Jesus Shows the Way!

Begin as you intend to continue!

I have had people say that to me on a number of occasions, usually as I was setting out in a new job.  I like it.  It made me think about how I might do things differently in this place, or because of this job or whatever.

When you begin like this it creates a kind of overture like you have at the beginning of an operetta – something short and sweet that gives you a taster of what is to come.

Marcus Borg, who is an Anglican Priest in America is big on seeing overtures in the Gospels, and he suggests in a book he wrote with John Dominic Crossan called “The First Christmas” that the Birth Narratives in Matthew and Luke constitute overtures of the Jesus Story that will follow.

I am going to suggest that the very first theme that Luke develops after his Overture in the Birth Narrative is itself a kind of overture – in that it seems to be saying right from the outset “This is what Jesus’ ministry is all about.”

Luke gets right into it.

He begins with the story of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness, and I think the Lectionary will deal with that on another day. 

He moves decisively from that story with the words:

“Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned 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.”

Of course he was heading to his home town, Nazareth, and the guts of our story today and next week occurs there and I am rather glad that I will be here with you again next week to be able to make my comments in the light of what I say to you today.

So…

He goes to synagogue, like a good Jewish man.  This may well have been the place were as a lad he learned the Torah off by heart.  It would certainly have been his spiritual home if he had actually grown up in Nazareth.

I have no idea how it is decided who will read from the scroll at the meetings, but this story has it that it was Jesus who stood up to do so, and he reads what is now for us that famous passage from Isaiah 61:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim

release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”

Now, last week, I mentioned to you that we have to ask ourselves each day during Epiphany “What is it that God wants us to notice about who Jesus was and is and what he’s about.

Luke tells this story differently from Matthew and Mark and I think it’s because he wants us to notice something very important.  The story told this way is like a programmatic announcement that concerns both the nature of Jesus’ ministry and the character of the Church that would follow it in time.

By having Jesus say to everyone after he has read the scroll “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” Luke makes it very clear that Jesus’ ministry would be a prophetic ministry.   Actually, he had already given us some hints of that in earlier stories – the prayer of Mary that we call The Magnificat suggests very much a prophetic role for this child she is bearing, as well as the child her cousin Elizabeth was bearing; and the words of John the Baptist also point clearly to this as a descriptor of the nature of Jesus’ ministry.

Jesus was a prophet.

He was not a priest or a scribe or a Pharisee and we will explore some of the consequences of that next week.

But I hear a valid question forming in some of your minds already … “So what!?”

It is a good questions, and these are the two things I think we should take notice of as a result of it:

1.     It gives direction about what the rules will be in this new Way; and

2.     It sets out a framework for social policy in the church.

THE RULES

I am sure you are aware that Jesus was no fan of the Pharisees.  The Pharisees had turned the religion of Judaism into a Guinness Book or Rules with hundreds of rules about what you must do and hundreds of rules about what you must not do, and for every rule there were hundreds of little Mishnahs telling you what each rule really meant and how to keep it.

For example WORKING ON THE SABBATH is forbidden, but as you might expect, it is reasonable to ask “what is work?” So the Jews developed a definition involving 39 categories of creative activity that constituted work that could not be done on the Sabbath, some related to Temple work and some related to household work.

The trickiest one was the issue of CARRYING.  We all have to carry things – even the clothes we are wearing.  So they decided that carrying things around within a private place, or within a semi private place, or within a public place was okay but carrying something from one place to another was not.

Now the upshot of all this was that the Pharisees made it seem that their religion was a system of requirements (the Rules) and rewards (the Blessings), and the better you were at keeping the rules the more blessings you would receive.  And they, of course, worked out that you could say it the other way around too – if someone had lots of blessings (particularly if they were very rich) it must have been because they were very good at keeping the rules.

Jesus comes along and reminds everyone that it was the ways of the prophets that lead us into right relationship with God.

The work of the Spirit was an essential part of it – and our Second Reading today gave us the low-down about that – but at the heart of the prophetic tradition is that idea so clearly expressed by Micah

“What does the LORD require of you but to

do justice,

love kindness and

walk humbly with your God?”

This is not about a set of rules, but about a way of living and this can be as liberating for us in our day as it was in the days of the Prophets and of Jesus because there is no doubt that some in the church have turned our religion into a great long set of rules to be kept – when I grew up it emphatically included not playing cards, not dancing and not drinking or smoking.

Followers of The Way, then, are called to do justice and speak out for justice as an expression of their commitment to the LORD; and they are to so love kindness that it becomes the signature tune of their way of living; and finally, their relationship with God was to be one of humility knowing that nothing we receive is deserved but an outright expression of God’s grace; it also means that there can be none of the typical exclusiveness that religions often take on about who is in and who is out.

So, that’s a pretty important thing to take notice of.

But wait, there’s more.

SOCIAL JUSTICE

By citing the words of Isaiah, as he did, Jesus is saying that his ministry was going to be focussed on the seriously disadvantaged of his day:

The Poor

The Prisoners

The Disabled

The Oppressed

This should be a manifesto for the Social-Justice units of churches all over the world, and I am sure you will have observed what I have observed about these units in churches and that is that while they may be tolerated as “necessary” they can be rather discomforting and so are often marginalised in the systems of power within the church.  Nobody likes being told by the “prophets” that they are doing it wrong.

This goes for governments as much as church power-brokers, too.  The situations of greatest distress that I have experienced in our public discourse in Australia have related to failure by governments to act justly or even developing policies that perpetrate injustice:

Our current refugee policies;

The refusal of the Federal government to say “Sorry” to our first nations people;

Our failure to look after our children in care;

And I could go on…

The thing that I think Luke is wanting us to take notice of here is that things are not as they seem.  We look at those people who are respectable and doing well, and we think that this is because they are good people and that God is on their side.

Gods seems to have a preferential option for the poor, the imprisoned, the disable, the oppressed – in a word, the marginalised.  These are the ones that God cares about and God wants us to care about them, too.

Jesus demonstrated this very clearly again and again – and he got a reputation as drunkard and glutton, always hanging out with the tax-collectors, prostitutes and sinners, rather than the good citizens of Israel.

I think we have our marching orders in these words and I trust that you as a community of people who are followers of The Way will commit yourselves to discovering what that means for you right here where you live let alone here in WA and Australia.