Readings: Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Corinthians 12:12-31a; Luke 4:14-21
Noise! There is a great deal of it in our world today. We constantly surrounded by it, perhaps we even feel we need lots of it to feel at home, because there so much of it. For some of us the first thing we hear in the morning is the news on the radio. “Good morning. This is Radio New Zealand News and I am Stuart Keith,” or whoever it is who reads the news. This noise is especially startling on Monday mornings, as we are woken from peaceful bliss with the invigorating and rude noise of the world outside being played right into our sleeping ears. Then we hear the rumble of a train and the traffic; someone outside starts up a concrete cutter to fix the drains and the builders start banging away on the nearby building site. The phone goes. The TV is on covering the Aussie Open, there’s a computer game that is crying out to be played and the soduko in the newspaper to be solved. Where is there time and space to listen to the voice of God? We strain to hear the voice of God above the noise of the world; God’s eternal words laden with meaning that enrich our lives with meaning. So much of the noise around us is distraction. We tell ourselves that we are too busy dealing with all that has to be done to notice the needs of others. Sometimes we turn the noise up so that we can ignore the gnawing ache in our soul. The noise becomes an escape from ourselves; perhaps even an escape from God, a web of deceit into which we become enclosed; our own tower of Babel that makes us think we are in control and masters of our universe.
Our souls, in fact, are tuned to hear the voice of God, if only we would take notice. God has made us to long for himself, to find in him meaning and wisdom and life. More often than not, our desire for retail therapy, music on the radio, or the addiction to the computer game or to texting on the cell phone or our busyness is because our need for God is deep, and yet unrecognised, and so we try and fill that void with material things or lots more activity.
Our longing for God is also a longing for the shackles that bind us to be broken so that we can be truly free. The people Ezra spoke to in the first reading today were in that very position. They were a crowd of about 5000 who had returned to Jerusalem from exile in Babylon. God had been down in Babylon and had freed them and brought them home. They had made the journey from captivity into freedom. They knew what it was to be liberated, to be set free. So they longed to able to hear God’s word piercing the heart, making them weep for his law, washing away the false identities that held them back. Now home in Jerusalem they were able to hear God’s word proclaimed to them in the heart of the holy city. By then Hebrew had ceased to be a spoken language, so Ezra and his leaders translated the text into the Aramaic language of the Persian Empire so that they could understand. “With interpretation they gave the sense, so that the people understood the reading.” They were utterly mesmerised. They wept for God’s law and they sensed as they listened that God was washing away the things that held them back. Here is a new freedom to be God’s people. Here we have found our true home.
How much more were the people, who heard Jesus preach in the synagogue, longing to be set free from bondage! Once again they were mesmerised. In fact, they were transfixed. They hung on every word, at least in the first instance. Jesus does a radical thing in this sermon. He gets up and quotes a well known passage from Isaiah 61: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed to me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” You might well be wondering what is so radical about that. All he has done is read a familiar passage from the bible. The shock comes when Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” This was a huge surprise. Isaiah 61 recalls the Servant Songs earlier in Isaiah; the suffering servant who was marred and disfigured so that we recognised him not. In this moment, Jesus identifies himself as the Messiah, and then he links his self understanding of his Messiahship to the suffering servant of Isaiah. No one had ever done that before. Most people thought the Messiah would be an idealised King David; a military figure who would be powerful enough to restore Israel to even greater glory than ages past. How could the Messiah be a servant who would come in humility and in powerlessness to restore justice and bring God’s teaching? It did not compute and before long the adoring crowd will react and become the lynch mob.
Yet, here indeed is the Messiah, the suffering servant, who empties himself to become one with us in great humility. His whole being is a microcosm of the kingdom. In his presence the poor have good news proclaimed to them. It will be in his nature to stand with the disadvantaged, the oppressed, the imprisoned, and the disabled. All those regarded as outsiders, Jesus will be alongside. He is restoration to the community of the redeemed. Liberation from bondage will take many forms, but they will be concrete and real. In his presence, they will know God’s freedom and restoration. Release of the captives, recovery of sight for the blind, setting at liberty those who are oppressed will be the messianic agenda. These are programmatic words for God’s people too, for you and me. And they will only be meaningful when we as Christ’s representatives take them seriously. Our task is to co-operate with God in making them real in our world today. Faith must lead us to action, to being “little Christ’s” and living the Word, to eyes that see God at work in our world already and hands ready to assist. Then we too will find ourselves standing with Christ in the poor and the marginalised feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and setting people free.
This is the reality that St Paul is sensing in his letter to the Corinthians. But the biggest block disabling our ability to listen to God, the things that traps the most, is an ego thinking it’s in charge. Although Paul’s words seem mundane, they speak of a reality that draws us away from self-centred isolation and that draws into relation with one another. Christianity is a communal religion. We listen to the Word together. We reflect on it together. We become Christ’s body together. Our baptism makes us members of that body. The Body of Christ speaks of our solidarity together, our call to play an integral part of each other’s lives. We will never be able to listen to God while we think we are the masters of our destiny and that the ego is absolute. As long as we are locked into the isolation of self-absorption, attentiveness to God, freedom to be the people God has made us to be, will never come. No matter how many gadgets we have and no matter how socially networked we are, it’s all a lie if we fail to be the mystical body of Christ. Communion with Christ, being in relationship with the Body, this is what completes us, and sets us free. Incorporation into the Body of Christ makes us whole. It is by being in relation with the Body that we hear the voice of Christ breaking the chains that bind us.
Jesus, in his being, is the Word-made-flesh. He is Word who has power to heal us, to set us free, to restore our sight, to give us comfort. All we have to do is listen to his voice. Turn off the noise, be still, and you will hear Christ’s voice, clear as a bell. He longs to be with you, to love you, to give you life, to commune with you. He is here speaking to you now. He is present in the lives and hearts of those gathered around this holy table. His body is made real in our “Amen” to the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion. He comes to be enfleshed in our lives and to dwell in our hearts; he comes to be what we receive, the body and blood of Christ. Do you hear him? Does he speak to your soul and does he call you into loving and caring? For therein lies the power of being the Body of Christ.
