November 21, 2004
2 Samuel 5:1-3 + Colossians 1:12-20 + Luke 23:35-43
We come now to the end of Luke’s Gospel year, and the ultimate end of the journey Jesus has made to Jerusalem.
Now we know where he was leading us.
It is not to the city of the old covenant and temple, but outside the city.
It was not to the seat of proud power, but to the posture of humble service.
He took us to throne room with its riches and comforts,
but to a cross with its loneliness and suffering.
Yet from the throne of his cross he spoke his finest words
and delivered the most clear summary of his mission.
It is Luke’s summary of all that began in the Nazareth Synagogue
as Jesus stood up, took the scroll and began to read.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me and has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor
to proclaim liberty to captives,
recovery of sight to the blind
and freedom for the oppressed,
to proclaim a year of favor from God.”
In the genius of Luke’s writing, we see now that it is all complete.
The Jesus he gives us has done what he set out to do right up to and including his very last breath.
All his life he reached out to those who were outside, at the edges of life, the sinners, the tax collectors, the women, children, those without hope, and in his last breath, he does it one more time. He includes a condemned thief among those who will inherit His life and His relationship with His Father. No one who looks to Him will be without Hope and without a place before His Father.
What he proclaims in that Nazareth Synagogue comes as welcome news to the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed. The trouble lies in the last proclamation: “A Year of Favor From God.”
This is what I like to call: “Bible Speak”. It is a kind of very specific biblical language that refers to what is required in the book of Leviticus chapter 25: a Jubilee year every seventh year requiring the land to rest in order to restore its fertility, and every fifty years the Israelites were to restore their relationships with one another. It meant that they were to free slaves who were imprisoned for unpaid debts. It was all about forgiveness, righting relationships, and restoring the community to equality before God.
For a people who are more interested in what they call “justice” rather than forgiveness, this is a very unwelcome and difficult suggestion.
For a people who hold whole nations in debt with an economic system that keeps nations poor, a “Year of Favor” and not getting your money back with interest does not sound like a good idea.
For a people who would rather exact revenge and punish rather than forget and forgive, such a “Year of Favor” is seems like an insult and unfair.
None the less, the Year of Favor has been proclaimed by Jesus Christ from the Synagogue of Nazareth, and it was not a twelve-month year – it was and is another way of describing the Reign of God, the “Kingdom” of Jesus Christ.
Citizens of that realm, those who choose life in “Jubilee” or in “Favor”
will be setting things right these days.
They will forgive debts.
They will see to the freedom of those who are captive,
not just in prisons,
but those who are captive in economic and social systems
that exploit them and hold them in bondage.
They will see that relationships are healed and restored to goodness by kindness.
Those who recognize their need for the Kingdom, or that year of Favor
and the chosen ones, the kin of God.
The one who speaks the loudest in today’s Gospel is one who knows what is to come. In asking Jesus to “remember” him, he asks for the relationship to continue:
a relationship that brings the promise of forgiveness and paradise.
The thief wants a relationship with one who is innocent yet suffers,
one who is abandoned, alone, helpless, powerless, betrayed, and misunderstood.
He knows something many of us are yet to learn.
He knows there is no future for him, and no hope to be found from those who are comfortable, connected, and in charge.
Those of us who can identify with him and make his prayer our own and those who hang on the crosses of their own lives or live with the painful consequences of their choices as he did, have every hope of hearing that final and power filled promise: “You will be with me in paradise.”