, Hebrew slaves and prisoners would be freed, debts would be forgiven, land should be returned to its original partition among the tribes of Israel and the mercies of Yahweh would be particularly manifest. Overall, it was a very good idea if you were at the receiving end of it. Less so when you were to lose as a result of that. Human beings have always been good at finding loopholes; the case of the Jubilee Year was no different and in practical terms, it was reduced to a rather tokenistic form or abandoned completely. It’s quite likely that in the highly politically and religiously charged environment of the Holy Land, Jesus’ pronouncement “this text is being fulfilled today even as you listen” might have been considered as a declaration of holy war against the Roman Empire by the enslaved nation. So, why such a sudden change of mood in the congregation?
St Luke doesn’t give us a direct answer, but we can draw some highly likely conclusions from the immediate and the wider contexts of the event. Regarding the former, the dramatic scene in the synagogue was preceded by a brief induction: “Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.” (Luke 4:14-15) So, he arrived in his hometown in an aura of fame. Whatever stories the people of Nazareth had heard about him, they had certainly grown arms and legs. Expectations were very high, and everyone was excited. The wider context of the gospel clearly shows that Jesus was neither an entertainer nor a magician/miracle worker, and he certainly was bent on avoiding any political affiliation. His mission was the restoration of the bond of loving obedience between God and his chosen people, as expressed in this sentence: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.” (Matthew 7:21) That would explain why Jesus recalled in his sermon two pagans, the widow from Sidon and Naaman, a Syrian military commander, as examples of being obedient to God. The congregation knew both stories very well, but Jesus contrasted their attitude with that of the apparently superior Israelites: “There were many widows in Israel […] in Elijah’s day, when […] a great famine raged throughout the land, but Elijah was not sent to any one of these: he was sent to a widow at Zarephath, a Sidonian town. And in the prophet Elisha’s time there were many lepers in Israel, but none of these was cured, except the Syrian, Naaman.” Boy, that stung the congregation badly! So much so that they nearly murdered Jesus!
Sadly, the event in the synagogue in Nazareth isn’t just a story from a distant past. It can and sometimes does repeat in our communities and churches though – thankfully – not in a literal sense. There’s always a temptation to reduce faith to mere religion because the latter is so much simpler and undemanding. Religion consists of various practices and traditions, often performed or kept in a semi- or completely absent mind, without affecting everyday choices, decisions, actions and attitudes. In extreme form, such faithless religion seems to have more in common with the superstition than with that faith on which it is supposedly based. I call it “Catholic voodoo” when some people effectively want magic performed by a priest. It’s soul-destroying when people whom I have never seen before ask for their child’s baptism or first communion, or their own Catholic wedding and after the final blessing they disappear, never to be seen again. After 25 years of broken promises and assurances, it’s harder and harder not to grow sceptical, even cynical. Unlike religion, faith is an active, personal response to the word of God. Let me give you an example. Having heard in today’s second reading that love must be the driving force of everything in our lives how do we react? Do we simply skip over it? The response made in living faith ought to be I will make effort, so “this text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.”
Image by Chiemsee2016 from Pixabay