Good News to the Poor
Luke 4:14-21
Epiphany 3C
January 27, 2013
Epiphany 3C
January 27, 2013
Rev. John M. Caldwell, PhD
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
First United Methodist Church
Decorah, IA
Note: Due to inclement weather
on January 20, 2013, the texts for that day were used for the following Sunday,
accounting for the use of the texts for the 3rd Sunday after
Epiphany being used on the 4th Sunday after Epiphany.
Last week we read in John’s gospel that the very first act of
ministry that Jesus did was to turn 150 gallons of water into a first-rate
wine. This is no accident, since the
first story discloses the heart of Jesus’ life and work. If we ask John’s Jesus what his message is in
a nutshell, he answers that it is that the life of God’s people is like a
wedding where the wine gets better and better and never runs out.
Luke does much the same thing in a quite different way. We are told that Jesus wandered through
Galilee working wonders and teaching in the synagogues. Then, when Jesus was back in his hometown of
Nazareth, before he called any disciples or did anything else, he went to
synagogue on the Sabbath.
He was handed the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. This would not have been unusual. Any adult Jewish male could read in synagogue. Jesus had developed a bit of a reputation and
it was only natural to give the hometown boy and visiting celebrity a chance to
shine.
Jesus read some words from Isaiah and it’s clear that he wanted to
read those particular words. He rolled
the scroll until he got to the section. It
took a while. There were no chapter or
verse numbers, no column headings. Everyone
was waiting. He wasn’t flustered by the
silence hanging in the air. Finally he
found what he was looking for at Isaiah 61, a part of what scholars now call III
Isaiah:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the
captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
He read these words and then he sat down. This is important. In our practice it is the congregation who
sits and it is the preacher or teacher who stands. In Jesus’ day it was the other way
around. The congregation stood out of
respect and the teacher sat. I’ve always
kind of liked that idea, but I can’t ever seem to get a congregation to go
along. Anyway, Jesus sat down to teach
and the congregation was standing.
Jesus sat down to make the text he had just read clear and this was
the whole of his sermon: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your
hearing.” (Maybe if my sermons were that
short, you’d be willing to stand!)
Jesus’ ministry, as Luke sees
it, is grounded in an old dream that calls upon an ancient ideal. The dream is the dream of restoration, of
repair and renewal. But that dream in
turn hearkens back to bedrock beliefs of God’s covenant people. Those beliefs have to do with how God’s
people are joined to the land.
In the story that God’s people
told themselves, land was not something that could be owned outright. It wasn’t something to be bought and
sold. It was not a commodity that could
be bundled, parceled, subdivided, or developed.
It was not a thing that was supposed to turn a profit. The land even had rights. It had, above all, the right to Sabbath rest.
It had the right to rest for a year after six years of crop production. Every seven years the land would lie
fallow. If it happened to bring forth a
crop on its own, that belonged to the poor who alone had a right to harvest it.
Land was a gift from God to
God’s people, a gift to all of God’s people. Each family had its own plot. Under the covenant each plot was joined to a
particular family. The family cared for
the land. The land under God’s care
provided for the needs of each family. The
prophet Micah had this in mind when he proclaimed an end to war, when
“[nations] shall beat their swords into
plowshares,
and their
spears into pruning hooks;
nation
shall not lift up sword against nation,
neither
shall they learn war anymore;
but they
shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees,
Everyone, not just in Israel
but even among the nations, is entitled to “their own vines and their own fig
trees.”
Of course, not all land was
equal and not all families were equal either.
Some families prospered on their land.
Others, either through lack of skill or through laziness or through
plain bad luck, found themselves in financial trouble. They might even be faced with the choice between
selling their land or starving. Of
course, they would choose to sell their land before they starved. In that case, there was the risk that the
bond that held the land and its family together might be broken.
God’s people, though, had a
clause in their covenant that answered to this need. Every fifty years, after seven cycles of
years of production and a year of Sabbath for the land, the land would go back
to its original family. If the family
had been forced to sell itself into slavery, they would be released from that
slavery at the same time. This year was
known as the Year of Jubilee. As the
Torah puts it:
“[Y]ou
shall hallow the fiftieth year and you shall proclaim liberty throughout the
land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you: you shall return,
every one of you, to your property and every one of you to your family.”[2]
Ancient Israel, at least in the
story that it told itself about itself, had a way of resetting the economic
game. It had a way to keep the rich from
becoming too rich and the poor from becoming too poor. It had a way of reminding those who did well and
those who did poorly that they were still bound to each other in God’s covenant. The terms of the covenant were such that the wealth
of the whole community was based on living justly with each other and with the
land. The rich could not have a special
deal of their very own that let them live as if they were not part of the
covenant.
