Friday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 5:33-39
The call of the first disciples is followed in Luke by the cure of a leper and then of a paralytic. Then there is the call of Levi (who is called “Matthew” in Matthew’s Gospel) and the discussion with Jesus about his mixing with sinful and unclean people. It is the first of many confrontations between Jesus and the Jewish leaders.
We then come to today’s reading. Some scribes and Pharisees want to know why, when their disciples and those of John the Baptist regularly fast, Jesus’ disciples freely eat and drink. We know that John grew up in the desert and lived on an austere diet of locusts and wild honey. He also preached an austere penitential message and lived a highly disciplined life. The Pharisees also led a highly regimented and strict lifestyle. Jesus, however, together with his disciples, is frequently seen eating at the tables of Pharisees, tax collectors and in the houses of friends. But while Jesus rejected ostentatious fasting, we know he fasted (once for 40 days) and praised it together with prayer and almsgiving, provided it was done discreetly and not for display.
Jesus gives two answers to the question. First, he says that it is not appropriate for guests to fast when the bridegroom is still around. A Jewish wedding was and is a specially joyous occasion (plenty of wine needed, as we saw in Cana) and it could last for a week. It would be unthinkable to fast at such a time. Here Jesus is the bridegroom. There will come a time when he is not physically with his disciples, and then they will fast.
The second reason goes deeper and is presented in the form of a parable. One does not use a new piece of cloth to patch an old garment. At the first sign of stress, the new cloth will be stronger and the old cloth will tear out. Nor does one put new wine into old wineskins. The new wine is still fermenting and expanding. The old wineskins, made of goatskins, are already stretched and no longer flexible. When the new wine expands, the old wineskins will not be able to stretch any more and will burst. The result is lost wine and ruined wineskins. So new wine has to be poured into new wineskins.
In this Jesus is clearly saying that his whole vision of religion is new, and that it can only be accepted and adopted by people who are prepared to see things in a new way. His teaching and vision cannot be grafted on to the old religion. The old religion emphasised externals like observance of legal and ritual regulations and fasting; Jesus emphasises the interior spirit, which is the real measure of a person’s value.
This parable may also be read in conjunction with John’s account of the wedding feast at Cana, where Jesus produced new and better wine from the water in the ritual washing jars.
Jesus knows the difficulties his adversaries face:
No one after drinking old wine desires new wine but says, ‘The old is good.’
Those who had grown up with the ‘old wine’ of the Mosaic Law would find it difficult to switch to the ‘new wine’ that Jesus was offering.
Even in our Church today there are some who still hanker for the ‘old wine’ of the pre-Vatican II days. They have not made the inner shift which is necessary. They have not understood that Vatican II was much more than a change of external practices (such as have taken place in the liturgy). They nostalgically long for the Tridentine Mass in Latin and proclaim it preferable to the ‘new’ liturgy which they find superficial and lacking in reverence. But they do not seem to have grasped the thinking which is behind the liturgical changes. The new patch does not fit their old cloth. “The old wine is better,” they say.
Going forward, this thinking will not likely disappear because “the world writes the agenda for the church” and there will no doubt be other changes. The new wine will not be appreciated until the wineskins are also changed; otherwise we are in the same situation as the Pharisees were with Jesus.
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Saturday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 6:1-5
Yet another confrontation between Jesus and some Pharisees is described in today’s Gospel. Following immediately, as it does, after the parable about the patch and the wineskins (Luke 5:33-39), it confirms what Jesus said about the gap between the traditionalists and his vision.
He and his disciples were walking through a cornfield and it was a Sabbath day. The disciples were plucking heads of grain, rubbing them in their hands and eating them. The Sabbath did not forbid walking short distances. And custom did not forbid ‘gleaning’, that is, taking grain left over by reapers. It did forbid reaping and threshing. Only a very narrow-minded interpretation could have described plucking as reaping and rubbing between the hands as threshing, but that seems to be what is happening here.
The disciples are asked:
Why are you doing what is not lawful on the Sabbath?
