York Minster

God’s Today Luke 4: 14-21

Date: 24th May 2009
Preacher: The Reverend Canon Jeremy Fletcher

It is a strange experience to return to a place you have known, and to preach there. I’ve preached twice at my old school, twice at my old University and once at my old theological college, and there were always teachers present who had taught me when I was much younger. It’s a strange experience - you are immediately 12, or 20, or 25 again. Past and present and future are bound up in a complex way – you are grateful for memory and tradition, but aware that the world has moved on, and that there are new things to say.

In our second reading this afternoon Jesus was on just such territory – the place where he had been brought up. His ministry had been public for long enough to have been well known, and he was therefore returning to those who had known him longest with a degree of wider fame and approval. No doubt his former teachers would be there. After a promising start it gets difficult. His message doesn’t fulfil expectations, nor sit with their world view. By challenging them Jesus makes them angry, and the section actually ends with them dragging him out of synagogue and town and attempting to hurl him off a cliff. Thankfully that didn’t happen when I went back to my old places of learning, unless one of the dinners I was given was deigned to make me ill.

There is past, present and future here.  The past is signified by the reading. The synagogue custom was to read a small section of the Scriptures each week. Someone, perhaps the local or a visiting rabbi, or indeed one of the local congregation, would then teach about them. Jesus is recognised as itinerant, but local and welcome and invited to read and speak.  He is given Isaiah, and finds Chapter 61 – our first reading today. The hopes of the Jews had come to be all wrapped together in a figure who would exemplify the King, the Prophet, the Son of God, the Servant who suffered, the Messiah. These are longings from the past which the people hearing would have stored and cherished. We have similar ‘trust deeds’ – this place is an embodiment of them in stone. We have a rich heritage, which shapes us and which we should celebrate.

But there is a present reality also: we cannot be shaped solely by what we have been handed. Jesus makes this clear by his interpretation of the passage: this is about the fulfilment of those past hopes now – the realisation that this is God’s today. Jesus declares an end to the waiting.  He says that all is fulfilled in him: he is the bringer of good news to the poor; the freer of captives, the healer of the blind, the liberator of the oppressed, the one whose words bring in the new era of God’s blessing. Jesus does not look back to when it was better before, nor look forward to what might be if all went well. He says: all that is here now. In me. 

And this shapes our future. What Jesus does here is to say that God’s eternal new day has dawned. What the prophets longed for has been realised, and because this is the new day, the acceptable year, the day of the Lord’s favour, it is now here for ever. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” is spoken to us now as well as to the people in the Nazareth synagogue. It means that everything about God’s new kingdom is here, for us to live in for ever. It may not be fully revealed, but the reality is now, and part of our task it to bring it to fruition.

Our past shapes us. Our future beckons us. But what inspires us today is bringing in the liberation only found in Jesus.  That will mean shaping a society based on justice and service, not greed and selfishness, and it will require the churches to lead the way in showing how human beings can live together without tearing each other apart – and that may just irritate human society as Jesus’s hearers in the synagogue were irritated.

But what will happen when the churches become places of freedom, healing, and proclamation of God’s today? That’s a question for all of us, reflecting on our past, moving into our future, and living each day in the presence of God who sets us free. 

Amen.