Now, as I said, this was a part
of the story that they told themselves about themselves. We may surely ask if they actually did as
they said they were to do. We can ask, but
it is very hard to say that they did. They
may have, but there is little or no evidence for it. Still, it would be a stretch to argue from
the lack of evidence that they never kept the law of Jubilee
We do know for certain that
there were times when they did not do as they said they would do. As happens under every system, those who
gained wealth and power used their wealth and power to make sure that they
could keep and even increase their wealth and power. It was what my father calls The Golden Rule: “Those
with the gold make the rules.”
We know that in ancient Israel
the rich and powerful figured out ways to keep the land permanently. This also created a permanent underclass of
poor people who had no land. The Jewish
prophets railed against the corruption of the system that made this possible and
scolded the rich who made use of this possibility. Isaiah for example says to the greedy rich:
“Ah, you
who join house to house,
who add
field to field,
until there
is room for no one but you,
and you are
left to live alone
We know then that there were
people who figured out how to get around the law of Jubilee. Maybe it was a law that fell into disuse. Maybe there was a crisis and the rich and
powerful managed to convince the king that they needed their extra land so that
they could give jobs to the laborers who had been displaced. Maybe the king himself was rich and so this
argument made good sense to him. So
maybe the law of Jubilee became dead letter, considered by the elites to be as
quaint as the laws still on the books in some places that forbid kissing in
public or require riders to tie their horses to a hitching post when they go into
T-Bocks.
But somehow the dream
survived. It survived so that III Isaiah
could use it as a promise of restoration, of return and renewal. It survived so that Jesus could use this
dream to under-gird his life and ministry.
It survived for the descendants of Africans who had been stolen from
their homes and shipped across the Atlantic and sold to plantation owners—good
Christians all, and more than a few of them Methodists—who would forget God’s
Torah and own them like cattle. These
slaves remembered the dream of Jubilee and its promise that their freedom was a
promise from God and it would come. The
dream of Jubilee fired the imagination of Martin Luther King, Jr., whose
birthday we celebrated a couple of weeks ago. The
dream of Jubilee survived.
Downtown in the city of
Philadelphia there is one of the smallest national parks in the land, a little
piece of land that somehow, miraculously hasn’t fallen into private hands, a
little piece of land that still belongs to all of us together. It’s called Independence National Historical
Park. It contains what we now call
Independence Hall where the Continental Congress commissioned and received and
edited the Declaration of Independence. It
also contains the Liberty Bell Center that houses the famous Liberty Bell.
The Liberty Bell is not just a
bell. It’s a symbol that various groups
and causes have used to help put their ideas or plans forward. It was first called the Liberty Bell by
abolitionists who were working to free slaves.
That’s certainly a rather important meaning of liberty.
For some people today, liberty
means the freedom to get whatever they can and keep whatever they can get. Some of those folks use the Liberty Bell as a
symbol for that notion of liberty.
But the Liberty Bell itself
protests that use, if we will trouble ourselves to read what it has to
say. Written around the bell are these
words: “Proclaim LIBERTY throughout all the Land unto all the inhabitants
thereof.” Yes, it comes from Leviticus 5,
the part of the Torah that establishes the Law of Jubilee. What the Liberty Bell itself preaches is
Jubilee. So, it warns the rich “who join
house to house, who add field to field, until there is room for no one but
[them].” It declares that the poor will
be able to have what is theirs by right and that neither they nor we will have to
go on serving the whims of the wealthy and powerful. It announces that the day is coming when each
us may sit “under [our] own vines and under [our] own fig trees and no one
shall make [us] afraid.”
This is the Jubilee that Jesus
announced. This is the Jubilee longed
for and dreamt of ever since when—to borrow words from a more recent preacher
of Jubilee—we and all of God’s children shall join hands and sing, “Free at
last! Free at last! I thank God I’m free at last!”
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