The Third Sunday of the Year – January 25, 2004

            One of the closest of my priesthood friendships began in a rather odd way.  It was during an orientation class at the beginning of our studies in seminary.  We had just finished one of the main presentations, and had divided up into that seemingly so necessary thing called “small groups” for the purpose of discussion.  Our topic, so the facilitator announced, was our personal, individual image of Jesus, and I was chosen to be first to share.  “In the light of today’s main presentation, what is your own personal, individual image of Jesus?” asked the facilitator, looking at me.  Well, I stumbled across a few confused sounds, cleared my throat, and gave the only answer I thought, and still think, possible.  “Well, I would hope that my image of Jesus
Christ reflects the real one, the image presented to us in the New Testament, the Tradition of the Church – the real Jesus of history.”  A seminarian, who was sitting across from me, noticed my honesty and broke out into a big smile as we sat there.  He cornered me after the meeting and said, “So you too?  You too are tired of all this subjective stuff.  Yes, brother, we need the real Christ, not some fabricated image that serves our own immediate needs.”  We shook hands, and we’ve been close friends ever sense.

            St. Luke, in today’s Gospel reading, shows himself uninterested in sharing with us his own very personal, individual image of Jesus Christ.  He writes, rather, about “events that have been fulfilled among us,” about “eyewitnesses from the beginning,” about how certain “ministers of the word have handed them down to us,” and about how he too, St. Luke, after “investigating everything accurately anew,” had decided to write this all down in “an orderly sequence” so that the reader might know for certain that the teachings of the Apostles about Jesus Christ are indeed true.  There’s very little here about Christ that is subjective.  Luke wants to present Him as He was known and understood by His closest followers who were with Him during His time on earth. 

            Why bring this out?  Why stress the objective aspect of our Faith concerning who Jesus Christ is, what He is like according to the documents called the Gospels?  Well, first of all because these Gospels do so.  And secondly because we live in an age obsessed with the subjective.  The modern man or woman believes that something is most “real for me” according to how I feel about it; something is “true” or “real” or “authentic” to the extent that it meets my subjective needs (usually, these days, for psychological comfort).  And so we see around us the modern effort to reconstruct Jesus, after the manner of what we think we presently need.  Thus, the kind of “hippie” Jesus back during the 1970s.  A bit later, at the height of the popularity of the ill-begotten (from Marxism) “liberation theology,” we were presented with the “liberator Jesus.”  Most recently, and absurdly, modern society has demanded – and got – that there be a Jesus constructed who would entertain us along the lines of our favorite subject, sex.  And so the genre of airport fiction has swelled with the addition of the mindlessness of The Da Vinci Code.  And so it goes on and on.  Best to stick with the Gospels and the Church in which they were written, protected, and lovingly studied now for nearly 2,000 years.

            Otherwise, if we fail to be true to the Catholic Faith once given to the Apostles by our Lord Himself and, instead, get all caught up in the fad of the moment or our own emotional needs for a self-constructed hero – if we fail here, we will miss the wonderful, even earthshaking significance of the scene in today’s Gospel, a significance that is at the very heart of the whole Bible and faith of all Christians. 

            This Gospel scene is remarkable.  Jesus has returned to His boyhood town, Nazareth, and it is the Sabbath.  So our Lord, of course, goes to the synagogue, and there He steps forward to do the customary reading.  He chooses the passage from Isaiah (61:1-2), quoted by Luke in today’s Gospel, a passage that is a clear reference to the coming of the Messiah, Israel’s long-awaited Savior.  He finishes the reading, hands the scroll back to the attendant… and all eyes are upon Him:  what will this Man say now, He who has begun to cause a stir here and there with some of the things He has done, purported miracles and such; now, what will He say for Himself?  Calmly, our Lord pronounces with utter simplicity who He really is and what He is all about:  “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”

            “I am,” Jesus is as much as saying, “all that Israel has ever hoped for.”  I am, is the meaning of His words, God’s answer to you, God’s salvation itself.  From this point on, our Lord begins to put action behind His words, and so the miracles that He will begin to do so often and dramatically are really His illustration of and proof for the claim He has just made. 

            Here is the Jesus, I am telling you, that we must believe in.  We must accept His own testimony about Himself, if we would know Him at all and be free from all the silly and even sometimes demonic attempts to “reconstruct” Him and so obscure Him from our vision, He who is the only Savior the world has, the Head of His Body the Church, the way to eternal life, and the source of all our ultimate happiness.  Today’s Gospel is simply making that astounding claim.  And it is a tremendous claim, putting to shame all the attempts, personal or otherwise, to come up with an image of Jesus “for me” or “for our time.”  No, give me the one portrayed in today’s Gospel – the real One.