Jesus answers very quickly and to the point. He makes no reference to the narrow-minded legalism that his critics reveal, the ‘old wineskin’ mentality. Instead, he throws at them an incident from the past. David and his men were hungry so they went into the house of God and, with his approval, ate the holy bread of the Presence which only the priests were allowed to eat (1 Sam 21:6). Each Sabbath, twelve loaves of fresh bread were set on a table in the Holy Place. The stale bread was eaten by the priests.
As king, David put himself above the law. Both David’s and the disciples’ actions involved godly men doing something forbidden by law. However, it is never a violation of a law to do what is good and to save life (eating for survival). In that sense both David and the disciples were within the spirit, though not the letter, of the law.
And Jesus, too, is above the law:
The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath.
Jesus has the authority to overrule man-made laws concerning the Sabbath, particularly as interpreted by the Pharisees. This does not mean, of course, that Jesus (or even God for that matter) will do anything he feels like doing. Jesus will never go against anything that involves the True or the Good; with his Father he is the Source of all that is true and good.
But many of the Jewish laws (like civil laws) are ‘positive law’. In themselves, they involve matters which are neither good nor bad. In itself, it is neither good nor bad to stop at a green light or go through a red one. It is neither good nor bad of itself to abstain from work on the Sabbath. What makes these acts good or bad is the deeper good of which they are a sign. That deeper good may sometimes involve their non-observance. Hunger and survival may over-ride a rule to fast. In a matter of extreme urgency it may be necessary to drive (safely) through a red light. The letter of the law is violated, but not the good it intends.
As noted in the Jerusalem Bible, “some manuscripts of Luke contain a very pertinent [but likely spurious] saying at this point”:
On the same day, seeing a man working on the Sabbath day, Jesus said to him: ‘Friend, if you know what you are doing, you are blessed; but if you do not know, you are accursed as a breaker of the Law’.
That is a sentiment that goes with new wine and new wineskins. If truth and goodness are not violated by doing or not doing something, can we say there is sin or evil there?
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Monday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 2:1-5
Paul continues to explain the basis on which he was proclaiming Christ to the people of Corinth. When he first arrived among them from Athens about the year 51 AD, he did not come as a polished orator with convincing arguments. Perhaps Apollos, a Jewish exile from the sophisticated society of Rome who became one of the leaders of the community, had led the Corinthians to place more emphasis on eloquence and intellectual arguments. Paul more than once acknowledges his weaknesses in this area. Was this the “thorn in the flesh” which distressed him so much?
The only message Paul had to bring was that of Jesus Christ and him crucified. On the face of it, it did not look like a very encouraging message. This was not a message crafted to attract followers in large numbers, especially given Paul’s acknowledged weakness as a persuasive speaker.
No wonder, then that he had come among them “in weakness and in fear and in much trembling” (a common biblical expression), for he had none of the eloquence which they might have expected and to which they were accustomed from the intellectuals of the day.
All Paul had to offer was the persuasiveness that came:
…with a demonstration of the Spirit and of power…
He came to proclaim to them the “mystery of God”. ‘Mystery’ here is not so much something that is difficult to understand as it is a truth which had previously been hidden but is now made known to those who are ready to hear it. Greece at the time had its ‘mystery religions’, where the beliefs of the religion were only made known to initiates, something akin to some secret societies today. The ‘mystery’ here was the revelation about what God did for us through the life, death and resurrection of God’s Son made man—something that could never be discovered by the most sophisticated philosophers.
As Paul discovered in time, his deficiency was, in fact, his strength. All he had to offer was his personal knowledge and experience of Jesus as his crucified Lord and that was all that was needed. Paul was only the fragile “vessel of clay” through whom God did his work. As a powerful orator, the focus would have been more on himself and his arguments. His message proclaimed that:
…your faith might rest not on human wisdom but on the power of God.
“The power of God” was clearly visible even in his weaknesses.
What Paul says here is of great importance to us in communicating our faith to others. There are those who try to convince non-believers or those who have fallen away by piling on apologetic arguments and proofs of God’s existence or the validity of the Church’s teaching. Ultimately, though, the only really effective way to lead people to Christ is by the sharing of our own experience of knowing him and by the witness of a life that is clearly influenced by the vision of the gospel.
