4th Sunday after Epiphany – Year C
February 2, 2025
Gospel Lectionary Text
Luke 4:21-30
4:21 Then he began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."
4:22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, "Is not this Joseph's son?"
4:23 He said to them, "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, 'Doctor, cure yourself!' And you will say, 'Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.'"
4:24 And he said, "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown.
4:25 But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land;
4:26 yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon.
4:27 There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian."
4:28 When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage.
4:29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff.
4:30 But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.
Context
Coming soon.
Question
Coming soon.
Reflections
Whose Voice?
By Sue Hudacek |
Burning in our hearts is the desire to encounter and experience the Divine. We yearn for this encounter, even if we aren’t quite sure what to expect from it. Those who heard Jesus were no different. They all had the same response as he read from Isaiah … wonder and amazement, even awe.
Are you in or out?
By Joel Van Dyke |
Taking a deep breath, Jesus knows his proclamation will transform the cheering multitude in front of him into a mob of murderers behind him. He points to two stories that his audience would have known well.
The Mystery of Incarnation
By Kris Rocke |
Last week we heard Jesus’ first sermon. This week’s lectionary text keeps us in the same passage, but it focuses on the end of the sermon when things turn ugly. In the first half of the sermon Jesus lifts up the expansive nature of God’s grace, which is why “all spoke well of him and…
Praying Eucharistically - Weekly Homily by James Alison:
Understanding the Bible anew through the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.
Poetry
Waiting for the Barbarians
by Constantine P. Cavafy
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Queer Jesus
by Steve Garnass Holmes
How dare he uncenter us, the right, the normal.
Oh, we want so badly for Jesus to be like us.
To praise our kind, to fit in, and bless our fitting in.
But he will not.
He will stand outside our lines, athwart our expectations, the sickness of our normal.
He will not fit, and make unfit our fitting in.
He will be the one we judge and label, and all who are not our kind, and try to throw away.
But we can’t be free of him.
Even as he lives on the edge of us he passes through the center of us.
This queer savior, this noncompliant master, this misfit, is the uncaged Word made flesh, whose ways are not ours.
Beneath our fragile costumes of class and sect, in our honest lives undressed,
ill-fitting and not right, unpacked and unconformable, there,
there, is our place in him, and our salvation.
Prayer
Coming soon.