Third Sunday after Epiphany
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Scripture |
Luke 4:14-2114 Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. 15 He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. 16 When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
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Devotional |
Jesus began to teach in the synagogues where he received praise for his teaching. He comes to Nazareth where he grew up and as a habit went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. He finds the meaning of his ministry in the words of the prophet Isaiah “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, Jesus sees his ministry as a mission of liberation. Wherever human life is impoverished, imprisoned, impaired, it will become enriched, free, and enabled. This word from Isaiah the prophet was assumed to be a look into the future. Some day in the future hope would come to the hopeless situation. Jesus proclaims the promise has been fulfilled. The waiting period is over. The time has come to inaugurate the reign of God. Monday January 15. we celebrate the birthday of Martin Luther King. As he spoke about the inequities in our society forty years ago, many things have changed but many social problems are still present today. We find ourselves in a different situation. Joerg Rieger describes the present situation. “Yet the problems often remain invisible. We manage to compartmentalize and hide the worst situations. In the United States, for example, we make certain that most of us never have to encounter the problems of poverty by building highways around low-income housing and by maintaining strict boundaries between rich and poor neighborhoods. 1 Slavery did not disappear but has taken on a new identity. “The author of a new study on the subject points out that this new slavery focuses on big profits and cheap lives. It is not about owning people in the traditional sense of the old slavery, but about controlling them completely. People become disposable tools for making money. This reflects once more the problem of the invisibility of the structures of exclusion. There are more slaves today than all the people taken from Africa in the days of the slave trade, yet the problem is not even on the map. In addition, this new slavery begets yet another form of exclusion. Slave and slaveholder were once closely bound together, but now that relationship is growing ever more distant. Today’s slaveholders, who are often respectable businesspeople, may never even meet their slaves. 2 This is some of the thoughts that come to me as I hear Jesus speaking in the synagogue. Jesus said these things and they killed him. Martin Luther King Jr. said these things and they killed him. Can the gospel be anything less than provocative? Prayer: Lord may the word of Jesus disturb us enough that we will speak out against the injustice around us. God calls us to act against the injustice rather than kill the messenger. . 1Joerg Rieger, God and the Excluded: Visions and Blindspots in Contemporary Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. p. 5 |