It is also consoling for us to realise that the success of our evangelising does not depend on our own abilities. As Paul would say elsewhere:
…whenever I am weak, then I am strong. (2 Cor 12:10)
It is not a matter of intellectual power, but of our integrity, which allows God’s truth and love to shine through us.
At the same time, as one commentator reminds us, this does not give preachers a licence to neglect study and preparation. Paul’s letters reveal a great deal of knowledge in many areas of learning, and his eloquence is apparent in his address before the Areopagus in Athens (see Acts 17:22-31). Paul’s point is that unless the Holy Spirit works in a listener’s heart, the wisdom and eloquence of a preacher are ineffective. Paul’s confidence as a preacher did not rest on intellectual and oratorical ability, as did that of the Greek orators. Our communicating of Christ and his vision to others will also depend much more on the inner truth of our message than on our powers of persuasion.
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Tuesday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 2:10-16
In today’s passage, Paul discusses the true nature of the genuinely spiritual person. Not surprisingly, the source of his spirituality is the Spirit of God:
…the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
The Spirit does this, not in order to know them better—for the Spirit knows all things. But rather, he understands fully the depths of God’s nature and so is fully competent to reveal them to us. And just as only a person alone knows what is going on in the depths of his or her heart, so only the depths of God can be known by God’s own Spirit.
What distinguishes the true followers of Christ is that they are not imbued by the spirit of the world around them. The “spirit of the world” is that “wisdom of this age” which is alienated from God and all he stands for (1 Cor 2:6). It is the attitude of ‘sinful nature’ as described in the Letter to the Romans (8:6-7). Instead, true followers have received the gift of God’s Spirit which helps us to understand the gifts and the love that is constantly being showered on us. So Paul’s teaching is not, as he said before, based on philosophical speculations, but comes in the way the Spirit communicates, that is, straight to the heart and not just in the mind.
In the verses which follow (including some which are not part of today’s reading) Paul explains why many fail to grasp true wisdom. It is because such wisdom is perceived by the spiritual (i.e. mature) Christian. The Corinthians, however, were unspiritual, worldly (infant) believers (1 Cor 3:1-4), and the proof of their immaturity was their division over their human leaders (1 Cor 3:3-4).
The unspiritual person is described as one who is closed to the working of the Spirit. The Greek term here is psychikos, a person who depends on his own natural resources:
…who walk…according to the flesh… (Rom 8:4)
This person is dominated by the physical, worldly or natural life.
Such a person—and we have surely met such individuals often—rejects the gospel teaching as nonsense. In fact, he or she does not understand it because understanding only comes through being open to the promptings of the Spirit.
Persons who are spiritual, on the other hand:
…discern all things, and they are themselves subject to no one else’s scrutiny.
The Spirit gives the follower of Christ deep insights into the meaning of life, and a vision of what is really important. Paul himself, as a ‘spiritual’ man, is not to be judged by the Corinthians who are ‘sensual’ and immature, only able to be:
…fed…milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food. (1 Cor 4:2)
Many a truly Spirit-guided person will, as Jesus and Paul were, be frequently criticised. Such individuals may be rejected and even removed altogether by exile or death. But as long as they remain true to the guidance of the Spirit, they do not feel effectively judged by such people.
Christians must never be arrogant or contemptuous of others. At the same time, they must not fear or hesitate to be in opposition to the conventional wisdom of their environment. In order to make sure of their integrity, they must constantly discern the voice and the leading of God in all that he says and does.
Paul ends by asking a question posed by Isaiah:
For who has known the mind of the Lord
so as to instruct him?
Paul answers by saying that, while we may not know the mind of God, and still less dare to teach him, he does claim that he and many of the baptised are those who have:
…the mind of Christ.
To have the “mind of Christ” is to see things the way Jesus sees them, to value things the way he values them, and to totally share his vision of the meaning and goal of our lives. What exactly that mind of Christ is can be found in the lovely hymn that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippians (2:6-11). Let us pray today that we may be truly spiritual people who share and understand the mind of Christ.
