READINGS

Luke 1:1-4 The Dedication to Theophilus
Luke 4:14-21 Ministry in Galilee, Rejection at Nazareth, 1 Esdras 6:27/28 (LXX) The Decree of Cyrus, Return from Exile Isaiah 61:1-2 Messiah’s Jubilee Isaiah 58:6

HOMILY

The Dedication to Theophilus

Luke talks to this most excellent Theophilus. Who this Theophilus might have been?

It could have been a generic name for a lover of God, because that's what theo philos means: a friend of God, a lover ofGod.

Or it could have been a reference to the high priest between the years 37 to 41 who was called Theophilus and who was the son of Anas and brother-in-law of Caiaphas, who we know from the Gospel accounts, and who may later have become a Christian and therefore have Luke explaining to him what was really going on in this fulfilled ordered account.

But he's explaining it to Theophilus so that you may know the truth: you may know with certainty concerning the things about which you have been instructed.

He wants to give a filled out picture of fulfilment. He's not writing history in our modern sense or is he trying to writehistory, he's trying to set out in an orderly way how things have been fulfilled.

And we're going to get a very strong sense of how he does that.

If we compare what happens in Mark's Gospel at this point (Jesus preaching in Galilee), we get something very very brief.

It says: now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near - repent and believe in the good news. That's it, that's what Mark says at this point.

But what we want to find with Jesus is that beginning at the same place (so after Luke has gone through the infancynarratives, the young Jesus in the temple,the baptism, and then the temptations in the desert), you know he comes to Jesus actually beginning his ministry.

Ministry in Galilee

14 Then Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread throughout the entire vicinity.

15 He was teaching in their synagogues, being praised[j] by everyone.

Jesus filled with the power of the spirit. Remember that he'd been baptized. The Spirit had come upon him: this is my son whom I am pleased today or who is my beloved.

A report about him spread throughall the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

Galilee was a chunk of land about 70 kilometres north-south and 40 kilometres east-west. That's about 45 miles long and 25 miles wide - not huge.

In it, there were some maybe 500 small towns, according to Josephus, so a fair number of people, maybe 300.000 or so at the time.

He's going through that area teaching in their synagogues and was praised by everyone, everyone approved him, gave him a reputation, as the Greek says.

Rejection at Nazareth

16 He came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. As usual, he entered the synagogue on the Sabbath day and stood up to read.

And now he comes to Nazareth.

And I hope you're going to see what Luke is doing here.

He's filling out those words from Mark, which says: Jesus proclaimed the good news of God saying: the time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God has come near. It's this fulfilling of the time that we're going to see today.

17 The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him, and unrolling the scroll, he found the place where it was written:

We don't know whether there was a list of people or whether it was first served, or whether there was curiosity about the local boy, because people had heard about him from around about.

And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him.

Now the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was discovered at Qumran. Obviously, not the same scroll, but a scroll containing the whole of the prophet Isaiah.

It's 7.3 meters long. You don't just hand that to someone, you need a forklift truck to hand that to someone. So this is going to be not the whole of Isaiah, but a chunk of Isaiah, presumably the relevant chunk.

18 The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me[k] to proclaim release[l] to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free the oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.[m]

And so now Luke quotes pretty exactly from the Septuagint, the Greek version of Isaiah, remembering Jesus would probably have read it in Hebrew, then it would probably then have been repeated in Aramaic, and then Jesus would have spoken.

That would have been the normal liturgical pattern but we don't know whether that was the case in Nazareth on that particular day.

It may just have been he read it in Hebrew and then spoke in Aramaic, explained it in Aramaic, which might account why the text is very slightly different from the one we have in Isaiah.

It's different in two ways:

He leaves out a bit about people's hearts, the broken of heart, which is in the Isaiah text. And introduces "letting the oppressed go free", which is a different bit of Isaiah.
And then most famously and significantly he leaves out the very last verse, the very last line: "to proclaim the favour of the Lord's, the Lord's favour; and the day of the vengeance of the Lord".

