For Sunday
Epiphany 3C
Collect
Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation, that we and the whole world may perceive the glory of his marvelous works; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.
Reading
Reflection
As we move back to the gospel of Luke, we attend Jesus’s first act in this gospel. After his baptism, he is drawn into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to confront Satan with his three temptations to power. This story, which we’ll come back to in Lent, offers us a preview of Jesus’s relationship to power — which is to say he is not interested in the forms of power that Satan offers him. Power over desire, over people, and over God. This sequence helps prepare us for what is to come.
Now, we see that Jesus does have power already. He is filled with the power of the Holy Spirit. And that power is performing before a crowd gathered in the synagogue in his hometown.
The passage offers us a fascinating juxtaposition between the humanness of Jesus and the divine power flowing through him. We get to see what a sort of real power looks like, as long as we remember what it is Jesus came to do, which is articulated afresh here from Isaiah.
The challenge for many of us is that we receive this message like the town does (will, in the next section of the story) — with amazement in the hearting, then anger at what it implies about us, our relationships, and ultimately how we relate to this person named Jesus.
For his message appeals to them, the dream of God is attractive to all who hear it, but in the realizing the messenger is the carpenter’s son or that the church has lost moral standing in the modern world or that releasing captives and restoring sight and letting the oppressed go free means not only changing our current practices, but our own relationship to wealth, power, and control.
And suddenly, we’re less interested in the day of the Lord’s favor being today. Maybe tomorrow. When other people get their act together.