Wondrous Type

The Readings 16th Thursday after Pentecost (21 Sep 23)
Leavetaking of the Elevation of the Holy Cross

• Ephesians 1:1-9
• Luke 4:16-22

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And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”

Luke 4:21

WAS IT THIS WAY for everyone reading the scriptures as a child (or having the scripture stories read to them)? When I hear “fulfilled” I imagine someone making a prediction about a thing (tomorrow it will rain) and then the prediction comes true (it actually rains tomorrow). So every time I heard about Jesus “fulfilling” prophecy, I went to take a look – did someone say, “then XYZ will happen”? Usually, to be frank, the answer was “No. No one said that.” So I wondered how things were being “fulfilled”. In the more fundamentalist world of my childhood where prophecies had to be specific “checklists” of things one had to expect a literal checking off of each item in its accidents in order for it to be true. For a dream sequence to be fulfilled, the exact things had to happen in the exact order, otherwise it was a “prophecy”.

That’s not the way the ancient Church read the scriptures – nor the way they learned to read them from their Jewish teachers. In the Second Temple period, the scriptures were read as meditation literature, as a continual process of contemplation. For example, one way to read the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphical works of the Jewish and Christian writers of this era is as fabrications. Another way is to see them a meditation journals: the daily process of engaged contemplation of the scriptures. This is evident in the traditions of both Jewish and Christian communities. And both communities, in their evolution, were able to make choices about which meditation literature was, ultimately, to be included in their sacred texts. Today we call this “settling the canon” and it can sound really curious when the Jewish community settled on a different canon a couple hundred years after the Christians did. But it’s an ongoing process of discernment. The Holy Spirit works gracefully, not bullishly.

In the process of meditation literature, to be “fulfilled” is not to draw a 1:1 ratio between the accidents of a prediction and their “coming true”. Rather it’s to draw, as it were, a 1:10 rati between the accidents of the prediction and the new, more-full way they are manifested. Imagine a small child drawing simple stick figures in the dirt, marked “Mommy”, “Daddy” and “Me”. Then a very generous and loving artist comes by and, using the stick figures as a guide, he creates full, life-sized manifestations of the family. Then he brings them to life. That’s “fulfilled”. Meaning a superabundant, overflowing realization of the actually meaning of the text.

Had Jesus yet done any of the things in his passage?

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, Because He has anointed Me To preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted, To proclaim liberty to the captives And recovery of sight to the blind, To set at liberty those who are oppressed; To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Luke 4:18-19, from Isaiah 49:8-9

Yes and no. No: in fact this was the beginning of his mission. But yes: it was doing it in the actual process of reading it: the poor were in front of him and he was preaching to them, the brokenhearted were in front of him and, if they would be open, they could be healed. They are the captives and in the reading he was proclaiming their liberty. He was – in the very moment – announcing the acceptable year of the Lord.

There. Right then. As he was reading it.

The stick figures on the page had gone from realized sculptures to a living man. Jesus, standing in front of them doing what the Scripture was saying as he was reading it. Fulfilled, at a ratio of one to infinity.