Fourth of Year C
January 2010
The theme today is how God never tires of sending prophets to his people who, by and large, reject and ignore these prophets.
As I have said many times, each of the gospels are not exact accounts of what Jesus of Nazareth said and did. They are four different theologies or explanations or exposition of what the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth meant to different, widely separated, Christian communities. These four differing theologies were written down between forty and seventy years after the death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth and are the result of much thought, contemplation and living out of the Christian message in these communities.
Today’s Gospel is a typical example.
Today’s story of what happened at Nazareth is a preview of the whole Gospel.
The account we read in today’s gospel occurred at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry. It may or may not have happened as portrayed in today’s Gospel reading. For Luke it is a prefigurement or a synopsis or a foretelling in symbolic form of the principle events of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
The reading from Isaiah symbolises his preaching of the Good News.
The response to this Good News was acceptance by some and rejection and ridicule by others.
Jesus chides them for their unbelief and punctures their little bubble of pride by telling them that the God they claimed to be exclusively theirs was in fact the God of all peoples.
Their reaction to this was to seize him and try to destroy him - His arrest and execution on the cross.
But Jesus was enabled to escape from the worst they could do to him and walk away. - - His resurrection and Ascension.
So in today’s Gospel story of what happened to Jesus at Nazareth we have a synopsis, in the form of a story, of the main events of the life death, Resurrection and Ascension of Jesus.
Whether the events at Nazareth actually happened as described, or not, is not the point. .
So I must ask myself, how do I react to the preaching of the good news.