Monday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time
In today’s gospel (Luke 4:16–30), we return again to the beginning of Jesus’s public ministry with his first visit to Nazareth, his hometown, after he is baptized. This visit is, on the one hand, a stirring proclamation of Jesus’s identity and mission. Quoting Isaiah, he reveals to the people that he is the Messiah, the one anointed with the Spirit of the Lord, and that he has been sent to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
And yet this proclamation of Jesus is not received well. Jesus’s listeners are unsettled by the fact that it is the humble son of Joseph, the carpenter, who is claiming to be the Messiah. Yes, what he says is impressive… but is he really the one? For his listeners to accept what Jesus says about himself would require that they discard their preconceived notions and expectations of him; because they are unwilling to do this, they reject him and even try to kill him.
As Christians, we are privileged to share in the mission of Jesus and to be anointed, through our baptism, with the same Holy Spirit. Yet this also means that just as Jesus was misunderstood and rejected, we can and will be misunderstood and rejected by some. Today, let us ask the Spirit to help us live according to our baptismal calling by sharing the Good News without fear, knowing that if we face rejection and even failure, our Lord himself stands with us.