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Wednesday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 3:1-9
In today’s First Reading, Paul continues his thoughts on the nature of the truly spiritual person. With regret, he cannot call the Corinthian Christians “spiritual people”. They are still sensual, governed by their bodily desires and still “infants in Christ”. They are still “fleshly”, like worldly people rather than people of God. They are living by purely human standards. And so, up to this time, he has treated them like infants, giving them milk rather than solid food. They are not ready yet to hear the gospel in its fullness because they are still so un-spiritual.
On what does he base this evaluation? It is clear there is “jealousy and quarreling” that divide them so badly, and which make them in no way different from their non-Christian neighbours. They are divided into factions, one rooting for Paul and another for Apollos.
To Paul this makes no sense at all. Paul and Apollos were merely the agents by which the faith message was brought to them. And the different ways in which they did that were based, not on a preferred style of operating, but on the different roles that they had been given by the Lord. Their different roles could not be compared with each other.
As Paul puts it, his role was to do the planting while Apollos did the watering. In other words, it was Paul’s role to found and to set up from scratch the Christian community in Corinth, starting something which had never existed before. Apollos, on the other hand, was working in a church already begun and building on the foundation that had been laid by Paul. But the actual growth of the community is the work of God alone and of no one else. Without God, the sower and the waterer are nothing.
So it does not matter who plants or who waters. Each one will be rewarded accordingly as he is doing the task assigned to him. Paul sums up by saying that he and Apollos:
…are God’s coworkers, working together…
They are partners, each one contributing something special to the whole work.
The people, for their part, are God’s farm, the soil in which he works, and all growth is attributable to him alone. And they are God’s building, the place where he takes up his abode; he lives in them. That is what makes them ‘holy’ (hagioi), a people set apart from those around them. Later in the letter Paul will speak of the Christian community as a ‘temple’, the place where the Lord is to be found in a real way.
And so they belong to God and not to Paul or Apollos. They are God’s people and not Paul’s or Apollos’. So, for people to say they belong to Paul or to Apollos makes no sense.
It is certainly not for us to point an accusing finger at the Christians of Corinth. We see the same kind of factionalism at many levels dividing Christians today, both inter-denominational and intra-denominational.
The divisions among the Christian churches, which are often expressed in the most regrettable and un-Christian forms, must be a matter of shame for all of us, not to mention a source of scandal and confusion among non-Christians. This observation is especially salient when we read Jesus’ prayer for unity in John’s Gospel (John 17:20-23).
There are also divisions in our own Catholic Church at many levels from high up to low down. We should especially take cognisance of divisions in the communities to which we personally belong, especially our parishes, organisations and groups within parishes—and certainly our families as well.
Instead, we should be making sure that we do not say or do anything which contributes to such divisions and, where we can do so, let us try to be agents of healing and reconciliation, because:
By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another. (John 13:35)
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Thursday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 3:18-23
Again, Paul urges the Corinthians to put aside the “wisdom of this world” and learn to be a fool for Christ in the eyes of that world. To ‘be a fool’ means to turn away from the ‘wisdom’ of the world, which will make one, in the eyes of many, a fool. It is the first step to real wisdom. It is only when we can recognise in the apparent failure and disaster of the Cross the triumph of God’s love that we begin to have true wisdom.
People who chase after the ‘wisdom of this world’ believe that money and material wealth and success and power over others are the ways to fulfilment and happiness. Some are even ready to die for these things, but in the long run such pursuits do not lead to the fulfilment for which we all long.
Quoting from Psalms, Paul says:
The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise,
that they are futile. (Ps 94:11)
God’s wisdom, on the other hand, is conveyed to us through the life and death of Jesus.
So, Paul continues, no one should boast on the level of human beings. He picks up again the call to unity which he raised at the beginning of his letter (see 1 Cor 1:10-13).
He writes, for instance, about being one person’s disciple versus another’s. The Christian leaders—Paul, Apollos and others—belong to the whole Church. No group can call one leader its very own. In other words, it was quite wrong—as the Corinthians apparently had been doing—to be investing their whole self in someone like Paul, or Apollos, or Cephas (Peter), or in the world in general, in life or in death, in the present or the future. All of these things are mere servants or agents of God and we can never stop at them.
So let there be no more talk that one group is for Paul and another group for Apollos:
…all are yours, and you are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.
