NewCreation

Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this the homily for the third Sunday in ordinary time, which is also the Sunday which falls in the octave of Christian unity, so the occasion when all Christians are invited to come together around the celebration of the Word of the Lord. So today is known as the Sunday of the Word of the Lord, and that's particularly appropriate given our Gospel for today, which is the very beginning of Luke's Gospel, in which he explains what he's doing, and then the very beginning of Jesus's ministry — in other words, his first public use of the word. So we're going to have to look at those in some detail. This is really where we begin our reading of Saint Luke, and it's worth just pausing to think what Saint Luke says about what he's doing. This is where we get the first four verses of the Gospel. He says: "Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us." Big hint: events have been fulfilled. In other words, he's trying to describe a fulfillment. You can only describe a fulfillment if you indicate what is being fulfilled. "Just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word." So he's referring here to eyewitnesses and servants of the word, probably reaching right back as far as the Hebrew Scriptures — "from the beginning" is usually the word there — but also the beginning of the fulfillment of these things, so what we would now call the Christian witnesses. "I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus." So, putting everything into order. And he talks to this most excellent Theophilus. And of course there's been a great deal of discussion as to who this Theophilos might have been. It could have been a generic name for a lover of God, because that's what Theophilus means — a friend of God, a lover of God — 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 Annas, a 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." In other words, he wants to give a filled-out picture of fulfillment. This is not — he's not writing history in our modern sense, nor is he trying to write history. 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 in today's Gospel, because if we compare what happens in Mark's Gospel at this point, 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're going to do, what we want to find with Jesus, is that beginning at the same place — so after Luke has gone through the infancy narratives, the young Jesus in the Temple, and the baptism, and then the temptations in the desert — so after that, now he comes to Jesus actually beginning his ministry. And then he says: "Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit" — remember that he'd been baptized, the Spirit to come upon him, "This is my Son, whom I have begotten today," or "who is my beloved" — "Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returns 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." So he's filled with the Spirit, he returns to Galilee. Luke gives us a tiny little bit more detail about that. Remember, Galilee was a chunk of land — it still is a chunk of land — about 70 kilometers north-south and 40 kilometers 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. And he's going through that area teaching in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. Everyone approved him, gave him reputation, as the Greek says. 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 said 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. So he comes to Nazareth where he'd been brought up. He went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read. 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 have been not the whole of Isaiah but a chunk of Isaiah, presumably the relevant chunk of Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written. And so now Luke quotes — pretty exactly from the Septuagint, the Greek version of Isaiah — remembering Jesus would probably have read it in Hebrew, 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 that he read it in Hebrew and then explained it in Aramaic, which might account for why the text is very slightly different from the one we have in Isaiah. It's different in two ways. First of all, he leaves out a bit about the brokenhearted, which is in the Isaiah text, and introduces "letting the oppressed go free," which is in a different bit of Isaiah. So we don't know whether he had a different version of the Septuagint than we have. And then, most famously and significantly, he leaves out the very last line: "to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour and the day of the vengeance of the Lord." He leaves out that bit. So he's reading them a chunk of Greek — an edited chunk of Greek, edited by him — and he rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, and sits down. Now, the 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 it. This is not an amateur who just goes up to the reading and then skips back and sits down in his seat. No, this is the person who is now taking the seat of the one who is going to proclaim and explain the Scripture. And here we have the interesting factor — to see what's going on here, the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. We'll come back to that in a second. 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. We're going to see why that's important. Then he began to say to them: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Now, you might say, okay, what's that about? Is he just saying he's coming in to do all these nice things? It says "to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour." This was the proclamation of the jubilee. And behold, this was a very important and sensitive matter at the time. During the first Temple period, jubilees had been celebrated every fifty 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 forty-nine years, the estimation being that it started up again — the jubilee system started up again — in the year 426, when the prophet Ezra, he from our first reading, proclaimed the beginning of the first jubilee with the setting up of the new Temple. It's from then on that the jubilees are counted. That would mean that, around this time, so between the years 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 scroll, 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 fulfillment of the house of the Lord. That would be done in the tenth jubilee, in the first week of the tenth jubilee. That will be the first week, meaning the first period of nine years. Seven nines are 49. There were seven weeks in a jubilee, a week being nine years. Why have I got that wrong? Anyhow, whichever way it is, the years here are the beginning of the tenth 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 Saint Luke is brilliant, because just before he says that, he says the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And believe it or not, this is a reference to a passage which we don't have in our Catholic Bibles. It's in the Greek Bible, 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 1 Ezra. And in this book called 1 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 — he said 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 — all of that about 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 Word? 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 fulfillment is in some ways an excess of what was described before. But the fulfillment is going to happen in very small, precise things that Saint Luke is now going to show us. This, I think, is part of the joy of reading Luke. It is the sense of a very, very rich painter. People have sometimes said they thought Luke 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 completion of the house of the Lord, which is what Jesus is now beginning. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.