What Is Not Included

Made Flesh

The first time I spoke the words above in a community reading, written as a benediction, I noticed they kept out the last part of the second verse in Isaiah 61, “…and the day of vengeance of our God.” I was quick to judge this hermeneutical decision and assumed that the liturgists were exercising some sort of comfortable or convenient pacifism (consider this anecdote the confession of my 20-something self, who of course knew everything back then).

It was only in discovering the story of Jesus in Nazareth’s synagogue in Luke 4 did I realize that we were quoting his own reading, and not Isaiah himself! Any omission of verses was Jesus’ choice, or Luke’s. I ate humble pie. I have, in recent years, paid significantly more attention to what is NOT said in the text, as a hermeneutical discipline. What is left out is often as interesting as what is kept in. Also of significant interest, I think, is how this story in Luke 4 ends: Jesus the Christ’s fellow townspeople are so incensed with him and his words that they try to drive him off a cliff – a foreshadowing of sorts in what awaits him on the crucifixion day on Golgotha. Jesus’ source text in Isaiah speaks of God’s day of vengeance; Nazareth’s villagers seek to instill vengeance as their own.

Was this whole story a sort of doomed liturgical call and response? Jesus reads the words that may, more than we realize, reveal God made flesh, and his audience sees ‘a mirror that reflects the sinfulness and violence of our own hearts.’ He reveals the fullness of God’s endless grace, and they respond in attempted murder. This indeed brings out the principle that “the cross will do anything, including killing God, to avoid the truth of our violent nature. There is no way around it. The incarnation leads to the cross and a confrontation with our own brokenness and the boundless mercy of God” (Rocke, K. and Van Dyke, J., Incarnational Training Framework. Street Psalms, 2017, p.34).

What else is happening on this day in Nazareth? While I read the verses as a prose of beauty and hope, confrontation may actually be at the heart of this moment when Jesus opens the scroll and reads the words:
The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed 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.
When he elaborates on his reading at synagogue, he scandalizes his audience by naming past prophets’ healing and liberating actions towards the outsiders, the Other.

Virgilio Elizondo writes that, “Jesus’ refusal to resign himself before evil” is revealing of the salvific power of truth. For those of us who choose to follow Jesus, continues Elizondo, “it is not sufficient to do good and avoid evil: the disciple must do good and struggle against evil” (Elizondo, V., Galilean Journey. Orbis Books, 1978, p.77.). What if Jesus’ taking on these anointed words were much more than a checklist of the good he intended to do in his earthly ministry? What if they were the signs of Christ’s confronting and non-resignation in the face of evil?

Our hermeneutical commitment to see through the eyes of Jesus begs us to read this story not as one where Christ is merely biding time until his hours on the cross. It requires us to enact the year of the Lord’s favour as an engaged, struggling, confronting action of salvific truth, one which wrestles with evil, and that ultimately leads to the cross.

Dwelling Among Us

Read your favourite line from the scroll that Jesus recites. Take a breath.

Read it again. 

Does incarnation lead to the cross? Why?