Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, 1/23
Today’s first reading shows the awe and reverence that the Israelites hold for the Word of God. Ezra raises the holy scroll for all to see, and as he reads from the book of God’s law and interprets it, there is joy and true worship of the Lord. The book of Nehemiah, from which this reading comes, is a historical book whose events occur centuries before the coming of Christ in the New Testament. But from their earliest origins, the Hebrew people reverenced the Word of God and the ancient scriptures with deep faith that one day these texts would be fulfilled. For hundreds of years, prophet after prophet, they live in the distant and perhaps dormant hope that someday all of these prophecies will make sense, and that God will come in power to encounter his people through the Messiah.
In the Gospel, Jesus does something truly shocking. Seated in his home synagogue full of devout Jews and men of the holy text, people who have known him since his childhood and who have studied God’s word religiously, he reads a passage from the prophet Isaiah that speaks of the Savior that God is sending. Unflinchingly, Jesus looks up from this text and tells them: “Today, in your hearing, this Scripture passage is fulfilled.” We can imagine the shock and indignation that must have met these words, that the random neighbor kid and son of the carpenter was announcing in the synagogue that HE is the one they’ve been waiting for. But that is the shocking thing about Jesus. That he IS who he says he is. That he is the answer to God’s promises to us. That he not only fulfills the words of scripture, but he is the very Word of God, made flesh for the salvation of every soul that has awaited him.
Like the synagogue crowd in today’s Gospel, we are faced with a crucial decision: to either chase Jesus away in denial and confusion, or to take him at his word and let that change everything. It can be easy to turn away in shock and doubt that Jesus really is the answer to our hopes and longings. But he never turns away from us or falters in his mission. He gazes at us, unflinching, and with loving confidence tells us: “today, in me, those longings are fulfilled.”
Jule Coppa, Penn Campus Minister
