Bringing glad tidings to the poor
Thursday, January 09, 2014 First Reading: 1 Jn 4:19-5:4 Gospel Reading: Lk 4:14-22
Jesus acted with the power of the Spirit, and on his return to Galilee the news about him spread throughout all that territory. He began teaching in the synagogues of the Jews and everyone praised him.
When Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, he entered the synagogue on the Sabbath as he usually did. He stood up to read and they handed him the book of the prophet Isaiah.
Jesus then unrolled the scroll and found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and new sight to the blind; to free the oppressed and announce the Lord’s year of mercy.”
Jesus then rolled up the scroll, gave it to the attendant and sat down, while the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he said to them, “Today these prophetic words come true even as you listen.” All agreed with him and were lost in wonder, while he kept on speaking of the grace of God. Nevertheless they asked, “Who is this but Joseph’s son?”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE (Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
God freed us not by sending an army to crush the oppressors but by sending his Son. Today’s Gospel quote from Isaiah is a cursory description of this Son. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and new sight to the blind; to free the oppressed and announce the Lord’s year of mercy.” These verses came alive with Jesus himself reading them to the crowd.
When was the precise moment of Jesus’ anointing? On this matter Benedictine monk Rupert Deutz wrote: “So when was the precise moment when the Lord anointed me? He did so when I was conceived, or rather, he did so in order that I might be conceived in my mother’s womb. For it was not by the seed of man that a woman conceived me, but I was conceived by a Virgin through the Holy Spirit’s anointing. Then it was that the Lord set upon me the royal anointing; he consecrated me as king and priest at the same time. A second time the Lord consecrated me in the Jordan through the same Spirit…”
We haven’t been anointed as Jesus was but we all received the Holy Spirit as he did at our baptism. The presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives spurs us on to “bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and new sight to the blind; to free the oppressed and announce the Lord’s year of mercy.” We do so not with an army crushing perpetrators of injustice but with the Holy Spirit animating our acts of charity. – Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email:dan.delosangeles@gmail.com. Website: www.frdan.org.
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