20 He then rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. And the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fixed on him.

Sitting down is the sign of the teacher, the teacher sat.

So it's actually the gesture of one who is now going to teach, who is going to perform.

This is not an amateur who just going to do the reading and then skip back and sit down in my seat. No, this is the person who's now taking the seat of the one who is going to proclaim, explain the scripture.

Now, and here we have the interesting factors to see what's going on here.

The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.

Luke gives us a very very big hint as to what's going on here in the word 'were fixed', the fixation of the eyes. [SEE LATER]

21 He began by saying to them, “Today as you listen, this Scripture has been fulfilled.”

Now so you might say: okay, what's that about, is he just saying he's coming in to do all these nice things?

And he says: to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour.

This was the proclamation of the jubilee and, behold, this was a very important sensitive matter at the time.

During the first temple period, jubilees had been celebrated every 50 years, the years of the Lord's favour in which the people were to do a whole number of things: to set slaves free and so on.

And this had been celebrated in the second temple period every 49 years.

The estimation being that the jubilee system started up again in the year 426 when the prophet Ezra proclaimed the beginning of the first jubilee with the setting up of the new temple.

When the new temple was setting, it's from then on that the jubilees are counted.

That would mean that around this time, so between the year 17 to 19 AD it was the beginning of the tenth jubilee.

Now one of the prophecies that we know about (because it's in the fragments of the Melchizedek school) was that the great Melchizedek priest, the high priestly royal figure, would come in and would perform the definitive sacrifice and usher in the kingdom.

The fulfilment of the house of the Lord, that would be done in the 10th jubilee, in the first week of the 10th jubilee.

So Jesus is basically sitting down and saying: yep, the tenth jubilee promise is fulfilled today in your hearing, which implies: I am the Melchizedek priest, that's what this is about.

And this is where St Luke is brilliant because, just before he says that, he says: the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. [SEE NOW]

And believe it or not this is a reference to a passage which we don't have in our Catholic Bibles, but it's in the Greek Orthodox Bible, because they can use the Septuagint for the Hebrew scriptures. And there, in the Septuagint, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah - we're reading the book of Nehemiah as our background text today - is basically contained in a book called One Ezra (The Decree of Cyrus, Return from Exile).

And in this book called One Ezra, in order to announce the going back of the people of Israel to be able to start building their new temple and get things going again, first of all, Cyrus had announced it where it was picked up by Isaiah, but then a long time later when people had forgotten about what Cyrus had announced, king Darius does it again: finds the evidence and has people go back to build the temple or to find the temple being built, and they discover that it was legitimate.

And king Darius says this: and I have also instructed that they build it completely and that THEY WATCH FIXEDLY that they work closely with those who have returned from amongst the captives of Judah until the house of the Lord be finished.

So what do we have here? We have captives or those amongst the captives from Judah watching VERY VERY CLOSELY at the one who has returned to finish the work of the house of the Lord.

You can see how very carefully Luke is framing this reading. Luke is giving a filled-out account of what Mark had said when he announced.

Luke said at the beginning of Jesus's Gospel was: the time is fulfilled.

That's what is being described in this scene.

He's talking about the word, the word from Isaiah, the word from Ezra: the coming in of the one who is going to build up the house of the Lord.

That is what's being fulfilled in their sight.

So what is it like to listen to the Lord? It's like sitting under a huge act of communication, which very subtly comes amongst us, showing what it's going to do by fulfilling something even though the fulfilment is in some ways an excess of what was described before.

However, the fulfilment is going to happen in very small, precise things that St Luke is now going to show us.

This I think is part of the joy of reading Luke.

He is a very very rich painter. People have sometimes said they thought he must have been a painter because of the ways that rather than just give the words he gives very rich images to allow us to imagine what it was like to undergo this.

So we have one sitting in the synagogue fulfilling the promises with the people fixed as obeying king Darius who himself was obeying king Cyrus, and all of this is to do with the building up to the completion of the house of the Lord, which is what Jesus is now beginning.