Lk 4:31-37
Jesus went down to Capernaum, a Town of Galilee. He taught them on the sabbath, and they were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority. In the synagogue there was a man with the spirit of an unclean demon and he cried out in a loud voice, "What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are - the Holy One of God!" Jesus rebuked him and said, "Be quiet! Come out of him!" Then the demon threw the man down in front of them and came out of him without doing him any harm. They were all amazed and said to one another, "What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits, and they come out." And news of him spread everywhere in the surrounding region.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Today's Readings
St. Paul, in this reading from his First Letter to the Thessalonians, encourages us not to sleep like the rest of the world. Sleeping means not trying. He also says that we are not of in darkness, for we are children of light. Darkness makes a person want to sleep. Darkness is hopelessness. Hopelessness makes us want to stop trying. Light is hope. We are children of hope.
What kind of hope? Not a false hope. St. Paul has just warned us that “when people are saying, ‘Peace and security,’ then sudden disaster comes upon them.” This is the false hope on which the world hangs its dreams. False hope is more assumption than hope. It starts innocently enough, we wake up in the morning and assume that the floor is still there. We breathe air and just assume that there is oxygen in it. We go to work, and we assume that we will get paid. We get in an elevator and assume that we will not plummet to our deaths. We must do all this assuming, because the alternative is being paranoid to the point of insanity.
But then we extend these assumptions to other matters. We put money away in a retirement account and assume that it will still be there in thirty years. We live in America, so we assume that no army will ever invade our home. We go to the grocery store and assume that there will be food available for a price we can pay. We make these assumptions, yet how many counter-examples throughout the world should give us pause! Our safety and security seems so rock-solid, but it is really a fragile soap bubble in time destined to eventually pop.
When someone puts their hope in this world, they are in darkness. They think that they are awake; they are working so hard; they are exhausted every day, but they are really just dreaming; they are asleep. If you put in an eight hour shift in your dreams one night, no one will actually pay you no matter how tired you are. If you work hard for a worldly hope, even if you do not live through war or famine, the world will fail to actually pay you.
We are children of the light. Our hope is founded in reality, and it will not disappoint. Now if only we could work as hard for our real salvation as the world does for it ephemeral rewards. There were three parts to Israel. In the South, Judea with David's city Jerusalem. In the middle Samaria with Jericho. And in the North, Galilee.
In the Genesis story God rested on the sabbath, but the sabbath was the day when Jesus really used to get busy. He was frequently accused of breaking the sabbath, and even when he was dead he descended on Holy Saturday into the underworld, the Apostles’ Creed says, and liberated all who had languished there since the time of Adam. I found a passage in St Ambrose (c. 333 – 397) that tries to make sense of all this sabbath activity. He wrote, “[Luke] describes the works of divine healing begun on the sabbath day, to show from the outset that the new creation began where the old creation ceased.”
Ambrose also noted that Jesus healed a man (today’s reading) and a woman (tomorrow’s). Just as at the beginning God “created them male and female” (Genesis 1:27; 5:2), Jesus now heals both. “The Lord came to heal both sexes,” he wrote.
Jesus spoke with authority, Luke says. ‘Authority’ is one of those words that can have opposite meanings, depending on their use. Speaking or acting ‘with authority’ can simply mean you have the official piece of paper, you are authorised by someone else. In the time of Jesus, rabbis were forever quoting other rabbis, or quoting texts. Yet the word ‘authority’ comes from the Latin ‘auctor’ (source), from which the word ‘author’ is also derived. People speaking with authority in this sense are speaking from themselves; they are the authors of what they are saying. Jesus “spoke with authority,” that is, he spoke from himself, from his Self. His words came from somewhere (they were not quotations). For that very reason they were able to go somewhere: they were able to cast out demons, freeing people from their torments.
By acting as he did, Ambrose wrote, “Jesus showed us that the Son of God is not under the law but above the law.” It might have been better if he had said Jesus was one with the law, in the sense that he was one with the mind of the law-giver, God. In him the law was being fulfilled, not set aside (Mt 5:18). A law is not necessarily being fulfilled when it is interpreted into thousands of details; it is being fulfilled when its purpose is being realised. The law was being fulfilled in Jesus, despite his apparent breaches of it, in ways that it was never fulfilled in the Pharisees, despite their apparent devotion to it.
