I just read from the beginning of the Gospel according to Luke, the longest of all the Gospels, written by the same Evangelist who penned the Acts of the Apostles.
Today’s Gospel is in two parts, including the opening verses of Luke’s first and fourth chapters.
The first passage is a sort of prologue, addressed, like the Acts of the Apostles to a man named Theophilus, a Greek name which means “friend of God.” This Theophilus serves as a kind of stand-in for you and for me, and everyone who reads or hears the Gospel, seeking to be open to God and to learn about his only-begotten Son.
And the second part of the passage I just read, from chapter four, does just that, as it introduces us to Jesus, beginning his public ministry. Chapter four picks up right after the Baptism of Jesus by John in the Jordan river, which we listened to a couple of weeks ago when we celebrated the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.
So chapter four picks up on the Sabbath, as Jesus, “in the power of the Spirit,” goes to the Synagogue in his home town of Nazareth.
Just like any good Jew, Jesus joins the others gathered for Sabbath prayer and listens to the Scriptures. Like our own Liturgy, those who gathered in the synagogue would have listened to a reading from the Torah or the Prophets, followed by a homily, which is exactly what Jesus, the young rabbi, does.
He opens the scrolls and finds a passage from the Prophet Isaiah that begins: “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted.”1
A couple hundred years later, Origen, a Father of the Church from Alexandria in Egypt, would write of this passage: “It is no coincidence that [Jesus] opened the scroll and found the chapter of the reading that prophesies about him. This was God’s will.”2
For then Jesus does a remarkable thing. He looked up at the assembled congregation and began his homily with these words: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
Listen to what Jesus is saying. In him is fulfilled the hope of all the prophets. In him is the fulness of all truth. In Jesus, standing and preaching in the Nazarene synagogue, is the hope and salvation of every human being who ever walked the face of the earth. For he has anointed me to bring good tidings to the afflicted, to us, and all who dwell in darkness and sin.
And listen to the first word of his homily: Today! Another great Alexandrian father of the Church, Saint Cyril, tells us how important that Today is, for just as we are Theophilus, the ones to whom the Gospel of Luke has been addressed, so we live in that today, situated between the first coming of Christ in a manger and the second coming in glory at the end of time. And because we live in this today, our work is to listen to the Gospel and to convert our hearts and our lives in preparation for Christ’s coming in glory, for that Last Judgement at the end of
time.3
Indeed, as our beloved Pope emeritus teaches us, “Jesus himself is the today of salvation in history, because he brings to completion the work of redemption.”4 Jesus is not a fond memory or unfulfilled hopes of yesterday. He is the today of our lives, the Lord who invites us to turn away from all that is dark or sinful, and to follow him, who is our light and our salvation.
So hear the the Lord as he opens the scrolls and proclaims the Gospel, which is the story of the God who so loved us that he became a man for us, offered his life on the Altar of the Cross for our salvation, and in his life, dying and rising, fulfilled the hopes of all mankind.
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1 - Isaiah 61:1-2.
2 - Origen, Homilies on the Gospel of Luke, 32, 3.
3 - cf. PG 69, 1241.
4 - Pope Benedict XVI, Angelus, 27 January 2013.
