Saint Luke 4, 16-30: Today this Scripture is fulfilled
The message contained in today’s Gospel is very dense and broad. We are going to read from today until the end of the Christian Year, at the doors of Advent, the evangelist Luke. We started with its fourth chapter, because in Advent and Christmas we already did it with the first three: the annunciation, the birth, the childhood of Jesus and his Baptism in the Jordan. And we begin with a very significant, programmatic scene that can be said to give meaning to the entire messianic ministry of Jesus: his first preaching in the synagogue of his town Nazareth.
Jesus appears from the first page as the Messenger of God, his Anointed One, the one filled with the Spirit. And he also appears as the one who announces salvation to the poor, the captives, the blind, the oppressed. Luke is going to be a good teacher for us so that we know how to present Jesus, also to our world today, as the saviour of the poor. «He has anointed me and sent me to give the good news to the poor.» It is a good portrait of Jesus, which will unfold over the next few weeks: the one who cares for the poor, the one who wants joy for all, the one who offers integral liberation to those who suffer some kind of slavery.
Is this also the program of your community, that is, of us? Can it be said that we are announcing the good news to the poor? And are we ourselves those poor who let themselves rejoice at the announcement of Jesus? The admiration, first, and the rejection and persecution, later, are already from the beginning the synthesis of the reactions that Jesus will elicit throughout his ministry, ending on the cross. And also, of what will happen to his Church throughout the centuries, as very well Luke himself was in charge of describing in his book of Acts. With the conviction that after the cross comes the resurrection. But in the meantime, we are not surprised that many of our efforts fail, as Jesus failed many times.
Jesus is truly the «year of grace» that God has prepared for humanity, by sending him – two thousand years ago now – as saviour and «evangelizer.» Hopefully we will also look at him like his countrymen at the beginning: «the whole synagogue had its eyes fixed on him.» «Today this Scripture is fulfilled.» This is what happens every day, in our listening to the biblical readings. They are not proclaimed to us so that we find out what happened (we usually know and, but because God wants to renew his saving grace, that of the OT and that of the NT, today and here for us. It is what our personal meditation and homily They must seek to: update in our lives what God has told us in his History of Salvation.
Peace and good
Fr. Antonio Majeesh George Kallely, OFM
