I am addressing as a single unit the gospel readings for the last two Sundays, Luke 15-30 in total. For some reason, the lectionary divides the story into two parts, making it easy to lose the plot. Jesus has gone home and attends worship service at the little synagogue in Nazareth. Here any male can pray, read Scripture or comment on the Scripture. Jesus selects the messianic passage from Isaiah in which the author gives his vision of the Kingdom of God: good news for the poor, release of prisoners, new sight for the blind, liberation of oppressed people, and most importantly restoration of Jubilee Year. Jesus tells the faithful that this scripture is being fulfilled in him, the Anointed One.
Jesus goes on to tell them that Elijah and Elisha performed miracles for , not Jews, but gentiles. He reflects in that way on his decision not to share messianic blessings with his hometown crowd, for a prophet is accepted in his home town. After all of this, the people are enraged and take him up to a brow of a hill to throw him down to his death, but he escapes.
Two important points need to be shared. First, the traditional reading that Jesus' life is endangered because Jews are xenophobic and can't live with blessing of gentiles is common, but it is nonsense. The prophet Zechariah speaks of righteous gentiles streaming into Zion as friends of Jews. In the Second Temple, there was a court of the gentiles! Moreover, righteous gentiles, commonly called "God-fearers," attended synagogue and contributed to their construction and ongoing upkeep. In other words, Jews fully expected and supported God's blessings of righteous gentiles. Suggesting otherwise is simply an anti-Semitic reading. Rather than accosting his fellow Jews, Jesus simply refused to bestow messianic blessings on the Nazareth faithful who had no confidence in the local boy made good.
The second, and critical, point, is that Jesus has in effect endorsed enforcement of the law related to the Jubilee Year, which had been abandoned after Jews settled in the land, built a capital city, and crowned a king. Here is an explanation: Seven is a key number in Judaism. The seventh day of every week which ran from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday was Shabbat, the Sabbath, kept holy before God. Every seventh year was Shabbat ha-Aretz, when all fields were left fallow for natural recuperation. And every seventh series of seven years, the forty-ninth year, inaugurated Jubilee. That year all debts were to be cancelled in full, all slaves to be set free, all big landholdings to be broken-up and redistributed. Calling for a return to Jubilee practice shows that Jesus was truly prophetic and uncompromising in commitment to the abandoned biblical call for social justice. He had taken on the local Chamber of Commerce and they, no doubt, had no interested in seeing their accounts receivable zeroed out, or their slaves freed, or their estates turned over to the poor. That certainly makes the most sense in understanding the story.
As we are now Jesus' representatives on earth, we are tasked with his prophetic ministry. We're obligated to endorse and live out Jesus' call for radical social justice. Regardless of the cost.
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