Good News for Those That Need It

Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; Psalm 19; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21

The book of Nehemiah records that, when the people of Israel assembled in Jerusalem upon returning from exile, and the book of the Law of Moses was read and explained to them, their reaction was to weep.

Martin Luther liked to say that the Law has two main functions. First, the Law shows us the beautiful life that God has always intended for human beings – that we would live together in community, that at least once a week we would be free to rest from work and enjoy life, that elders would be honored, that our lives and relationships and possessions and boundaries would all be respected, that we would not covet and compete with one another but all share in the plentiful gifts of God that are enough for everyone.

But learning that God has this beautiful plan for our human life together has a second effect – we see how far our actual life is from the life God wants from us. We see how powerful are the forces that grind us down, that extract from us more than is humanly possible to bear, that set us in competition with one another, that tell us that some of us are expendable and not worthy of respect or dignity. That we live lives that are very far from the beauty of what God wants for us, and that the good God desires from us feels unattainable – at least not something that we can achieve or fix on our own.

The book of the Law that Ezra read to the people gathered at the Water Gate, the book of the prophet Isaiah that Jesus read to the people gathered in the synagogue in his home town of Nazareth – these books fill us with a sense of awe and wonder as they portray a community that practices justice and mutual respect and ensures a good life for everybody. And they fill us with a sense of hopelessness, that the society where we actually live is in fact quite far from this vision. And that we ourselves are complicit in our common failure to live out God’s vision for humanity, and that we are powerless to bring this community into existence.

It’s only when we have experienced both of these effects of the Law, Luther said, that we begin to be ready to hear the good news of the Gospel – the good news that what is impossible for us is possible for God, that God has not given up on the divine plan for humanity, that in the resurrection of Jesus God has defeated the powers and the fears that prevent us from living in God’s peace, that one day the will of God for human beings will in fact be done on earth as it is in heaven.

In our midweek Bible reading group we just finished this week a long slog through the book of Deuteronomy, which is probably the book of the Law that Ezra would have read to the people that morning in Jerusalem. In our group we spent quite a while on chapter 15, which says that in addition to the sabbath every seven days when everyone gets to rest from work, there will be a sabbath year every seven years when all debts are forgiven and slaves are set free. It is a provision that prevents inequality from developing within the community of Israel, that prevents some people from using debt and dependency to gain long-term power over others. Before inequality gets entrenched, before anyone gets too deeply into poverty and debt – every seven years the clock is reset. Every seven years everyone forgives the debts of others and receives the same forgiveness of their own debts to others. The year of jubilee, they called it, the year of the Lord’s favor.

This jubilee is what Isaiah was speaking of in the passage that Jesus was called upon to read in the synagogue at Nazareth. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, to proclaim good news to the poor – to announce liberty for the captives, and release to the prisoners, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor has arrived.” The Law itself provided for a year of the Lord’s favor every seven years, a year when the captives would be freed and the poor would have their ancestral inheritance restored.

It’s not clear how much the law of the year of jubilee was actually practiced in ancient Israel – but the evidence suggests it probably wasn’t actually followed very often. Certainly in the time of Jesus it had become a distant memory – the Roman Empire wasn’t much into practicing the forgiveness of debts and the restoration of ancient equality. For people whose land had been foreclosed upon and had to work odd jobs like carpentry to eke out a living – the law of Jubilee must have sounded both beautiful and impossible.

And so for Jesus to begin his ministry by announcing that the ancient promise of the Law of Jubilee, the year of God’s favor, has now arrived – it is now fulfilled in your hearing – this must have been electrifying news. The reign of God is at hand, the proclamation of the year of God’s favor is here, right here, right now – God is acting today, here in Nazareth, to release debts, open eyes, free prisoners, break chains. Where we have been unable to make Jubilee work, God will make the year of Jubilee a reality right now, right here, in your hearing.

As Luke tells it, the whole life and ministry of Jesus, right up to the final confrontation with Pilate and the cross, consists of Jesus announcing and making real the year of Jubilee in the lives of ordinary people, and confronting the powers and fears that keep us from realizing the freedom and joy of Jubilee in our actual lives. Those powers and those fears are very strong, and it costs Jesus dearly to struggle against them, and even the Easter victory of Jesus does not completely set us free from their power, at least not yet.

But in the meantime, the Holy Spirit calls us to have the gift of faith to believe those powers and fears have in fact been defeated, and that we are therefore free to start acting on that belief. We are free to start practicing Jubilee right here and now. One way to imagine what that looks like, it seems to me, is Paul’s famous image of the body of Christ we hear in today’s second reading.

The human body is an amazing collection of parts that work together in deep and mysterious ways. The body has hands and feet and eyes and ears, but also livers and gall bladders, T-cells and an immune system, hearts and lungs and nerves and brains and systems that operate outside of our awareness.

And every part is essential.

And every part is essential. Social convention will tell you that some parts of the body are more honorable that others. But this is a lie – every part of the body is essential, every part of the body is important for the good functioning of the whole, every part of the body is a beautiful creation of the good God. And the same is true for our communities – every person is essential, every person is unique and irreplacable.

Some people may say that the blind and the crippled and the imprisoned and the impoverished are expendable, they don’t contribute to the economy. Not so, say Isaiah and Jesus – the arrival of the year of God’s favor is especially good news for them.

Paul says that when there are parts of the body that are thought to be less honorable – not that they are in fact less honorable, because in fact every part is honorable and essential and just as important as any other part – but when some parts are thought to be less honorable, we go out of our way to protect and dress up those parts more than the others. “God has so arranged the body,” Paul writes, “giving the greater honor to the (supposedly) inferior member, so that there will be no dissention within the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another.”

That’s why I think it is profoundly Christian to stand up in solidarity with anyone the society of the moment says is less honorable and less valuable than others. Poor people, sick people, people of color, queer people, old people, young people, people who don’t have jobs, people who struggle with mental illness or addiction, people who have harmed others, people who are thought of as expendable or less honorable for any reason whatsoever – we Christians who know better are set free to be right there making sure they get the honor and respect they deserve. And we do this so that the coming reign of God will be made manifest to everyone.

Because we know that it is God’s will that there be Jubilee, that God deeply desires release from the obligations and the burdens and the weight of the past that cripple and blind and imprison people. Because we know and can admit that in our fear we sometimes treat others as less than ourselves. But most of all, because we know that God calls us beloved children anyway, that God forgives us and sets us free, so that we can forgive and set free whoever may still be bound in chains. This is the electrifying good news that Jesus once announced in the synagogue in Nazareth, the good news that we announce this morning in Mount Vernon, the good news of God’s abundant grace and mercy for all – and especially for those who really need to hear good news.