Scripture: 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4: 14-21

“Then he began to speak to them, ‘This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen.’”

-- Luke 4:21

If we compare the introductory summaries the four gospels respectively we find that they both agree and differ about what the good news is. The name  “gospel,” (euangelion in Greek) literally means a message of good news, and their introductory summaries tell us what they understand that news to be. Our text for today is Luke’s introductory summary of the Good News, and I believe we shall understand his message better if we compare his opening statement with those in the other gospels. Mark is the earliest and briefest introduction, “There he proclaimed the good news from God. ‘The time has come’ he said, ‘and the kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent and believe the Good News’ (Mark 1:15).” He takes for granted that we know what this kingdom of God is, and what it is to repent. John is at the other end of the spectrum from Mark. He gives us a long, poetic introduction, whose essential points are that the eternal God becomes flesh in Jesus, and that we see God’s glory in him, “…full of grace and truth…since though the Law was given through Moses, grace and truth have come through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; it is the only Son who is nearest the Father’s heart, who has made him known (John1: 14, 17-18).” Matthew and Luke are in the middle of the spectrum. Both introduce a quotation from the prophecy of Isaiah to interpret the entry of Jesus into his public ministry. Matthew takes over Mark’s summary introduction, “Repent for the kingdom of heaven in close at hand,” and adds to it a quotation from Isaiah 8: 23-9:1 to make the point that Jesus will be a light to the Gentiles. This quotation interprets specifically the geographic fact that Jesus goes to live in Capernaum, a town near the Gentile lands of Naphtali and Zebulon, about which the prophet says that “The people that lived in darkness have seen a great light…” In Matthew the prophetic text supplements the message of the drawing near of the kingdom, in Luke it supplants it, and this is what raises the question, “What precisely is the Good News?”  What does it mean that the kingdom is drawing near?

I said that there is both similarity and difference in the four opening summaries. We shall be exploring the special emphasis of Luke this morning, the difference he makes, but before we begin we must register the emphatic similarity, namely, that whatever the evangelists say at this inaugural point in their gospels they say it about Jesus. For all of them, Jesus is the Good News from God, and so the question, “What is the Good News?” can be restated in a form something like this: “What does Jesus give us, and what does he want from us?” or “How might I know that I am in a right relationship with Jesus? What would my life look like if I were?” We could phrase that question in many ways, and we each probably ask it all the time in all the ways our life opens up to us. It is the fundamental question of our faith, and of any satisfying and fruitful life, because it is simply the Christian form of the question all human life asks all the time, namely, “What is the best way to live so that I might succeed at life?” For us Christians the best way to live is in relationship, and the primary relationship is with God, which the invisible God has made possible by His human approach to us in Jesus.

At this point one might say that it is problematic that that question be asked only of Jesus, of one man only in all the human race. One might say that such an important question should be asked of reality in general and searched out in all those who have left us or can give us wisdom. It is too confining to limit our focus to one man. That is a legitimate objection, but not one that can be made by a Christian, because exclusive commitment to Jesus is the definition of being a Christian. Therefore, the first affirmation we Christians make is a positive response to the words of Jesus we have quoted above, “This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen,” to which we say “Yes!”  and, “Amen!”

Jesus is the one who fulfils all God’s promises and prophecies, and so it is to him we address the question “What do you give us and what do you require of us?” What is the gift and what is the task? Matthew and Mark tell us to repent and believe that the rule of God is present in Jesus. John tells us to believe that in Jesus the invisible God makes himself known in grace and truth. Luke tells us that a certain prophecy is fulfilled in Jesus. Today, since we are asked to study Luke let us pay attention to that prophecy, from Isaiah 61:1-2. It tells us that the gift is the presence of the Spirit of God in our relationship with Jesus Christ, and that the effect of that presence is to bring good news to the poor, announce liberty to captives, new sight for the blind, relief for the downtrodden, and the arrival of the time of God’s favor. Essentially the message is the same as in the other Gospels, namely, that Jesus brings the kingship, grace and truth of God to us, but it goes further than the others by spelling out the meaning of that grace and truth in terms of concrete action. Christ’s coming means good news for the poor. What else can that news be than that God is acting to alleviate their poverty? What can liberty for captives be other than what it says, and in this context the captives are not criminals, because there was no prison system in those days, and criminals were executed or exiled? No the captives in mind here were hostages taken in war and enslaved, something like the people of Israel when they were enslaved in Egypt. The coming of Jesus means that the hostages will go home, the blind will receive sight- miraculously or by means of Christian physicians and hospitals? - probably both, the downtrodden will be enabled to look up and stand up, and the time will be like the time of Jubilee, the year of God’s special favor.

So Luke puts the coming of Jesus in a context of worldly blessing and deliverance. Jesus means good news for those in this life and this world who are crushed by misery and deprivation. This represents the social action dimension of our faith that has been quite prominent in American Christianity ever since the arrival of hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the European poor in the mid 19th century, who were cruelly oppressed and exploited on these shores. Some Protestant churches went to bat for their welfare and came to be known as the Social Gospel churches. Before that the social dimension of the faith was activated by the phenomenon of chattel slavery in the Southern states. It was the Abolitionist gospel. It seems clear to us now that slavery is wrong, but there was a time when Christian preachers assured the slaves and slaveholders that Jesus approved of slavery. Abolitionist theology challenged that, just as feminist and gay theology challenges other biblical passages today, and called on texts like ours, “liberty to captives, freedom for the downtrodden, good news to the poor!” to refute the slaveholding Jesus.

It might seem self-evident to us that the pulpit should denounce a social institution like slavery and defy the politics that favors it, but it is still contested whether preaching and politics should mix. Before the Civil War Southern pulpits regularly justified slavery, its institutions and it politics.  When Northern pulpits started denouncing it, they were told that the pulpit is no place for politics and social criticism. That’s called eating your cake and having it too.

Our text seems to justify a Christian involvement with politics and society. Having said that, however, we must register a strong caveat, because we know and can at present vividly see how dangerous the mix of politics and religion can be. People do the most atrocious things in the service of God, and so we must always keep the political and social dimension of the faith safely enclosed within the transcendental dimension. What does that mean? It means that we must never fall to the dangerous delusion that we can by our own this-worldly efforts rectify the world. This delusion is called utopianism, and has many forms, and levels, from the mild to the murderous. The great tyrants of the last century, Hitler and Stalin were utopians bent on bringing us a kingdom of heaven on earth built by our own hands, alas upon the bodies of the oppressed. Our current Muslim opponents think they are doing the will of God in murdering unarmed civilians.

Amen.