Today is Bible Sunday and Luke’s Gospel places the story we have just heard at the beginning of Jesus's ministry, when Jesus draws on Isaiah. The practice in the synagogue was to read a passage from Torah say about God’s promises to the Israelites, and then a concluding passage from a Prophet which applied the Torah to human history. This passage from Isaiah 61 is no longer used in Jewish worship precisely because Jews reject its use in Luke Chapter 4 and the ascription of the prophecy to Jesus.
Our faith stands or falls on this text and Jesus’s claim taken up by his followers that he fulfils the calling as the saviour of the world. It’s a massive claim, and one that his contemporaries in the synagogues did not and never would accept.
The question I want to ask is how much reliance can we place on the Biblical text and indeed what is Scripture and what is not?
If it is an instruction manual then how come its instructions can be read so differently, not only between us and the Jews in particular with whom we share so much of it, but also between ourselves as Christians as the current controversies such as say about Living in Love and Faith, when we literally share all of it?
Scripture at the time of Christ did not include the Gospels or other writings that make up the New Testament. Over time these were added as the life of Christ became accepted by the new sect that began its life within Judaism as a point of departure and new beginnings.
For Christians Jesus becomes much more than a teacher and a prophet (which of course Muslims believe) but a new expression of God themself. In the Gospel of John he is called the living word, in Greek the Logos, and for our purposes today he is living scripture, the words brought to life, which is literally what Jesus can be understood as saying to his hearers.
This day the words that I have read are being fulfilled in your presence … the Spirit of the Lord is upon me, … to proclaim the freeing of the captives … the day of the Lord’s mercy.
Rather than an instruction manual we need I think to see the scriptures as a guide book, and more than that a living document that tells a story of what has and still is unfolding in human history and the human imagination of which our individual and communal stories and life together is a part. It was for Jesus and it was for the Jews in their times. We can’t make the claim that it is the only story since its not in our gift to limit the ways of God. Since the time of Christ the stories of the Jews have continued in their own tributaries and in addition to the Hebrew Bible there is the Mishnah and the Talmud, and a whole superstructure of law and interpretation in which Jesus plays no part in most branches of modern Judaism although there are Jews who have accepted Jesus as the Messiah .
What is more relevant to us is how we as Christians treat the Scriptures amongst ourselves. As I said using the same source material we can come to very different conclusions about what we believe and wh. Paul tells us that we need to use the knowledge we think we have considerately. However compelling we think our arguments how we treat one another matters at least as much and often far more than the basis of our quarrels.
In Paul’s day the issue was whether to eat meat that had been sacrificed to idols and Paul says that if it comes to it then it is better to eat or to desist from eating if it enables us to live at peace with one another, and focus on what really matters.
How might this translate into our controversies today?
Is Paul saying that if it comes to it accept your Christian brothers who have different sexual inclinations and if he is what does that mean in practice? These are the kinds of issues that the church is wrestling today and some people are saying that it is so fundamental that we cannot agree to keep on this road together as Christians if we do, and others are saying that they are already being excluded if we don’t. This isn’t a dilemma for the rest of society as in our secular sphere we have already decided that we can’t be prescriptive about what makes us who we are. In religious circles where there seems to be a source text that has been quite certain about this it very much is. Did God put everything he wanted us to know into one place where there is privileged knowledge that cannot be questioned, and cannot change
because God cannot change? I’ll come back to this!
It's easy to see the solution to other people’s problems as far easier to solve than our own. The New testament Roman Christians were falling our over dietary laws but of course it was much more than that. They were asking how does following Christ fit in with being a Jew.
Were the two things compatible?
The answer they came to was that Jesus couldn’t be tucked away into a tidy corner but that it was a decisive break. The Jewish conception of God, found in the Torah, the story of creation and the founding principle of the community that worshipped him, and which
became embedded in practices that formed a community and way of life that was worthy and valuable had taken a step further in the direction of inclusivity to embrace all of the peoples based not on their location or ethnicity or their gender but on their humanity, made in the image of God.
In claiming this Jewish story of enslavement, freedom from one oppressor in Egypt, to a promised land, then into exile and return Jesus could have taken the view that his task like any legendary hero, a Joshuah or Moses or Sampson or David, was to turn the situation around again. There was strong support for that in his peers and in fact our history books tell us that there were messianic figures who emerged to try just that, and not long after Jesus the whole enterprise of a Jewish kingdom was broken apart and the Temple destroyed in 70 AD or Common Era to use the secular terminology.
Instead Jesus led by the Spirit has faced this temptation and overcome it. He begins his ministry having been baptised by John and blessed by the Father and empowered by the spirit. He has gone into the wilderness and been offered the poisoned chalice of earthly power and dominion and he has responded with scripture and rejected it. He has immersed himself in Scripture and knows that spiritual food means more than bread when he is so hungry he wants to eat the stones or that it would be folly to put God to the test by throwing himself off a high place in the Temple.
