Fr. Michael Williams

‘Ezra the priest [who] brought the Law before the assembly, consisting of men, women, and children [and how] all the people listened attentively to the Book of the Law’.

God’s people had assembled to be fed with God’s word, and to be instructed in God’s ways. Once the people had been instructed in the ways of the Lord, they all responded to Ezra the priest with, ‘Amen’, which is Hebrew for ‘so be it’ or ‘we are in agreement with what you have said’. Two and a half thousand years after Nehemiah and Ezra lived, we as God’s people are gathered together - men and women - to listen to God’s word, and to be instructed in His ways. For ‘when the holy scriptures are read in Church…it is God Himself who is speaking to us’.

Jesus, who is God-with-us, also gathered with the People of God on the Sabbath. St Luke tells us that, ‘[Jesus] went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day as He usually did’. Our Lord was a man of community prayer, not just private prayer. He gathered with the people in public to pray to the Father with them. Prayer needs to have a community dimension to it. Some people today will say, ‘I don’t need to go to church, I pray at home’. It is important that we pray at home. But if we truly follow Jesus, we will always be people who pray together as a community, because this is what Our Lord did. He prayed publicly with others. It’s worth remembering that in the Lord’s prayer it is, ‘Our Father’, not ‘My Father’; and it is ‘Give us this day our daily bread’, not ‘give me today my daily bread’.

By going to the synagogue on the Sabbath, Jesus is teaching us the importance of gathering with other believers on the Lord’s Day. By gathering together on the Lord’s Day we are publicly witnessing to our faith in God.

Whilst in the synagogue in His home town of Nazareth, Christ reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. By reading this passage He is making clear what His mission will be about. He says, ‘The Spirit of the Lord…has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and to the blind new sight, to set the downtrodden free’. And these words Jesus uses were backed up by his actions during His public ministry.

The Lord was sent ‘to bring good news to the poor’. Throughout St Luke’s gospel Jesus stresses that the poor are the favoured children of God. For example, the poor shepherds at Bethlehem are the first to be invited to visit the new born child, who Himself was born into poverty. Or in the parable of the Rich man and Lazarus, it is the poverty stricken Lazarus, who enters into the Kingdom of Heaven. In St. Luke’s gospel we can see that the Lord has a special concern for the have-nots in society. Jesus fed the hungry, cared for the sick, freed the possessed, consoled the sorrowful.

As followers of the Lord, we too have been anointed by the Holy Spirit through our Baptism and Confirmation, and so are called to help, and bring strength to those people in any kind of need. As St John says, ‘Our love must not be just words or mere talk, but something active and genuine’ (1 John 3: 18).

As we assemble around the Altar of the Lord today, to be fed with His Sacred Word and His Sacred Body and Blood, let us pray that we will imitate the One we receive, and so ‘brings good news to the poor’ in both word and deed.