Monday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 4:16-30
Today we begin the reading from Luke’s Gospel, which will bring us to the end of the Church year. We have already gone through Matthew’s and Mark’s, and John’s Gospel has been spread through various parts of the year, especially during the Advent, Christmas, Lent and Easter seasons.
Luke’s Gospel is a companion volume to the Acts of the Apostles, and the language and structure of these two books indicate that both were written by the same person. They are addressed to the same individual, Theophilus, and Acts refers to Luke’s Gospel. Luke’s Gospel and Acts could be considered as volume 1 and 2 of the same book.
Luke presents the works and teachings of Jesus that are especially important for understanding the way of salvation. Its scope is complete from the birth of Christ to his ascension and it appeals to both Jews and Gentiles.
Today, we take up Luke’s Gospel at the beginning of Jesus’ public life (chap 4). After his baptism by John the Baptist:
Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee…
(Luke 4:14)
As we know, Galilee is the northern province of Palestine and his home province. Already people were talking about him everywhere.
Now, as our reading opens, we find him in Nazareth, the small town in Galilee where he grew up. From the verses immediately preceding, it does not seem that Jesus actually began his ministry in Nazareth. The event described here may not have taken place until a year later. One suggestion (NIV Bible) is that all that is described in John’s Gospel between 1:19 to 4:42 took place between the temptation in the desert and the moving north to Galilee (see Luke 4:13-14).
But Luke has arranged the structure of his Gospel so that Jesus will begin his public life in Nazareth, and will gradually proceed southwards towards his goal, Jerusalem, without turning back. In the other Synoptics, he moves around Galilee in all directions, and John suggests that he made a number of visits to Jerusalem during his public life.
The Jerusalem Bible suggests that our passage today actually combines three distinct parts:
- vv 16-22 Jesus is honoured: occurring at the time indicated by Matthew 4:13;
- vv 23-24 Jesus astonishing his audience: the visit of which Matthew and Mark speak;
- vv 25-30 the life of Jesus threatened: not mentioned by Matthew or Mark and to be placed towards the end of the Galilean ministry.
In this way Luke presents an introductory tableau which is a summary and symbol of Christ’s great offer and of its contemptuous rejection by his own people.
As the reading opens we find Jesus in the town synagogue. It is a Sabbath day. He gets up to read the Scripture and comments on it. The ruler of the synagogue could authorise any adult Jew to read the Scripture lesson. The passage he reads is full of significance. It comes from the prophet Isaiah, and Jesus’ reading of it amounts to a manifesto or what we might call today a ‘mission statement’. ‘Books’ in those days were in the form of scrolls, and the Scriptures were kept in a special place in the synagogue and given to the reader by an attendant. Jesus may have chosen the passage himself or it may have been assigned for that day.
But it is more than just a mission statement. As he reads, it becomes clear that the whole statement is about Jesus himself:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…
This has already been confirmed during his baptism in the river Jordan when “the Holy Spirit descended upon him in bodily form like a dove” and a voice was heard to say:
You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.
(Luke 3:22)
Next Jesus, still reading from Isaiah, says:
…because he has anointed me…
In saying this, he is making an unequivocal claim to be the Messiah or the Christ, the long-awaited liberating King of Israel. The word ‘Messiah’, translated into Greek as Christos, means someone who is anointed with oil (we call the oil in baptism and confirmation ‘chrism’). And a person was made king by having oil poured over his head (remember how David was anointed king). Jesus, of course, was not literally anointed, but had been figuratively ‘anointed’ by the coming of the Spirit on him during his baptism. ‘Anointing’ is our equivalent of ‘coronation’, symbolised by the putting of a crown on the new king.
Then comes the mission of this King:
-to bring good news to the poor,
-to proclaim release to the captives
-and recovery of sight to the blind,
-to set free those who are oppressed,
-to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.
There is nothing here of restoring the glories of Israel, nothing about conquering enemies and laying waste their lands. No, it is about letting the poor of this world hear the Good News of God’s love for them. It is about healing and reconciliation. It is about liberating those who are tied down by any form of enslavement. It is about helping people to see clearly the true meaning of life. It is about restoring wholeness to people’s lives and to societies. It is about the inauguration of the Kingdom by its King.