Its worth standing back for a moment and reflecting that this occasion is the third time that we have a story of Jesus in the instituted place of worship, what we call a church and they called either the Temple for the one temple in Jerusalem where sacrifices were made, or the
synagogue. The first time he is presented as a baby to Simeon and Anna and he is received as the fulfilment of lives dedicated to the coming of a saviour, the second time he strays from his parents and community in order to engage with the elders in the Temple. He is already engaging in questions both as children do who have acute and inspired intuitions about the meaning of life, and as a young person who can read and absorb the Scriptures. Between that day when he is 12 and 18 years or so later when his ministry begins Jesus has continued in a journey that would have been centred on Jewish Scripture. We know this
because it was the primary material for reading and because of Jesus’s reputation and knowledge in debate. He may have himself been a Pharisee or another sect within Judaism such as the Essenes who left the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Scripture now plays its part by the utterance of a prophet from perhaps 500 years before which affirms this. Jesus feels the Spirit is with him and he finds a passage which says that it is, the Spirit of God is upon me; words which presumably until Jesus reads them would have been read differently but because this is the appointed time and because he has been sent to say them he speaks with conviction.
These were startling words not because they hadn’t been read many times before but
because Jesus explains that they apply to him and to them.
He goes on to tell them after our reading that he has not been sent to them in his home town but in the tradition of the Prophets to those who are beyond the boundaries of his home town, or even his own people but foreigners to whom until now the promises of God have not applied wholesale.
Their aggrieved and furious reaction will be to turn him out of the synagogue and Nazareth itself.
This is as uncomfortable for us as it is for them. We know from the context that he is healing and ministering in Galilee so why not in his home town? If he hasn’t been sent for them then in a way if we apply it to ourselves as modern day Christians gathered to hear God’s word, how do we know it is for us. Why then do we come to church, try our best, pray, give to good causes and pay for the upkeep of the church and its ministers? Or are we okay since we are Christians, the ones who have come forward from our sinful communities to claim the promises of God?
I won’t leave you hanging very long but I will say this. I have often struggled with the passage in which Jesus meets with the Samaritan woman at the Well or with the Syro Phoenician woman who he likens to a dog, when he says almost abruptly and rudely that either they don’t know who he is or he has not come to them but for the lost sheep of the
House of Israel. I wonder if there isn’t a pattern here; Jesus wants to make his hearers think and review who they are. The Syro-Phoenecian woman quickly responds with her
entitlement even if only to the scraps. If they are from God’s table then they are better than
any amount of riches.
With his own people too, he has a serious purpose and one which he can only develop by a course that will look very much like failure and disappointment instead of power and glory.
The people of Nazareth will have heard of John the Baptist. Does Jesus mean that somehow he is going to free John? As we know John is murdered in prison and Jesus can do nothing about it. He has chosen a route to glory that goes by a different way. The prisoners he is referring to are those who are imprisoned by their own desires, and priorities whether they are status, or power over others or prisoners as a result of injustice who a just judge will release. He need his listeners to redefine themselves as those who like the foreigners he goes on to mention are not entitled to anything but to whom God sends his mercy and grace. His hometown congregation believe themselves to be among the elect just by being in the synagogue and inevitably we who come to Church regularly and give and all the rest as I was saying earlier understandably feel.
The Jews from whom our understanding of God begins in their Scriptures incorporate Torah into their lives which is both a story of enslavement and freedom and willing submission to strict commandments. These are ritually retold through scripture and performance which only has meaning if at the same time they also support the poor and free the oppressed, what we think of as the Gospel in terms of the treatment of one another and the world.
Some Jewish theologians have made the point that nothing Jesus does or says is in conflict with the true meaning of the law and the prophets.
The Gospel was good news not because it was new but because it opened the promises of God made to the Jews to all. Jesus confirms the promise of salvation but he tells his Jewish congregation that it is for others too.
For Jesus the scriptures (the Old Testament) already contained the Gospel and for Christians Jesus embodies this same Gospel. As Christians we believe as John the Gospel writer says that Jesus is the word made flesh.
I mentioned earlier the controversies in which we are immersed as a church from which
there are no easy or painless answers. I don’t think the answer is not to argue the case, but it is to do so with care for our fellows. One of the reasons we have been having discussions with a bring and share lunch, so far about disability and race is because there are things we need to do better as a church to be inclusive. Just as Judaism was always about more than the Jews but all the nations of the world, so our faith is not just for able bodied (whatever that means), white or brown or black people, or for married people or single people or for straight or gay and so on and on. We need all of us to play our part in that and it does raise questions and with the help of God and his word, both in the scriptures and embodied in the Lord Jesus we can do that.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.