Daily Reflection for Thursday, January 9, 2020
Peace and Blessings, Friends and Parishioners,
We encourage you to reflect on Thursday’s readings at this link:
http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/010920.cfm
If you prefer to use your own Bible, the readings are:
First Reading: 1 John 4-19- 5:4
Responsorial : Psalm: 72-1-2, 14,15bc, 17
Gospel: Luke 4:14-22
Our reflection on Thursday’s readings:
He said to them, “Today this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Luke 4:21
Can you even imagine it? Can you imagine being there for the start of Jesus’s public ministry? Ignatian spirituality encourages and invites one to place themselves in the real time story and it is interesting to consider the energy, the whispers and most definitely the doubts that swirled around this presumed nobody in Jesus who almost overnight landed on the local scene and began to make waves and became known around the region.
Our Gospel reading for today highlights the beginning of his Galilean ministry and His return to Nazareth. As He must have done countless times when growing up, He heads to the synagogue on the Sabbath day drawing all the eyes of the congregation to Him and informs them that the scripture passage that He had just read was fulfilled in their hearing. What must it have been like to have heard the mandates in the first person of bringing glad tidings to the poor, proclaiming liberty to captives, recovering sight for the blind, and letting the oppressed go free?
The disquieting challenge is to consider in what way this scripture reading applies to us. If we believe that Jesus became fully human so we, in turn, could be like Him, then the goal of our Christian life should exemplify what we were made for which is nothing more than to be in communion with one another and to attain our truest fulfillment through this other-centered communion by being “another Christ” to each other. St. Augustine wrote, “let us thus rejoice and give thanks, for we have been made not Christians, but we have been made Christ.”
How does the valence of today’s Gospel reading change with this frame? How much broader do the concepts of glad tidings, captivity, blindness and oppression become? (Captive, blind, oppressed to what, by what?) As His body we are not called to do these things for Christ or even with Christ but AS Christ.
Rafael Rosario