It is, in short, the whole picture of Jesus that will unfold in the pages of Luke, a Gospel which focuses on the poor and vulnerable, a Gospel of tenderness and compassion, a Gospel of the Spirit and of joy, a Gospel of prayer and healing.
It is about proclaiming “the year of the Lord’s favor”. This refers to the Messianic age when salvation would be proclaimed. Isaiah, in the original text, is alluding to the Year of Jubilee, when every 50 years slaves were set free, debts were cancelled and ancestral lands were returned to the original family. Isaiah was thinking mainly of freedom from Babylonian captivity, but Jesus was speaking of liberation across the board of human living.
As he finished the reading, Jesus put down the scroll and said:
Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
And the townspeople who thought they knew him so well were overawed by the wisdom with which he spoke. This positive reaction to Jesus is a favourite theme in Luke.
Rhetorically they asked:
Is not this Joseph’s son?
But they were wrong. He was not Joseph’s son. He was the son of Mary and of the Father, the divine Word sharing our ‘flesh’ (as suggested above, this event may have occurred on a second visit).
And this in turn leads us to the third section of the reading, which provides an unexpected turn of events and is more in harmony with the later part of Jesus’ public life. Jesus’ hearers were surprised at the way he spoke, but they were not moved to change. After all, he was ‘just’ the son of Joseph, and someone they knew so well could have nothing to say to them. At the same time Jesus says they, his own townspeople, must be wondering why he is not doing the things in Nazareth that he was doing in places like Capernaum.
Capernaum, apparently a sizeable town, was where Peter lived and Jesus made his house, the centre out of which he did his missionary work in Galilee. A modern church now stands over the ruins of a 5th century basilica on the supposed site of Peter’s house and there is a 4th century synagogue nearby.
The reason for the townspeople’s non-acceptance of Jesus is that they do not really accept him for what he is. He reminds them that prophets are seldom accepted in their own place. Familiarity blinds people to their message. Their attitude was: “I know who he is and he has nothing to say to me.” Jesus then gives two rather provocative examples:
- During a great famine in the time of the prophet Elijah, Elijah was sent to help, not his fellow Israelites, but a poor widow in Zarephath, near Sidon, in non-Jewish territory. Sidon was one of the oldest Phoenician cities on the Mediterranean coast and about 33 km north of Tyre. (Later, Jesus would heal the daughter of a gentile woman here.)
- In the time of the prophet Elisha, there were many lepers in Israel, but Elisha was sent to cure Naaman, a gentile general from Syria.
God’s reaching out to Gentiles through his prophets sets the stage for the Gentiles to receive the message of the Prophet Jesus, which is so much a theme of Luke’s writings. These remarks so angered the people of Nazareth that they dragged Jesus to the brow of a hill with the intention of throwing him down, but:
…he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Whether he did this miraculously or from the sheer power of his personality is not clear. In any case, his time had not yet come.
Prophetic voices being rejected by their own is a phenomenon only too common in our own day. And it was something Jesus foretold would happen to his followers, simply for being his followers and proclaiming his vision of life. In the meantime, let us make Jesus’ mission statement our own. It is what being a Christian means.
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Monday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18
The early Christians, including the Thessalonians, were convinced that Jesus would return in their lifetime. They were consequently upset about the fate of their brothers and sisters who had already died. What would happen to them if they were not around to greet the Lord when he came?
So here Paul takes up the practice among the Thessalonians of mourning excessively for their dead, a reaction deriving from the stress placed by the community on their belief that the Second Coming of Christ was going to happen very soon, definitely in their lifetime. But now people were dying off before this took place: what was going to happen to them? Did they think that the dead, in accordance with Jewish and Greek belief, went to a place for the dead (Hebrew, Sheol or Greek, Hades) from which there was no escape? And so they would not be around when Jesus came to take all the Christians to himself?
The Apostle reminds them of the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the dead in Christ. On the basis of Christ’s teaching, he affirms that the resurrection of the dead is to precede the Second Coming. Those who are alive at the time of the latter will not have the advantage over the dead of being the first witnesses to it. On the contrary, the Lord will first command the dead to rise; the living will then join them and both groups will be witnesses of the Parousia.
The doctrine spoken of here is to be remembered when there are more deaths in the community. Since Paul does not know the time of the Parousia, he aligns himself with the Thessalonians in the hope of living to that day, i.e. within the first Christian generation. In his mind such a possibility seems not to have been excluded by the teaching of Jesus himself.
