10 January. Thursday after Epiphany

1st Reading: 1 John 4:19 – 5:4

Whoever loves God should love Jesus, and all of our fellow-Christians

Beloved, we love God because he first loved us. If anyone says, “I love God,” but hates his brother, he is a liar; for whoever does not love a sister or brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. This is the commandment we have from him: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.
Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is begotten by God, and everyone who loves the Father loves also the one begotten by him. In this way we know that we love the children of God when we love God and obey his commandments. For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome, for whoever is begotten by God conquers the world. And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.

Responsorial: Psalm 71: 1-2, 14-15, 17

Response: Lord, every nation on earth will adore you.

O God, give your judgement to the king,
to a king’s son your justice,
that he may judge your people in justice
and your poor in right judgement. (R./)
From oppression he will rescue their lives,
to him their blood is dear.
They shall pray for him without ceasing
and bless him all the day. (R./)
May his name be blessed for ever
and endure like the sun.
Every tribe shall be blessed in him,
All nations bless his name. (R./)

Gospel: Luke 4:14-22

In the Nazareth synagogue, Jesus proclaims the Isaiah prophecy fulfilled

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all. He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.

Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.

What Jesus set out to do

Nowhere else, except in his conversation during the Last Supper, does Jesus express his life-purpose so clearly as here, to his Nazareth neighbours, in their village synagogue. When called to the rostrum to read from scroll of Holy Scripture and then add some words of inspiration and guidance, he chose a key text from Isaiah to sum up what he now saw as his own vocation.
He must have known this passage well, for Luke remarks that Jesus unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written. We may well imagine that he had heard it read before, often perhaps, and had made it his own by frequent meditation. In many ways it conveys the same deep, hope-filled spirituality found in Our Lady’s Magnificat about joy and liberty, and the divine power that can set free all who are oppressed. And what a gracious God is there portrayed, a God who anoints with the Spirit the one who is to bring joy and fullness of life to the poor, the captives and the blind. No wonder the villagers were impressed and delighted, to think that this new day of salvation had dawned.
The way can be long and arduous, from hatching an idealistic programme to achieving it in the real world. So it was for Jesus. Soon after applauding him, his audience in Nazareth turned against him and drove him from their village. This prepares us for the opposition he will meet from Scribes, Pharisees and the Jerusalem priesthood as he tries to spread his message. His ideals of liberation, sharing and fraternity, and of loosening the chains of a legalistic, hierarchical structures were anathema to the priveleged few. In the end, of course, they led to his rejection and execution in the darkness of the hill of Calvary.
But even on Calvary, more than ever – as Luke will show (Lk 23:43,45) – the Spirit of the Lord was still with Jesus, giving sight to the blind and letting the oppressed go free. His life’s mission, announced in the Nazareth Synagogue and carried out in many places over the next three years, reached its climax of completion in his sacrificial death, about which each of us can say “He loved me, and gave himself for me!” (Gal 2:20)

What his ministry was about

Today we find Jesus in the synagogue of Nazareth saying what his ministry was going to be about. Above all, he wanted to proclaim the Lord’s favour. Jesus would reveal God’s loving favour for all, especially for those who were usually out of favour, the poor, the captives, the blind and disabled, the downtrodden. We could add to that list, the lost, sinners, widows, all who found themselves on the margins at that time for one reason or another. Jesus was announcing that he was about to reveal the hospitality of God, a hospitality that was as broad as God’s love. This was indeed good news.
Yet, strangely, this good news was not well received by the people of his home town. By the end of that sermon, they are ready to throw him down the brow of a hill. It seems as if Jesus’ God was just too big for the people of Nazareth, too hospitable, too welcoming, too forgiving, too all embracing, too generous. Jesus challenges our image of God. Yet because he proclaims the favour and hospitality of God, he has the power to transform us, enrich us in our poverty, bring us freedom where we were captive, enlighten our blindness, restore our sense of belonging to the Lord after we have been lost.