Christians are in union with the Church’s true leaders and with Christ, who in turn is in union with the other members of the Trinity.
All, however they came to be members of the community, can have only Christ as the source of meaning for their lives. And it is through Christ, and only through him and not through any other human agency, that they will find access to God from whom they have come and to whom they are called to be finally united.
If the Corinthians were genuinely wise, their perceptions would be reversed, and they would see everything in the world and all those with whom they live in the church in their true relations with one another. On the level of ‘ownership’, one reads: God, Christ, church members, church leaders—in that order. But on the level of service one reads in the opposite direction.
Only when we see Church leadership in terms of service to its members will we avoid the kind of situations which Paul is denouncing. When members must serve leaders, we begin to create the factionalism that was hurting the Corinthian church. We might well apply this idea to the situation of our own church be it on the world, national or local level.
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Friday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 4:1-5
Paul continues the theme that he and the other Apostles and ministers in the community are merely human agents of God. He asks the Corinthians to see him and his fellow workers in the church as servants and not masters or lords. They are to be seen as stewards or house managers working for a master. And they have been entrusted with communicating the “mysteries” of God.
The word ‘mystery’ (Greek, mysterion) here does not strictly mean something that is beyond all understanding. Rather it refers to truths which we could not discover by our own human efforts, but which are now being revealed and made known by God through his agents to those who believe. The term is linked to the so-called ‘mystery religions’ of the time, where the inner workings of the religious sect were only made known to initiates.
In the Christian community, there are also ‘mysteries’ made known. They are not meant to be kept secret, but it is likely that they will only be accepted and understood by those who have faith.
Paul emphasises that what is most expected of a steward is that he can be trusted—that he is reliable and conscientious. Paul also knows, however, that he has his critics among the community, so he affirms that his trustworthiness cannot be measured by them. He does not even dare to evaluate his own trustworthiness, on the principle that one is very often a poor judge where oneself is concerned.
Nevertheless, in spite of the criticisms he has received, his own conscience is perfectly clear. But that still is not enough. Only God can be his judge. And if only God can judge, then others have no right to pass final judgement on him. Jesus certainly had something to say about that (see Luke 7:36-50).
When the Lord comes at the end of times, the hidden intentions of all (Paul and his critics) will be made plain. Then, and only then:
…each one will receive commendation from God.
We should remember that each one of us, too, is a steward of the mysteries and truths of the gospel. Through our Baptism, they have been entrusted to us and we are expected to pass them on to others.
And we must do our utmost to be faithful and reliable stewards. Even if we are carrying out our stewardship to the best of our ability, it is almost inevitable that we will run into criticism, misunderstanding and opposition. In such cases, we must do our best to be people of honesty and integrity.
Sometimes the criticisms may be valid, and sometimes not. If they are valid, we should be grateful and make the necessary changes. If our consciences are clear, we should not be too concerned with what is being said about us, and leave the judgement ultimately to God. On our part, we continue to carry out our stewardship to the best of our ability.
Jesus never promised praise and popularity to those who proclaim the gospel—quite the opposite, in fact. He himself lost his life because of the hatred his work for others generated:
A disciple is not above the teacher nor a slave above the master. (Matt 10:24)
Paul focused on loving and serving Christ and the gospel in spite of great opposition both from fellow-Jews and fellow-Christians. Let us try to follow in his footsteps.
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Saturday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – First Reading
Commentary on 1 Corinthians 4:6-15
In the reading which continues from yesterday’s passage, Paul has been describing himself and Apollos as stewards or managers of God’s message. The focus should be totally on the message rather than on the messengers (also good advice for today’s Church!). As Paul says elsewhere, the messengers are just leaking vessels, vessels of brittle clay. The Corinthians therefore should not be taking sides and pitting one messenger against another, accepting one and rejecting the other. They have no right to be doing such a thing. They should keep to “what is written”. This may refer to Scripture or the written traditions and teachings that had been passed on to them.
The Corinthians themselves can only make judgements based on the teaching they were given, and they should not act as if their ideas were their own. Paul says:
Already you have all you want! Already you have become rich! Quite apart from us you have become kings!
