“Ezra the priest brought the Law before the assembly” who had just returned home after a long captivity. He stood “on a wooden platform” “higher up than any of the people.” The people “bowed down and prostrated themselves …(and) Ezra read plainly from the Book of the Law of God.” Centuries later Jesus stands before priests and elders in the assembly and quotes from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” “to proclaim liberty to captives” and “to let the oppressed go free.” Jesus then says, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
Jesus is proclaiming liberty from “higher up” priests bound to the Law who hinder the people’s fulfillment. Priests did not accept Jesus’ proclamation of freedom, nor fulfillment. They ran him out of that assembly but he kept on proclaiming the message and help create communion enabling the people to achieve their freedom and fulfillment among equals. We can be like the priests, hoping for freedom and fulfillment, but then rejecting their actual presence. We can think they are external things, like priests and laws, that will keep us secure and to which we can cling for comfort. We stay in the shadows of both and their many variations. It is the circumstance of the prostrated people before the priest Ezra. Though freed from foreign captivity under priests and laws, they regress under the captivity of their own priests and law. It is our circumstance when we regress under a white supremacist political system or a Holy Roman Empire Catholic Church or a Bible based Protestantism. We have no need of such pacifiers to get us through any crisis of certainty. We have need of realizing, ‘Today this passage is fulfilled in our hearing’ – ‘Now, in this moment, we are fulfilled’ At present, we are free.’ For centuries we have prostrated ourselves in the shadow of things that do not free, do not fulfill. We lose the truth that freedom and fulfillment are an internal essence.
“If it is an unjust law you would abolish, that law was written with your own hand upon your own forehead. You cannot erase it by burning your law books nor by washing the foreheads of your judges … And if it is a despot you would dethrone, see first that his throne erected within you is destroyed … And if it is a fear you would dispel, the seat of that fear is in your heart and not in the hand of the feared…. These things move within you as lights and shadows in pairs that cling. And when the shadow fades and is no more, the light that lingers” frees. (On Freedom – Khalil Gibran)
Prayer: Spirit, we radiate freedom and fulfillment
Question: What are the shadows which I need to step out from and into the light?
January 27, 2019 Gospel: Luke 1-4; 4:14-21 Third Sunday in Ordinary Time