Sermon, 3rd Sunday of Epiphany

Jesus said, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me...to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor."

About the only time I can recall using the word "favor" is in the shopworn phrase, "Could you do me a favor?" Could you do me a favor and pick up some milk on your way home? If you're going out anyway, could you do me a favor and drop this in the mailbox? Now I do remember one time in college when I begged a professor to do me a huge favor by letting me turn in a paper past the due date. That's a bigger deal than picking up some milk. But is Jesus saying that the Lord is going to do us a "favor?" Is that what we get out of today's Gospel reading? And what does Jesus mean by a "year of the Lord's favor": a year of picking up milk on the way home: A year of accepting papers a day late? Clearly, the word, "favor" has lost something of its original meaning.

But as Jesus unrolled the scroll, and read from the prophet Isaiah, his fellow Jews knew what he meant by "year of the Lord's favor." And it shocked them to the core. The year of the Lord's favor was the year of Jubilee. The children of Israel knew about the year of Jubilee. They knew about it from the book of Leviticus. Every 50 years was to be a year of Jubilee. If a family had had to sell their ancestral land because of bad luck or even mismanagement, they were to be given back the land that God had originally given them. If a son of Israel had had to sell himself into slavery because of his debts, he was to be freed from his bondage. All debts were to be forgiven.

No wonder that those who heard Jesus were amazed at the gracious words coming from his mouth. Was he really proclaiming a year of Jubilee: a year of freedom: a year of forgiveness: a year of all debts wiped out of every ledger? Who was he, the local boy, the son of Joseph, to be making such grand pronouncements? Who was going to listen to him: the Roman governor Pontius Pilate: the High Priest in Jerusalem: The Roman Emperor Tiberius? The fact is that there is no historical evidence that such a year of Jubilee was ever actually observed in Israel. It is a great ideal. But is that all it is?

No. Jesus was not crucified for an ideal. This wasn't pie in the sky. Jesus proclaimed the year of the Lord's favor. And when the people of his hometown rejected him, he left and went on to other towns, where he would find people ready to embrace his vision. And these people would form his church. And they were to live as though every day is the time of the Lord's favor. The rules of this world don't change, and we who live in this world must play by those rules. But in this church, in every place where Jesus's disciples gather together, we are to do favors for each other, to forgive each other, to comfort each other, to love each other.

Of course, it has been some 2,000 years since Jesus spoke those gracious words in the synagogue at Nazareth. The years have come and gone. The world spins madly on. People are born and they die. The rules of the world don't appear to have changed. But Jesus of Nazareth did not die for an ideal. He has suffered all that we suffer, and has passed through the darkness of death out into the light of resurrection and life. In his death, all our debts have been forgiven. And as Jesus shares in our death, so we will share in his resurrection.

Jesus has changed the rules of this world. Every day of our lives is one that we live in the year of the Lord's favor. In that never-ending year, let us comfort each other. Let us forgive each other. Let us love each other.