God's here and now

There is a very important connection between the first reading and the gospel in today's liturgy. The first reading reminds us of the story of Ezra and Nehemiah who in a time of trial challenged and organised the Jews to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem, for a city without a wall was hardly a city at all. It could be conquered easily. While Nehemiah rebuilt the city wall, Ezra rebuilt his people's spirit.

In a very similar way, in the gospel Jesus takes up Isaiah the prophet and seeks to rebuild the people's spirit reminding them that God's promise is not just words. "This text," we read at the end of today's gospel, "is being fulfilled today even as you listen."

The Christian message is a Word whose transforming power needs to be evoked. Otherwise it can easily remain a dead letter. We are not a people of the book. We are a listening people. God's revelation to us does not stop at Scripture alone. Added to that, there is the living tradition of God's here and now in history, in the concreteness of our personal lives.

As Christians today, we may have the sensation of being exiles: caught in that dangerous wilderness between contemporary secular Western culture and an old-fashioned Church culture. This gives us the feeling of being ill-equipped to face the challenges ahead.

We need a second exodus; we need to welcome Jesus again in our churches, allowing him to remind us afresh that the texts we read are meant to be good news to the poor, to captives, to the blind, to the downtrodden. God's word can remain just words, unfulfilled promises.

God's real presence and power can easily remain imprisoned in the dead letter of our scriptures. St Thomas Aquinas, very long ago, wrote that the word is dead unless it is given life in the one who listens.

When we speak of 'real presence', what normally comes to mind is the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But, in the concreteness of our lives and with the eyes of faith, we are called to discern many other instances of God's real presence. What we celebrate in our liturgies is not merely a commemoration of things past. That makes of our liturgies only the dead faith of the living.

What Christ read out in the synagogue on that Saturday were Isaiah's words of consecration with the spirit of the Lord whose anointing renders God's word "good news" and powerful news. This is the big difference between Jesus and the Scribes of his time. The words they pronounced remained just words, promises waiting to be fulfilled. With Jesus, the Word made flesh, the promise is fulfilled. And this is the power we are called, as Church, to transmit today in the world.

Today's gospel gives the account of Jesus's inauguration of his ministry. It is the Spirit who anoints, who "fills the house with the scent of the ointment" (John 12). We all are commissioned to let loose this anointing we received in baptism and to "give reason of our hope".

Christianity is not an ideology. Neither is it a philosophy of life. Christianity is not just doctrine and teachings. Christianity is about God's transforming grace in the here and now of our lives. The Spirit makes our struggles for liberation authentic and respectful of the dignity of each and everyone. The Spirit of the Lord saves our struggle for dignity from producing, as was and is commonplace, further wars, and violence, and abuse.

This calls for a fresh anointing that really liberates, first from inner sin and in turn from those structures of sin that our inner slavery generates.