Sunday Sermonettes: Luke 4:14-21

Sunday Sermonettes: In which I attempt to not completely waste my seminary education and reflect on a text from this week’s liturgy.

¹⁴ Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. ¹⁵ He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

¹⁶ He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, ¹⁷ and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
¹⁹     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

²⁰ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.²¹ He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

(Luke 4:14-21, TNIV Available at Bible Gateway: here.)

Luke, rather quickly, has become my favorite gospel. This favor coincides, I suppose, with my relatively new found awareness of issues of class and race. A fundamental concern with the structures that confine and constrain, define and detain us. And so I look to see if Jesus cares as much as I do about the structural.

One doesn’t necessarily find it in this text. What you do find in Luke which isn’t always highlighted in the other texts is the concern for the material. I remember thinking that, yes of course Christ gives sight to the blind and “sets the oppressed free,” but what really matters is the “spiritual” those metaphysical abstractions that can only be seen by faith and if they can’t be seen they need to be blindly followed “by faith.” I was always quick to privilege Matthew by inserting “in spirit” after “poor.” Because we all know the poor being poor is their own damn fault and that Jesus was not a communist.

But LUKE, oh Luke is constantly drawing attention to the material conditions people find themselves in, the ways in which the material is used and structured to oppress and blind. And the clarion call of Christ at the outset of his ministry is that it is this world he has come to engage, this material context, these particular constraining structures. And our following Christ must be in this world. It cannot abandon this world in his name.

I’ve grown tired of abstraction and what feels like a fundamentally “euphemistic” faith. One finds in Luke that Jesus seems uninterested in it as well. It comforts me that others are tired of this as well:

What I am saying is that the Christian life is not a blank slate, upon which we need to discern how to fill it all up. Instead, the Christian life  is defined by a concrete lifestyle and ethics which demands following. We follow the life of Christ. Jesus is never on route to the American Dream (or the Imperial Throne of Rome), but to the cross. In fact, to choose to not live a life of the cross is to choose to no longer be Christ’s follower (Luke 14:27).

(D.G. Hart, “The Will of God: More Abstractions So We Can Avoid Following Jesus“)

Whatever it means to follow Christ, it will require concrete action, in the real world. We have to address issues of economics, class, race, violence, governance and so on. It cannot simply flee to an internal, intellectualism in dealing with the world. We cannot persist with the notion that if we just got everyone thinking right all will be well. If we could get them to have some mystical experience everything would start to turn around. We have to attend to structures. We have to name “sin” (as opposed to simply euphemistically referring to it is a way of deferring action on their or our parts).

I certainly would prefer to remain in the realm of the intellectual, the mystical, the spiritual. It’s safer. But it’s also not the gospel.