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.
And our Lord came to his own hometown and read from the scriptures in the synagogue
and then sat down and said to them,
Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.
When he referred to the poor that needed to hear glad tidings
and the proclamation of liberty to those who were captives,
when he proclaimed the recovery of sight to the blind and the release of the oppressed,
when he proclaimed a year acceptable to the Lord,
he was proclaiming it to the people that were sitting in front of him in Nazareth
and to all the rest of us who hear this gospel preached.
For we are...
are the poor who need to hear the glad tidings.
Every one of us.
Every one of us is the captive that needs to hear liberty proclaimed to them.
Every one of us is the blind that needs to have their sight restored.
Every one of us are the oppressed that need to be set free.
Because the mission of our Lord was not in the first place to relieve us from temporal oppression
and suffering, but to relieve us from the burden of our sins.
And while, as I've said throughout this week, earlier in the week,
our Lord did care about the temporal needs and predicaments of his people
and relieve them from their suffering, from their sickness and their illness and their hunger even.
His purpose was always to liberate them from sin.
And we hear that the people that heard him speak were amazed at his gracious words.
They were impressed by what he had to tell them.
They realized that he spoke with authority and not like the scribes and the Pharisees.
But if we were to read on in this chapter, eventually they wouldn't receive him
because they couldn't figure him out and he came from their own town.
And basically, they came to the conclusion, even though they knew in their hearts
he was telling them the truth and that he spoke with an authority that was not human,
they still wouldn't accept him out of their own pride because he was one of them
and because he was directing his corrections to them.
Amen.
Things haven't really changed.
None of us like to be admonished and the world does not want to be told what to do.
I've heard it said before and I think it's true that atheism isn't in the first place a theoretical problem.
It isn't so difficult to believe that there's a God, that things ultimately have meaning,
that all the beauty and complexity and indifference.
The intelligibility of the world is something more than just a random alphabet soup
that got knocked together and turned into what it is.
It's not hard to believe that there has to be some kind of infinite intellect and will
behind the design of the universe.
Theoretically, that's not hard to accept.
But practically, it can be very hard to accept because if we accept the theoretical,
mind-setting, and logical part of atheism,
then we have to come to the conclusion that God has a right to tell us what to do.
God has a right to prescribe our freedom and to reveal to us his holy will and expect us to follow it.
That's the difficult part.
And Satan, the world, and the flesh want to over-end the world.
emphasize this to the point where we think that really God is a tyrant.
God, all he's doing is he's looking down on the world and he sees everything that we do
and he's created all these rules that we're bound to
mess up and fail to execute
properly and then he's going to send us to hell
and that his whole purpose is to keep us under control.
A lot of atheists believe that religion was created by men
to use it as a way of controlling people.
That religion was used by the ruling classes to keep people in submission.
So religion is a control mechanism for people.
And sometimes even those of us
who fully believe in our holy religion
can get into this rut ourselves.
And there's a balance that needs to be struck
because in fact
there's a balance that needs to be struck
because in fact
God who created all things is Lord and Master
and it's a terrible thing to fall into the hands of God.
We are all headed for judgment
and the judgment on the last day will be definitive
and it's an either-or proposition.
It's either total victory and we go to heaven
or total defeat and we go to hell.
Purgatory is just an interim situation.
It's either heaven or hell.
The last analysis, there are not really four things.
There's only three.
There's three last things.
Death, judgment, heaven or hell.
It's one or the other.
Nevertheless,
God sent his only begotten son into the world
to save us from our sins
and to deliver us from our captivity.
And this is what St. Paul talked about in his letters so often
when he opposed the law and the spirit
or the law and the spirit.
He said you know that's not even the truth.
It was the old law and grace.
The old law and faith in Christ.
It wasn't a matter of saying that you know
we no longer have to worry about anything
as long as we accept Jesus Christ
as our personal Lord and Savior.
It was about the fact that those who have come to know Christ Jesus
and his love and mercy have come to know true liberty,
that while we still remain bound by the laws of God,
There were two things.
ultimately be judged by our willingness to conform to those laws that we have the grace of christ in
our hearts and if we nourish that grace that is given to us through baptism through baptism by
the eucharist and and the sacrament of penance and by a continual life of prayer and the cultivation
of virtue then the love of christ will grow in our hearts so that we can reach the point where
we can say with saint augustine love and do what you want those who love god those who are filled
with the grace of christ can do whatever they want they're free to do whatever they want
there are no limits on their freedom because their one desire is to serve god and to give him
happiness god wants us to have that desire he wants us to have that kind of liberty where we
don't see
Where we see the laws of God as hanging over our heads, waiting to crush us the minute we step out of line, but where we see the law of God as his wisdom and his love for us and the interior motives that come to us from Christ deliver us from that burden so that we do these things not because merely we have to do them, but because it is our one and fondest desire to serve God and to be faithful to him out of love.
That is what our Lord is proclaiming when he comes to his people and proclaims liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for those who are oppressed. It is freedom not only from sin, but also from the burden of the law.
And that was what St. Paul wanted to deliver us from. It wasn't from observance of the law, because our Lord says in the gospel that the law is not going to pass.
It is not going to pass away until it is all fulfilled. He did not come to abolish the law, but to fulfill it. And the fulfillment of the law is the abolishment not of its observance, but of its burden.
We don't have to feel the burden of the law. In the end, as we struggle through our spiritual life, sometimes we feel that burden because we are tempted to do other than what God asks of us.
But we should have the hope as we...
We should pray as we receive Jesus in the Eucharist, as we go to confession, and we should pray that we should be delivered from that burden and that our love should become pure.
We learn in religious life that our motives, as they become pure, will help us to live our life, to obey, not because we have to, because parameters have been set up around us, but because it is our desire to fulfill the will of God.
St. Bonaventure says that...
Our love is purified when our motives become directed toward God alone.
When it is our desire, we feel joy and fulfillment in the fact that we are doing the will of God.
That becomes what is our preoccupation and what brings us happiness.
We should pray for that grace. That is what we pray for when we pray for true love.
It is not necessarily an emotional feeling.
True charity.
It is this desire to please God and the interior joy that comes from accomplishing that task.
May we have the spiritual insight that removes the blindness of our hearts to allow us to see that this is the wisdom of God.
And may we be delivered from the burden and from the captivity of...
Having to do what God wants us to do.
Rather, may we do it with the liberty of the children of God, because we are free and because we love him with all our hearts.
Amen.
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