That is the background, now to the reading proper. The converts in Thessalonica had obviously been worried about friends and relatives who had died and would not be there to see the coming of the Lord. Replying to their questions, Paul affirms the fundamental doctrine of the resurrection so as to strengthen their faith and hope.
Paul wants the Thessalonians to be quite certain about the fate of those who have “fallen asleep”. This euphemism for death was common in both the Old and New Testaments and in Greek literature. It was natural, then, to refer to ‘resurrection’ to new life or from death as an ‘awakening’. For the Christian, sleep is a particularly apt metaphor for death, because of its finality.
Some of the Thessalonians seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the Parousia and thought all believers would live until Christ returned. When some died, the question then arose, “Will those who have died have part in that great day?”
But, says Paul, there is no need to grieve over them, as others do who have no hope. Inscriptions on tombs and references in literature show that first-century pagans viewed death with horror, as the end of everything. The Christian attitude was in strong contrast (see 1 Cor 15:55-57; Phil 1:21-23).
For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. [i.e. those who have died as Christians]
The resurrection of Jesus is absolutely essential for Christian belief in a future life. As Paul wrote to the Christians of Corinth:
…if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain…If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins. Then those also who have died in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied. But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have died. (1 Cor 15:14,17-20)
Paul can also state from the Lord’s own teaching, namely, that those who are still alive when the Lord comes will not have any advantage over those who have fallen asleep, that is, who have already died. The Thessalonians had evidently been concerned that those among them who died would miss their place in the great events when the Lord came, and Paul assures them that this will not be the case. There is no exact reference in the written Gospels for this saying of Jesus. Perhaps Paul is relying here on traditions he had received from others, but which did not find their way into the Gospel texts. There must have been many such sayings.
Paul next speaks about those believers who are still alive at Christ’s Second Coming:
…we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord…
‘We’ does not necessarily mean that Paul thought he himself would be alive then. He often identified himself with those he wrote to or about. Elsewhere he says that God will raise “us” at that time (1 Cor 6:14; 2 Cor 4:14). If he is including himself among those who will be present at the Parousia, it is more by hope or desire rather than by conviction.
The Apostle then gives an image of the Parousia using traditional apocalyptic imagery for a divine intervention. It is not to be taken as a literal description of an experience that is totally beyond our imagination.
For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven…
The only named archangel in the Scripture is Michael (Jude 9; Dan 10:13). In Luke, Gabriel is simply called an angel, and similarly, so is Raphael in the Book of Tobit. Later tradition calls them all ‘archangels’. The ‘trumpet’, together with voice and clouds, were traditional signs that accompanied a theophany, a divine manifestation, such as that at Mount Sinai. They were later adopted as conventional elements in apocalyptic literature, as for example, in Matthew’s description of the coming of the Son of Man at the end of time (Matt 24:29).
Then, in a reassuring remark, Paul affirms that:
…the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air…
This is the only place in the New Testament where a ‘rapture’—being caught up or taken up to God—is clearly referred to. Although some hold that such experiences will be secret, Paul seems to be describing something open and public, with loud voices and a trumpet blast.
Contrary to their fears, Paul says that:
…we will be with the Lord forever.
Of all the details given here: that the dead will answer the summons by returning to life, that they and the living will be taken to meet the Lord, and that they will accompany him to the judgement with which the eternal kingdom begins, the essential one is the last—eternal life with Christ. That is the ‘salvation’, the ‘glory’, the ‘Kingdom’ that Jesus shares among his chosen followers.
And, Paul concludes:
Therefore encourage one another with these words.
The primary purpose of the whole passage is not to give a chronology of future events, though that is involved, but to above all urge the Thessalonian community to mutual encouragement.
As mentioned, it is not necessary to take the scenario here described too literally; in fact, it would be quite wrong to do so. It consists of traditional apocalyptic and scriptural language to describe the indescribable—our future life with God after our death.
Very soon in the life of the Church people began to think less and less about this problem. We need to remember that this Letter is a very early Church writing. By the time we get to the Gospels, this anxiety has passed and the concern is now about how to live in a time of uncertain and presumably lengthy or indefinite duration.
But the warnings we saw in Matthew’s Gospel last week still remain valid. The critical issue is not the when or the how of the Lord’s final coming, but the when and the how of our leaving this earth. Will I be ready? Am I ready now?
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