There is a strong element of irony and sarcasm here as Paul points out their arrogance coupled with their spiritual poverty, in comparison with those by whom they were taught. He wishes it could be otherwise so Paul could share in their riches, but the sad fact is that those riches do not exist.
And in spite of their calling to be apostles, missionaries and teachers, Paul and his fellow evangelisers seem to be at the very bottom of the social ladder:
…God has exhibited us apostles as last of all…
It is as if Paul and the other evangelisers were numbered last in the line of condemned men called to fight for their lives in the gladiatorial arena and on display before the whole world.
There is more irony as Paul mockingly compares his position with the imagined superiority of the Corinthians:
We are fools for the sake of Christ, but you are sensible people in Christ. We are weak, but you are strong. You are honored, but we are dishonored.
The fact was, as he had reminded them earlier, they were neither learned nor powerful nor influential. They came from the lower strata of their society.
On the other hand, what Paul says of himself was largely true. He proceeds to give a litany of the trials and hardships he and his companions have to go through to fulfil their mission of proclaiming Christ to the world:
To the present hour we are hungry and thirsty, we are naked and beaten and homeless, and we grow weary from the work of our own hands.
Paul and his companions worked hard to support themselves. For example, we know that Paul supported himself as a tent-maker.
But following the teaching and example of their Master, they turn the other cheek to all the abuse showered on them:
When reviled, we bless; when persecuted, we endure; when slandered, we speak kindly. We have become like the rubbish of the world, the dregs of all things, to this very day.
And as it seems to be implied, some of this abuse comes from the Corinthians themselves.
Paul is saying all this not to shame or condemn them, but “to admonish you as my beloved children”, and to help them realise the real meaning of the gospel they have been called on to embrace. They may have “ten-thousand guardians in Christ”, but they should remember they have only one father, only one person who originally established the gospel among them and that person is Paul:
Indeed, in Christ Jesus I fathered you through the gospel.
All too often we hear Church leaders and pastors being criticised, sometimes with justification. But we do need to remember that, from top to bottom, we are a Church of flawed people. And so, we should keep in mind what Paul says—namely, that what we really need to focus on is the Message rather than the messengers. Some people abandon the Message on the basis of the behaviour of one or two messengers. Sometimes this is a rationalisation for not accepting the Message. We might remember Jesus’ words about being too conscious about the splinter in the eye of the other while there is a large beam of wood in our own. Messengers have had their shortcomings since the very beginning. Just look at Peter and Paul. The gospel, too, is addressed equally to all and the same fidelity is required of every member and not more from some and less from others.
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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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Tuesday of Week 22 of Ordinary Time – Gospel
Commentary on Luke 4:31-37
Immediately after his mixed reception in Nazareth, Jesus moves on to Capernaum, a town on the north shore of Galilee, which was to be the base from which Jesus did much of his missionary work. As in Nazareth, he taught the people in the synagogue on the Sabbath. Unlike in Nazareth:
They were astounded at his teaching because he spoke with authority.
He did not quote other authorities like the teachers of the law, because his authority was directly from God; it was his own.
At the same time, it was not the authority of domination. It was the authority of someone who has access to special knowledge, the authority of someone who speaks in his own name and not just on behalf of others, the authority of one who empowers others and makes them grow.
The word ‘authority’ comes from the Latin auctoritas, which in turn comes from the verb augere, meaning to increase or augment. And Jesus’ authority is not only in word and teaching. Right there in the synagogue as he speaks is a man possessed by a “spirit of an unclean demon”. The spirit, through the man, speaks in fear of the power of Jesus:
Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.
This title seems to indicate that the spirit recognises Jesus’ divine origin, but not his Messiahship. There was a belief in those times that knowing the exact name of one’s opponent gave one power over him.
Jesus ordered the evil spirit to leave the man, who was thrown to the ground, but not hurt. The people are amazed. Exorcism was not new to them, but they had never seen it done with such speed and effectiveness. They are astounded again at the power and authority of Jesus. They realise they are in the presence of someone very special, in fact, the “Holy One of God”.
Each one of us is given authority of some kind—as a parent, a teacher or perhaps our job responsibility. Let us make sure that we use it in such a way as to enhance the abilities of others rather than diminish them.
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