In this Sunday’s Gospel, Luke gives his version of how Jesus began his preaching: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me 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.”
To bring glad tidings to the poor. I’m going to be harsh: everyone I talk to, even people vowed to poverty, seems to think the poor are someone else’s vocation. Jesus’s way is not for us.
Everyone I see seems to say of their own vocation, “The Spirit of the WORLD is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the RICH. Maybe Jesus went to the poor, but He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the powerful and self-importance to those with worldly abilities, to absolve oppressors of responsibility, and to proclaim a year acceptable to . . . the world.”
(Brad Wilcox of the University of Virginia, the top sociologist of marriage today, pointed out this week that, for example, though every college has a campus ministry, the Church has zero outreach to the 60% of American young people who do not go to college. No wonder the poor have trouble with marriage. Please let me know if you know of any ministries to those without degrees!)
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The Lectionary gives us a strange Gospel this week. We finally begin in earnest our Year of Luke. Luke spends a couple chapters showing that Jesus was born poor, so the beginning of Jesus’s preaching isn’t until Chapter 4. But Luke has a prologue about his Gospel, so this week we read Luke 1:1-4 (theprologue) and then 4:14-21 (the first preaching). It sounds a little odd because it is odd.
But Luke’s prologue is important. What he says is that others have written Gospels before him, but now Luke wants to give sort of a more scholarly account. He is not an “eyewitness” (like Matthew and John, and Peter, who maybe helped Mark) but he is talking to them, “investigating everything accurately anew.” And his goal is “to write it down in an orderly sequence . . . so that you may realize the certainty of the teachings you have received,” or “that you may have a solid grasp on the words that are being thrown around.”
In some ways, Luke’s is the most sophisticated Gospel. Whereas Matthew (the accountant) just gives a straightforward accounting of what Jesus said and did, and Peter’s Mark makes sure we see that nothing makes sense apart from the Cross, Luke, friend of St. Paul, doctor, and most distant from the actual events, wants to get the theology clear.
And Luke makes sure we start with the poor Jesus preaching the Gospel to the poor.
Worldly wisdom tells us to start with the rich. It’s not such a crazy idea tosay we should start at the Ivy Leagues, and the media centers, and lawyers and businessmen. (Living in the outskirts of New York City, I call it the “Midtown strategy.”) What’s crazy is that Jesus went to his equivalent of the Bronx. What’s crazy is that St. Lawrence—and every other saint—called the poor the true riches of the Church.
Why? Because grace can do what man cannot. And Jesus teaches us to live by grace, not by human power. To live by earthly power is to renounce the Gospel—even if you pretend to preach the Gospel, while chasing worldly standing.
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Our reading from Nehemiah is thrilling, if you know the context. The Israelites have returned from exile in Babylon. Nehemiah and Ezra have rediscovered the book of the Law—the Bible. And now, for the first time in a long time, they are actually reading it, aloud, in public. The people weep, recognizing how far they have strayed from God’s ways. But Ezra tells them to rejoice.
The accent is important here. The last words are not “REJOICING in the Lord must be your strength”: the point is not that joy is our strength. The point is, “rejoicing IN THE LORD must be your strength.” Don’t weep: God’s words shows us the way, and that’s Good News. God gives us the strength to live in his way: that’s good news. And the way leads to God: good news.
When Christ calls us to renounce our worldly ways, to go to the poor instead of seeking worldly power, he’s not telling us our life should be miserable. He’s showing us the path to joy—but joy is only in him.
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And joy is in his body, the Church. Our second reading, from First Corinthians 12, spends a lot of time on the body metaphor. But let us not miss the conclusion: “Those parts of the body that we consider less honorable we surround with greater honor, and our less presentable parts are treated with greater propriety, whereas our more presentable parts do not need this. . . . If one part suffers, all the parts suffer with it; if one part is honored, all the parts share its joy.”
Now, no one in the Church is really a “little toe,” or a back of the knee, or whatever part of our natural body we think is unglamorous. But the point is that even the unglamorous parts of the Church—even the poor and the disabled, even the crazy—are just as essential to the Church as the media stars, cultural icons, and Masters of the Universe that the world fawns over, and that even we in the Church tend to give so much of our attention.
To love Christ, to find ourselves in his body, is to love all those he has redeemed, not just the ones we would fawn over even if he we didn’t love Christ. Christ’s “preferential option for the poor” is precisely a recognition that it’s in our treatment of those whom the world ignores that we signal our belief in the Gospel.
Thank you, Luke, for making sure we hear the message. We need it. We need to listen more carefully to Christ’s way, and less to the world’s.
Where do you find yourself practicing a preferential option for the rich and powerful? Where is Jesus calling you to love him in his poverty?
