Today's readings: Jeremiah 1, 4-5. 17-19; 1 Corinthians 12, 31 - 13, 13; Luke 4, 21-30.
In today's text from Luke, Jesus dares to give an interpretation that goes beyond what his audience was used to. Jesus is adamant on crossing the boundaries that the Jews preferred to consolidate.
A biblical scholar, Walter Brueggemann, distinguishes between the 'scribes' who stringently maintain the integrity of a text, and the 'agents of the imagination' who periodically allow the text to explode into new meaning, recovering its ability to startle in a way that necessarily moves beyond critical insight.
There is always a provoking power inherent in God's Word which is always waiting to explode. Jesus, being an agent of imagination, had to face the hard-headedness of the Jews of his hometown who had difficulty to accept him - "Joseph's son" - hailing from this remote village, as a prophet. In his hometown synagogue, Jesus uncovers the contradictions of their way of believing when he declares: "This text is being fulfilled today even as you listen."
For Jesus' listeners the text recalled only something from the past. For him, it was a happening in the 'here and now' of its proclamation.
The Jews monopolised God's promises to the extent of considering them as a closed text. This is also what has often been common practice in our churches. Many times we ourselves hinder God's Word from really and deeply penetrating our conscience to reveal the underlying contradictions even of our religious practices. There is a radical distinction to be made between faith and our often formal ways of being religious.
St Paul in some way connects with this when he affirms that "love is the only way to revelation", to quote the title of a book by Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. Paul shows how it is possible to be eloquent, to have the gift of prophecy, to understand all mysteries, to do so much, yet have no love. But that makes of us just "a gong booming".
It is only love that opens the way for God to reveal His real presence in our lives.
Without love, nothing is revealed to our eyes of faith, and without revelation, religion is mere external practice. Faith is knowledge, or reading, of the world from the standpoint of God. But faith is never projected in the past. It always opens new horizons for future promises to come true.
What really matters today is the way we should speak, or not speak, about God. Talk about God in itself should be destabilising, from the social point of view. Instead, we have always sought to sacralise too many ideas about God which effectively made much of our 'God-talk' pure alienation from life and its concerns.
In the first reading, Jeremiah recalls an experience similar to that of Jesus. He often went through moments of trial and experienced a great sense of failure in his mission. Many times he affirmed that without love, religion is pure formalism and exteriority.
He recalls his initial calling, which inspired his vocation as a prophet of interiority.
We are people of the kingdom of God, and the kingdom materialises first and foremost in interiority. Yet, for quite a long time we used to identify, even theologically, the kingdom with the institution of the Church.
Protestant theology pioneered the broadening of our insights as to the right relationship between the Church and the kingdom of God.
It was the Second Vatican Council that made it clear that the Church is to be understood fundamentally as a pilgrim Church, a Church on its journey of faith and always in tension towards the God of history.
From the stories of Jeremiah and Jesus, and from what Paul states in the Corinthian hymn of love, it is clear that prophecy in religion makes us "ambitious for higher gifts" and puts us in the right perspective and position to see God face to face.