ECUMENICAL PATRIARCHATE

Exarchate of Parishes of Russian
Tradition in Western Europe

A Path to True Life: the beginning of the Church’s Year

Parish of the Annunciation, Oxford, 14 September 2008

Luke 4: 16-22

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen

According to the Old Calendar, today is the beginning of the Church’s Year, and we heard the Gospel for that Feast: a passage from Luke where, for the first time, Jesus begins to speak openly in the synagogue in Nazareth.

It is important to place this narrative in a sequence of events. This is the very beginning of Jesus coming to consciousness and true understanding of his mission. Just before this passage, there is the story of his Baptism, and the picture of a dove descending, bringing the Spirit upon him, and the voice from heaven saying, ‘Thou art my Son in whom I am well pleased’. Christ, in the course of his baptism by John, hears the voice of the Father, and the Father is quoting Psalm 2:7 and Isaiah 42:1. These two books are actually the most quoted books in the whole of the New Testament.

Immediately after that he is led into the desert by the Spirit and confronts Satan. And in the desert he rebuffs Satan – he rebukes him – turns him down – and he does so by quoting Scripture. Three times, at each of the three temptations, Christ quotes from the book of Deuteronomy. What we conclude from that is that he knows the Scriptures. He is able to draw from the Scriptures the passage that is needed at that moment.

In the synagogue in Nazareth, however, we have a very different situation. Christ goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day as was his custom. In other words we are simply told that Christ worships on the Sabbath in the local synagogue; and we know also that he is a very familiar person and he is a person to whom respect is given, because he is asked to read from the Scriptures. He opens the book, which would probably be a scroll, and he reads. We do not know exactly whether he simply stumbled on this passage or – as is quite likely – it was simply the appointed reading for the day. But he reads the first few verses of Isaiah 61, and having read it, he sits down and tells the people, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.’

From that we have to conclude that the Scriptures speak to Christ. They are a source of his self understanding. What he has read is ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach.’ Now he knows that he had been anointed in the Baptism – but what was the purpose of that anointing? That Scripture tells him what it was about. It tells him that he has been anointed ‘to preach the gospel to the poor, deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, and to set at liberty them that are bruised, and to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.’ All those things now become his task. It is for this reason that the Spirit of God has descended on him.

All of these verses come from the Old Testament and the reference to the ‘acceptable year of the Lord’ seems to be a reference to the jubilee year, that is referred to in Leviticus 25 (vv. 9,10 ff).  A jubilee year is the last year in a series of seven times seven – forty-nine – years, and in that year, every man shall return to his own possession. In other words it is a beginning anew. The jubilee year is not simply a celebration as we would have it now, but it is a return to the beginning.

This is of course what Christ is also preaching – a return to where we started. It is no coincidence that the jubilee year is announced on the Day of Atonement, the day of reconciliation between God and his people, the day in which things are put right with the world and with God. This is the task of Christ’s ministry – to put things right: to put things right between us and God, and in the context of the Old Testament to put things right between us and the world.

What I want to stress here, however, is the importance of Scripture to Christ. Scripture even mediates his relationship with the Father. It can be no coincidence that at the Transfiguration these same words are heard by Christ, ‘Thou art my beloved Son in whom I am well pleased.’ The Father uses Scripture to address him, and Christ uses Scripture to refute Satan, and the Scriptures tell him definitively the reason why he has been anointed by God, the reason why he has received the Spirit in his Baptism.

We may not ourselves hear God speaking to us directly, but if know the Scriptures we can in fact use them as Christ himself used them. We can use them as a standard by which to judge the behaviour of others and of ourselves, and we can use them as a guide to what should rule our lives. We can use them as a guide, an indication, a pointer to our own calling, because the Scriptures both impel and constrain. They form around us a kind of royal way. They set out a path that leads not to death but to life – to true life, as for Christ. For Christ the Scriptures – the Old Testament – lead him inexorably towards resurrection. That is the trajectory of his life, and he finds it in the Scriptures.

What we have here is an enormous treasure, preserved in the Church and in Israel beforehand over centuries – two thousand years since Christ, and a thousand years or more before Christ among the Jewish people. And for all that time they had been a source of life and a source of inspiration. This process we are told to continue in our own lives. If we will read the Scriptures and if we will pay the same attention to them that Christ paid, we will be able to let them work on us and for us, just as they did for Christ.

Amen