Third Sunday in Ordinary Time Yr C 2025

Title

The Dawn of the Fulfillment

Outline

People often believe we are in the dawn of fulfillment

It may be this political party or that in the USA saying now with this leader we can reform the USA towards utopia. It may be the strain of evangelicalism that says, “These are signs of the last days” before Jesus returns and utopia comes to earth. It may be Mr. Putin saying, along with the Orthodox Patriarch, “Now with me at the helm we can return Mother Russia to greatness, to the greatness of the Third Rome.” Philosophically all of these and more are similar.

We see this in our first reading

Israel has returned from Exile, they have built a temple, now ten days before the Day of Atonement the Torah is read to all who could understand, read in Hebrew and translated into Aramaic, and the people respond with mourning for what they had lost but were told to rejoice for they were back in the favor of God, that this was the day of fulfillment. Regaining the Torah and the land was the fulfillment of the dreams of the prophets.

Now turn to Luke and see how it differs

Luke too is writing a scroll, a full scroll, containing the testimony of “those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” And it was to be read to Theophilus who is either an idealized Roman official or a Roman official who has become Christian. But there is a difference.

We jump to chapter 4 right after the baptism and genealogy of Jesus and discover not a holy scroll, but a person, Jesus, who functions “in the power of the Spirit.” He comes to his home town and reads a scroll:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

He is reading about the Spirit of the Lord, but it is not upon a book but upon “me” and then he says “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” You want fulfillment? You want utopia? It is me. You just heard me read the text about me.

Now the people will eventually not be impressed when he draws out some of the implications of that statement, but it is clear that the statement refocuses them from a scroll or an idea or a theology to a person about whom scrolls will be written and whose teaching and theology will be committed to apostles, but who will still remain central. Nothing must detract from Jesus as Lord.

That, my friends, is the huge difference between Jesus and other faiths or even Christianities

Other faiths, whether overtly religious or decidedly secular, have books and philosophies and practices and even Messiahs, but they do not have Jesus the Lord, the Messiah, the one who fulfills all our hopes and who is the kingdom in person.

We have many Christian leaders with different abilities, but their gifts are all derived from the same Spirit in whose power Jesus moved and so are aspects of the ministry of Jesus. They are distractions if their ideas come to replace Jesus and his teaching, no matter how charismatic they are. They are all equally helpful and needed to the extent they follow the leading of the same Spirit, are centered on Jesus as Lord, transmit his teaching, whether in word or deed, and are united by the Spirit under his authority. That is why I am Catholic and no longer Protestant.

And we have many who have proclaimed Rome or Mecca or Constantinople or England or the USA, among other places, the new Jerusalem of the fulfillment of our hopes, but we know that our kingdom is a person, Jesus, and those who are his subjects, and that it is partially fulfilled in his presence in the Holy Sacrament but will be fully fulfilled only when he is standing in our midst and we are all together in his presence.