Treating The "unpresentable" With Special Care

Third Sunday in Course 2025

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of people come into our lives over the seventy or eighty years of an average American lifetime. If we look at St. Paul’s words written almost two thousand years ago, describing an early Christian assembly, we can see images of people we have known, or even rub shoulders with all the time today. There are prophets, people with clear vision. We also encounter folks whose daily or weekly efforts behind the scenes enable the Church to grow, or move to more effectively answer inquirers. There are strong people and partially able ones.

In my life, for instance, I can think of my young brother-in-law, who was born with Downs syndrome. I contrast his life forty or fifty years ago with the situation of most children with that condition today. We know that most Downs-affected children are eliminated before birth nowadays. Some foreign governments even brag about how much resources are saved by not having to care for them. What is lost by losing them? Such children exhibit the love and openness of Christ to everyone they meet. I say losing that witness leaves a community injured, even emotionally and socially bankrupt. Paul calls us to treat “unpresentable” parts of the Church body with greater honor, greater care. That kind of community witnesses Christ’s compassion against a society only concerned with maximizing “utility.”

Or, on a liturgical level, consider one of your relatives or friends who just can’t sing the right note in any hymn. He/she is always a quarter tone flat. Church musicians know that if the whole congregation is singing, one or two percent of the praising assembly being out of tune actually creates a richer sound. As Ezra and Nehemiah knew many centuries ago, rejoicing in the Lord is our strength.

Our lessons today treat of the reading of the Word of God to His people, and the power of that Word. Ezra, the scribe, took the Book of the Law, Torah, on this solemn gathering during the Feast of Booths, and he read it to the people. It appears that he had help, thirteen other men who seem to also be readers. How do I know this? He read from about dawn until noon. That’s five or six hours. Surely he didn’t do that alone! Moreover, since the people who had returned to Israel from Babylon were speakers of the common language, Aramaic, there were interpreters in the crowd who helped them understand what they were hearing. There is a clear connection with what we do here, with interpretation after the reading of Scripture.

Jesus continued in that tradition when He taught in all of Galilee, and especially when He came back home to Nazareth. He read from the Book of the prophet Isaiah, not from Torah, finding in the scroll a passage from what we call chapter 61, a prophecy that concerned the Messiah. The Lord’s Anointed, Isaiah wrote, would preach good news to the poor, would proclaim a Jubilee Year, such as the one Christians celebrate this year. As in all jubilees, captives would be released from prison, the blind would see, the oppressed liberated.

Jesus then said to his hometown folks something revolutionary: “Today, in your hearing, this Scripture passage is fulfilled.” He identified his listeners as the poor who would hear the good news, and, more remarkably, was clearly claiming that He, Jesus, the hometown carpenter, was the Anointed of God. We don’t hear today the aftermath. There was an argument between Jesus and the townsfolk. He hadn’t healed any blind people there. Jesus didn’t back down, and He and His tiny band of followers had to escape with their lives.

St. Luke, we hear earlier in the Gospel, was very careful in his research to write only what he knew to be true about the life of Jesus. As a disciple of St. Paul, he followed him on his later missionary journeys, and the last of these took Paul and followers back to Judea and Galilee, where Paul had to spend a couple of years in prison. That gave Luke plenty of time to research his books about Jesus in both his childhood and ministry, and about the early Church after the Resurrection. So we can give thanks that Luke was able to write the most thorough and historically coherent of the four Gospels for the benefit of hundreds of millions of us. Blessed be God in His Word and works.