Song of Eternal Presence

For this season after the Epiphany I have been focusing on the songs sung by all those players in Luke's nativity narrative.  Luke wants the world not only to recognize that Jesus is the beloved Son of God, the Christ but to celebrate the extent to which this gift has its effect on all the wrongs and misdeeds causing imbalance and suffering for the nations and for Israel.

Much of what Luke has his players sing is not new.  Simeon's song harkens all the way back to Abraham and Sarah who are released to the peace of their fathers as God promises to watch the generations after them.  Zechariah's song is full of the ancient Psalmist's praise. You can hear echoes of Hannah in the songs of Elizabeth and Mary.

How fortunate it was that the scroll was opened to Isaiah that day when Jesus returned to his home and stood to read in the synagogue:

18  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to proclaim good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives

and recovering of sight to the blind,

to set at liberty those who are oppressed,

19  to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Heady stuff and before the subtlety of those words hits home they all puff up a little that they know this Jesus and his family.  But as they come to see that the reading says as much of what is not happening yet and what they are preventing or at the very least not accomplishing themselves their puffery turns to offense and they shout to throw him off the nearest cliff.

It is often, too often a fault of human making.  Most of us have a view that reduces our lives to mechanisms of cause and effect.  Even some of the best arguments for the existence of God are those unmoved mover, first to love, creator of creativeness arguments.  So much of how we understand the world and its workings is to describe a linear process with beginning, middle and end.

What if what Jesus was sharing of Isaiah's song was about another way to understand God's relationship with us?  Wouldn't a "normal" word to the poor be to blame them for their lack of initiative or cast blame on some greedy oligarch or landlord?  Shouldn't the oppressed just rebel against their oppressors?

But Jesus/Isaiah just proclaims it, the year of the Lord's favor.  It is a Jubilee year and all debts are forgiven, prisoners freed.  The blind can see.

Who are these blind ones?  No others benefitting from this reversal of fortune are so singularly situated.  Aren't the poor part of the system of cause and effect imbalanced by greed and inefficiency?  Aren't the oppressed someone's victims?  Do not captives have jailers?

Could the blind ones be someone besides the victims of oppression, besides those made poor by another, besides those imprisoned?  Could it be that the blind are the oppressors, as well?  Could the greedy be missing something, blind to the same truth.

Could it be that this well-remembered home boy Jesus is calling the wrong people blind?  It could, couldn't it?  Could it be that in our small world of cause and effect we have imprisoned everyone -- oppressor and oppressed -- away from God's Jubilee?  What if the way God relates to us is as much eternal presence as a divinely begun progression of cause and effect?

I keep hearing Martin Smith's reminder, "you can never talk behind God's back" so now I'm wondering will we ever sing Isaiah's jubilee, knowing that God is always and fully with us?