A proclamation of values

 ‘…Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing..’ (John 2:10)

Luke 4:14-30 (Year C: Epiphany+3)

Proclamation is the name of a currently running Irish TV drama marking a selection of events took place in Dublin 100 years ago. The programme like the events it purports to remember and to dramatise has received mixed reviews. At the centre of the events was the ‘Proclamation’ made by the leader of the rebellion outside the General Post Office in Dublin during these events.  It was a bold and lyrical proclamation of an ideal and a purpose. 

And the rest is history.

The TV adaptation in the context of the centenary of 1916 might have involved a local crowd chasing Pádraig Pearse down Sackville Street to throw him into the Liffey!  (in real life this would not have been plausible as, in common with the vast majority of armies at the time, the comrades were heavily armed, as they claimed, ‘under the protection of the Most High God’ whose blessing they invoked ‘upon our arms’ to quote the 1916 proclamation).

So much for Irish history.

And Jesus went back to his home town and ‘as was his custom’ (v.16) he went to the local synagogue on the Saturday. He ‘unrolled the scroll’ and ‘found the place where it was written’ in what we recognise as coming from the 61^st chapter of the Book of Isaiah to make a bold and challenging proclamation with the very clear implication that this applied to Jesus and that this was happening right now in front of the synagogue congregation as well as the people in the region.

What did Jesus say?  He had four messages to related:

1. Good news to the poor
2. Freedom and release for those imprisoned
3. recovery of sight to the blind
4. A year of the Lord’s favour.

We can read into this a very radical challenge to the religious and political status quo both then and now. No wonder his own people and religious brethren pursued him to the brow of the hill to kill him once the full implications of what he was saying sank in (Beware of one of our own).

Who are the poor? How do we help the poor?

When Jesus stood up in that synagogue and proclaimed a year of the Lord’s favour he did not waste words.  He went straight to the core of his purpose and mission drawing on a text that would have been very well known to his own people and the synagogue minders.  For some reason the passage recalling this bold proclamation in the synagogue and which is read on this Sunday in the ‘Year of Luke’ stops short at verse 21:

Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.

In a touch of enormous irony the fulfilment of scripture this very day that Jesus stood up in the synagogue meant that Jesus very nearly met death as the locals rose up and took him to the brow of the hill in Nazareth to throw him to his death. His fine words and popularity (refer to verse 15 ‘praised by everyone’) quickly turned to hatred, persecution and exclusion from Nazareth and the synagogue there.  That, too, was a fulfilment of scripture. A bold proclamation backed by practical witness and living out of a set of values brings its own opposition and death.

• And what values do we live out of?
• What is our manifesto or proclamation?
• Does it appear to be any different to those manifestos – corporate, ideological, nationalist, religious etc. that dominate our world? 
• Does our proclamation make a difference and how and why and where?
• Can we tell stories from our own water wells where others may draw the living water?
• Is our religion a religion of just words?  Is our religion a religion merely of the head but not of the head and the heart?
• Who knows?
• Who cares? 

The crowd is fickle. There is a limit of 140 characters per tweet and 2 minutes attention span on vimeo or youtube.  If Jesus made his proclamation in 50 words – give or take that he spoke not in English but, presumably, in Aramaic in his local town – then what is our 50 word-20 second pitch? And how do our words and gestures carry credible weight in a world where cynicism, broken promises and fatalism prevail?

Put another way, anyone who wants to proclaim a year of the Lord’s favour that is more than just words but that involves fundamental change either in the way people live, or think or expect is landing herself or himself into serious trouble. Jesus’ time had not yet come but his time would come and there would be payback time for quoting Isaiah and applying it to himself in such a way that someone in the authority got seriously upset. Did that stop Jesus? No more than his cousin John the Baptist it did not. What defines Jesus is not how he defines himself in the finest of Greek philosophy or the exactitude of Jewish Law but in what he does and how he does it. Therein lies the power and love of God at work through his Word.

The point about scripture ‘fulfilment’ is not that the world or our lives goes according to some literal script so that we are in auto-pilot carrying out a blueprint. We are not just followers but pioneers in the life that Jesus brought to us in a backward corner of the Roman empire and that he still brings to us no matter who we are or where we are.

Postscript

The Battle of the Somme in July 1916 also involved proclamation of purpose and mission – the alleged freedom of small nations and all of that – and many Irish men and women died for that.  Millions died for what. And still die.

But, happy is the land that has no need of heroes no matter what political colour they carry: “Unhappy the land that has no heroes,” says a character in Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo. “No,” replies another. “Unhappy the land that needs heroes.”