The Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (C)
Dear brothers and sisters,
In the Gospel passage(s) we have just heard, Mother Church presents to us two beginnings. Perhaps you missed them; it would have been easy to do so.
These verses from the quill of Saint Luke the Church come from two different parts of his account of the life of Jesus. The first four verses come the very beginning of his Gospel; the rest come from its fourth chapter, beginning with Jesus’ preaching in the synagogue following his temptations in the wilderness. Why has today’s Gospel been seemingly cobbled together so?
There is a word found in both passages connecting them together; the word is “fulfillment” (Luke 1:4; 4:21). In the first instance, Saint Luke speaks of “the events that have been fulfilled among us,” namely the Paschal Mystery, the Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension of Jesus Christ. Whereas other accounts of these events were somewhat piecemeal, jotted down quickly without organization, Saint Luke tells us he decided “to write it down in an orderly sequence,” that is, to record the life and ministry of the Son of God in a chronological fashion (Luke 1:3).
In doing so, the Evangelist is not simply setting out to write an historical account as we would understand it. No,
the evangelist does not simply speak of events that have taken place, but emphasizes and specifies that they have been fulfilled. He is saying that it is not simply something that has happened, perhaps something new or beautiful, but that everything that has happened is a fulfillment. In other words, something that has reached its fullness, its purpose, its goal.[1]
Luke knew the ancient prophecies of God; he, too, had been awaiting the promised Messiah and knew the Messiah had come in the person of the God-Man. In the beginning, we find the fulfillment.
We next find Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth. Why does he go there when he is God himself? He does so, in part, to give us an example. “As a strict observer, the Lord does not disregard the pattern of the weekly liturgy and joins the assembly of his fellow citizens in prayer and in listening to the Scriptures.”[2] If the Lord Jesus does not exempt himself from communal worship each week, who are we to attempt to exempt ourselves from the holy Mass, even if only from time to time?
In the context of the weekly liturgy, Jesus “reads a Word and proclaims that this Word has been fulfilled.”[3] He reads one of the Messianic promises given to the people because they have been found unable to fulfill the demands of the law which they took upon themselves under the priest Ezra (cf. Nehemiah 8:6).
What does Jesus mean when he says the beautiful Messianic promise of Isaiah is at last fulfilled? He means
that our starting point, the beginning of life, is something that has been fulfilled, that a promise is kept, a covenant is fulfilled, a faithfulness is honored. At the beginning of our faith, at the beginning of our life, at the beginning of our relationship with the Lord, there is a gift that has been long prepared and finally irrevocably given. Fulfilled.[4]
Even in the beginning, we find the fulfillment.
Consider what Jesus does in that synagogue. Luke emphasizes that “Jesus stands up, receives the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, opens it, finds the passage with the verses that speak of the coming of the kingdom of God, reads from the scroll, rolls it up again, hands it to the servant and finally sits down again.”[5] Each of these actions, these gestures, these movements, carries great meaning because Jesus never does anything needlessly.
Jesus receives this history, in obedience to the Father; then He opens it to enter into it, to be part of it. He enters into a history that walks toward Him, the history of waiting for the Messiah, of waiting for a salvation that is free, that is for all. Jesus then reads it, interprets the law, that is, he makes it his own, reveals its meaning. And finally he rewinds the scroll, because the time of waiting for that Word is over, and now everything written in the scroll is fulfilled: you can see it and touch it, in his own person.
He is the redemption, He is the sight, He is the good news.[6]
“Jesus himself is ‘the today’ of salvation in history, because he brings to completion the work of redemption.”[7]
My brothers and sisters, Jesus has not simply entered into history generally, but into the history of a people, a people made up of persons, of persons he has united to himself through his Baptism in the Jordan. He has entered into my history; he has entered into your history. What is more, we have entered into his history through our Baptism into his Death and Resurrection. This gives new meaning to each “today,” and particularly so to each Sunday, the day of his triumph over the grave.
In this light, this Gospel passage calls us to reconsider the “today” of Sunday, how we live Sunday as a day set aside for God and for family.
Above all, it is the day to devote to the Lord, by participating in the Eucharist, in which we are nourished by the Body and Blood of Christ and by his life-giving Word. Second, in our diversified and distracted time, this Gospel passage invites us to ask ourselves whether we are able to listen. Before we can speak of God and with God we must listen to him, and the liturgy of the Church is the “school” of this listening to the Lord who speaks to us. Finally, he tells us that every moment can be the propitious “day” for our conversion. Every day (kathçmeran) can become the today of our salvation, because salvation is a story that is ongoing for the Church and for every disciple of Christ. This is the Christian meaning of “carpe diem”: seize the day in which God is calling you to give you salvation![8]
Let us, then, not be afraid to allow Jesus into the “today” of our lives. Let us not be ashamed to allow him into our history, however messy it might be. He is not afraid to enter into it; rather, he plunges himself into our history even as he plunges us into his own life in the waters of Baptism. Let us strive to live today in such a way that the fulfillment of eternal life promised us in our beginning at Baptism, may be given to us. Amen.