IV Epiphany - breadcrumbs through the woods
This week is a continuous reading in Luke (and in First Corinthians, too) -- we pick up right after Jesus has finished beautifully reading from the scroll of Isaiah about bringing good news to the poor and vulnerable places in the world. 'Today this scripture is fulfilled when you truly hear it, and take it in,' he tells his hometown crowd.
How nicely he speaks! So say they all.
Jesus is not letting them off the hook. "Yes, well, the Spirit of the Lord comes and goes to bring good news to the poor, the oppressed, the captive, et c., ...but don't assume that this year of the Lord's favor is being proclaimed as a special dispensation for you alone. This is not a sectarian blessing that only comes to True Believers with a certain lineage, or the Right Way of Doing Things.
Jesus continues in his dialogue with his hometown folks, alluding to stories of healing and deliverance familiar to them all -- In the time of famine, when miraculous good news was brought to poor widows to keep them from starving, this good news (they all know the story) was not brought to you, or to the right people, but to a foreigner, a person supposedly outside this dispensation. "Yet there were plenty of widows in Israel at that time," Jesus reminds them. Same with the famous healing of a foreign leper -- healing brought to people outside the circle of the seemingly righteous.
They do not care to hear this reminder, and want to throw him off a cliff. It can be dangerous to challenge people who have just complimented (co-opted?) you.
In the reading from Paul's letter to the community in Corinth, we arrive at the famous hymn to love - 'If I speak in the tongues of angels and men, but have not love..."
What is often overlooked in Paul's praising of love is his contrasting between what he calls the 'incomplete' (the 'now' of all things) and the completion-held-in-God that is always yet to come. We have an incomplete knowledge, an incomplete perception, and this will always be so. We are not to worry about being perfect, actually, or perfectly righteous. It is impossible.
We are, however, to follow three things that abide, that last, and are available to us, even in the incompleteness (the becomingness, you might say), of all things.
Faith, hope, and love. And the greatest of these is love. They reveal glimpses of the Complete to us, even now. Follow these three like guides in the wilderness, or like breadcrumbs left to take us on our homeward path through the woods. Listen for their Word as a guide in determining how to bring 'good news to the poor' and to the vulnerable places of this world. How shall we speak peace to our own hearts? How shall we follow Jesus in being this Body of Good News for all things, this speaking of peace, of healing, of justice for the poor and vulnerable of the earth (and the earth, itself)?
Seek out these gifts: faith, hope, love. They are fully available to us now. They abide.