Living the Word: from now through Easter (April 20), we follow Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus shows us a loving God in his teachings, healings, and relationships with people pushed to the margins. His commitment to love leads him to Jerusalem and the cross.
“Are you the one who is coming, or should we look for someone else?”
This is the question at the heart of this Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 7:18-35). It’s not so different 2,000 years later. A lot of people in our midst are asking “What is going on? How are we to respond? What’s the appropriate resistance? When? How? What? Where? Who can we follow?”
What’s going on is that we’ve elected a president determined to rule like an autocrat, like a really bad, modern-day CEO and not a public servant. He told us this when he campaigned. And his new regime has come in with a shock and awe method and sheer determination to tear down anything they don’t like. To use power for power’s sake. And already lots of people are being harmed.
It’s destabilizing. It’s disorienting. It’s panic-inducing. It’s meant to be all those things.
Jesus’ response to the initial question above is, in characteristic fashion, indirect:
Go, report to John what you have seen and heard.
Those who were blind are able to see.
Those who were crippled now walk.
People with skin diseases are cleansed.
Those who were deaf now hear.
Those who were dead are raised up.
And good news is preached to the poor.
One of the ways God measures our faith is our commitment to serve others. On Sunday, we will re-center ourselves in these fundamentals of our faith, re-committing ourselves to the work of the Gospel, the work of the prophets, which can often mean, the work of resistance.
Come Sunday and we’ll re-commit ourselves to the work that Jesus calls us to do.
Yours in faith and solidarity,
Kent
Image: Baptism of Christ, by Dave Zelenka,
from Art in the Christian Tradition,
a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, Tennessee.
Links here and here
