“Who the heck is Jesus, really"!!!”
Karen Sloan 23/01/2022
Readings - 1 Corinthians 12:12-20, Luke 4:14-21
I have had a few weeks off, and apart from doing some swimming eating and sleeping, I also did lots of reading.
One book I have read that’s been incredibly rewarding is called ”The book of longings” by Sue Monk Kidd. It’s a work of fiction but presents Jesus as married and depicts his world and his life and his mission in relation also to family and to Anna, his wife. The author uses as a basis for her story one of the writings from the Nag Hammadi collection found in 1945, in Egypt called Thunder, Perfect Mind,. This piece of prose speaks of God with a feminine divine voice and was written maybe in the 1st or 2nd century. The book by Monk focusses on both Jesus and Anna and gives Anna a voice at a time when women were regarded as mere chattels. The author imagines that Anna is the author of this beautiful piece of ancient writing.
But the novel also is very profound in its depiction of Jesus, not as a super hero, not as less than human, but rather as truly human. A human being living in a time when Rome ruled, where exclusion was the norm for many many people, and where the priesthood and the authorities were more interested in the rules than the heart of God.
So how does this book relate to today’s reading, well it relates in so many ways. When you think of Jesus think of a young man steeped in the Jewish religion, A carpenter, and a peasant, and with a family who loved him, but also a person with an incredible understanding and connection with the God of the universe, the God in us, and a vision for how God’s kingdom can be brought to life on earth.
Think of him as a real human being, first and foremost.
Then the reading from Luke will come alive.
The reading is set at the beginning of Jesus ministry, after his 40 days in the desert. The other gospels put it later, but not Luke.
Jesus comes back from the desert and goes to the synagogue, in his home town. Luke makes this event the inauguration and preview of all of Jesus’s ministry. It’s like its his first and most important sermon.
Jesus presents himself as the anointed prophet predicted in Isaiah, who announces “the favourable year of the lord”. Which everyone who is listening knows refers to the year of Jubilee, where debts are cancelled, slaves and prisoners released and property returned to its original family. Wealth that had been accumulated would be redistributed.
So what does Jesus say on that morning….
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.” Similar to the year of the Jubilee. That’s it…
Then he rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, and sits down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him and I’m sure everyone was like, “wait. What just happened?” Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Not every 50 years, but now, today.
Hell of a sermon. Short, shorter than mine!
Hell of a message. We hear next week people weren’t all that pleased with it.
Nadia Bolz Weber runs a church called “A house for all sinners and saints”. She is a wonderful writer and leader in her own right.
This is what she images Jesus might say if he entered her church or our church, and preached this same message in the 21st century… I thought it was too good not to share….
“Maybe, just maybe, our Lord would say something like this……,
The Spirit of the Lord has anointed him to bring good news to the poor.
-to bring gifts of fine wine and rich food to those who exist only on McDonalds and funions, a type of onion cracker, because it’s the only food in walking distance from their decrepit neighbourhoods
-the Spirit of the Lord has anointed him to forgive all your student loans.
– to bring living water to the people of Syria, Palestine and Yemen and to the Congo and to our hidden suburbs
– to tell the bank janitors that the CEO has distributed all their own pay raises and bonuses and stock options to them
-to look the Dow Jones in the eyes and laugh
-to dismantle our system of profits at the expense of people
-to restore the dignity of the 99% AND to restore the dignity of the 1%
– to endow us with a sense of worth that has nothing to do with bank accounts and status
Because the Spirit of the Lord had sent him to bring good news to the poor.
I imagine Jesus standing here and saying that The Spirit of the Lord has sent him to release to the captives
to free the addicts from the needle and the bottle and the laptop
– to remove the feeling of worthlessness from the depressed
- bring rest to the sleep-deprived parents of babies
– to free those wrongly imprisoned by justice system so often lacking in actual justice
– to take away the profit making system of the US prison industrial complex
– to remove all desire for the kind of cheap goods that only can come from child labour
– to give a sense of belonging to the alienated
– to forgive the sinner
– to save us from having to prove ourselves
– to remove all resentments from those who can’t let go of the past
Because the Spirit of the Lord has sent him to bring release to the captives
And then I imagine me shifting my weight around in my seat – when I realize his sermon is going over 10 minutes and that Jesus might not know how we do things here. And then I imagine him looking at me and giving me the most loving “get over yourself” look ever and I imagine us all laughing including the kids with him, before he continues.
and then he says that he has also come to bring recovery of sight to the blind.
– to forever change the way we see those whose abilities differ from our own.
– to illuminate to us the ways that human sin tears at the fabric of all humanity
– to allow us to see who we really are, to again glimpse the image of God in ourselves and others – to again see that thing that has always been there but is so obscured and made opaque by years of competing messages.
– to give us a glimpse of heaven in the here and now. To show us that the Kingdom of God is at hand.
– to show us what it looks like to love what God loves
– to allow us to see ourselves as God see us. So that we see how there really is no longer a “them” there is only an “us”.
Because the Spirit of the Lord has sent him to bring recovery of sight to the blind.
The Spirit of the Lord has sent him to bring freedom to the oppressed, the over worked, the under-appreciated, the last chosen, the unlovely, the despised and unseen, the overly-proud, the parts of ourselves that are so small.
And maybe that is what our ears might hear were Jesus to stand at this stand and say:
“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.”
And then he sits down. And the eyes of our whole congregation are fixed upon him. No one moves. Not even the kids. And then he says,
“Guys, stop looking at me – you have what you need. It’s all here. Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Not bad. Thanks Nadia. I know, a sermon longer than you might have expected today, and I know the rules, but maybe this is a reading we have to linger on for a while, particularly at the beginning of a new year.
For Jesus was a man, who had a vision, its wasn’t just political, it wasn’t just spiritual, it was about life, life for everyone. And that it has begun today if we hear and trust in it.
Because when Jesus opens his mouth to speak, it’s as though there is something both common and melodic about his voice. A voice that is as familiar as the sound of our own heartbeats. A song we had forgotten and yet still know by heart (again words from Nadia).
A song that calls us to become the body of Christ, for the sake of the world, or at least our part of it.
Amen.