Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
The analogy that St. Paul uses of the Mystical Body of Christ, the Church, being like a human body is pretty accessible. We think about the different parts of the body, and how they all work together. And if a part is not working, it can pretty easily lead to problems. Even something as simply as a foot falling asleep can be quite problematic. The brain may want it to work, the lungs may be getting enough oxygen for the foot to work, but if there is no blood flow, the muscles can’t respond like they’re supposed to and walk.
But the Church isn’t about walking. The Church’s mission is the exact same mission that Jesus outlined in today’s Gospel. We have been anointed “to bring glad tidings to the poor…to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,…and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” Maybe you’re thinking that you didn’t sign up for that, but you did, when you were baptized, or when your parents had you baptized. By being configured to Christ through baptism, your mission became the same as the Lord’s, as Isaiah prophesied in the Old Testament.
Of course, we need to go beyond the literal meaning of the words, and go to the deeper, spiritual meaning. What does it mean to bring glad tidings to the poor? How do we proclaim liberty to captives? Is there any way that we can give sight to the blind? What is an acceptable year to the Lord, and how do we proclaim it?
First, let’s look at bringing glad tidings to the poor. Who are the poor? We tend to think of them as those who do not have enough money or resources, for a variety of reasons. But as we go beyond the economic definition of the poor, we can look to those who are spiritually poor. Those who are spiritually poor are those who don’t have enough of what they need, but instead of focusing on money, they don’t have enough of the Lord. We are each made for God, and, as St. Augustine says, “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God].” So when a person doesn’t have that connection to God, they are spiritually
When it comes to proclaiming liberty to captives, we’re not talking about letting people out of jail, which is generally a bad idea. The captivity that binds us all is sin, as Jesus says in the Gospels, and St. Paul reaffirms in some of his epistles. To proclaim liberty is to let people know that there is a way to unload their burden of sin, and find the freedom they want. It may mean inviting someone to go to confession with us. Or it may mean being an accountability partner for someone who is stuck in a cycle of addition. But Jesus charges us with the task of letting people know that they do not have to continue in slavery to sin, but can find the freedom that they desire, the freedom of the children of God.
In the Gospel according to John, Jesus calls the Pharisees blind because they are unaware of their sin, even while they are condemning the man who was born blind but whom Jesus healed. The physically blind cannot see the physical world, which creates unique challenges to life. The spiritually blind cannot see the spiritual world, which creates challenges both in the spiritual and the physical world. If a person believes that this life is all there is, that there is no God, they will stumble through a world that God created according to His plan. If a person does not acknowledge what God has revealed to make them happy, then they will be miserable. So our duty as people on the mission is to help them see how the world truly works, not from an earthly point of view, but from a spiritual point of view. We do this by encouraging those who can work to do so, to build up the society in which they live, rather than simply taking from a government program. We encourage the virtue of chastity, especially, but not only, to the youth in our families, because the vice of lust leads people to trip and fall over many pitfalls that God does not want for their lives. We invite people to come to Mass with us on Sunday, not because it’s easy or we always feel we get something out of it, but because God has made us to praise Him, and when we don’t, we’re lacking the ability to hear how God wants to most easily speak to us.
Last, but not least, to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. The acceptable year of the Lord was the jubilee, the celebration every 7 years, and especially in the 50th year, of a rest granted by the Lord. Our words and our actions should point to heaven, which is the eternal rest to which the jubilee year pointed. But we get there by the narrow path, not by the wide road. So proclaiming that acceptable year means reminding people that this life is not all there is, and that heaven is what God wants for us, but we have to accept that gift of eternal life by the daily decisions that we make. We tell others about Jesus’ Resurrection, and how that ensures for us the possibility of eternal life, where we will eternally worship God in the wedding feast of the Lamb.
When we were baptized, we were anointed with the Sacred Chrism which made us little christs, little anointed ones. At that moment, the mission that Isaiah proclaimed, and that Jesus said was fulfilled in the hearing in the synagogue, became our mission, too. Today, the Lord invites us to recommit ourselves to the mission: “to bring glad tidings to the poor,…to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind,…and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”
