3rd Sunday after the Epiphany
Texts: Luke 4:14-21;
Neh 8; 1 Cor 12:12-31a
YouTube: https://youtu.be/tefRWpKJXDI
See also the Sermon Notes
JESUS INAUGURATES THE JUBILEE OF HUMAN EQUALITY
That was quite a dramatic inauguration, wasn’t it?! I’m not talking about what happened in Washington on Monday; more on that in a few minutes. No, I’m talking about what we just read in Luke 4. Luke’s Gospel has the longest lead-up to Jesus’ actual ministry. He tells us infancy stories (both for Jesus and John the Baptist); he’s the only Gospel to tell us a story about Jesus as an adolescent, twelve years old. He has longer versions of what’s in the beginning of Mark: John the Baptist, Jesus’ own baptism, and the temptations in the wilderness. So here at Luke 4, verse 14, we finally have Luke narrating the inaugural moment of Jesus’ adult ministry, uniquely shaped by Luke. None of the other three Gospels tell the story quite so dramatically. It’s so dramatic, in fact, that the church’s lectionary has seen fit to split it in two. We can look forward to the even more dramatic ending next week (Epiphany 4C).
But this first half of Jesus’ Inauguration is pretty dramatic, too. First of all, it takes place in Jesus’ hometown of Nazareth. I think it’s like many of our modern-day political candidates, when they announcement their candidacy and launch their campaign. Very often, they do so in their hometowns, or at least their home states, right? Jesus launches his campaign for God’s reign in his hometown of Nazareth in the synagogue on the Sabbath. It’s not only hometown but also his home ‘church,’ so to speak. We are all set for the moment that he says the things to define his campaign, that tell us what he’s all about.
What happens next we can’t be sure of. Modern-day synagogues have a lectionary like we do. They have a section of Torah assigned to read each Saturday of the year. We can see this already in our First Reading from Nehemiah. As the Second, rebuilt Temple gets underway about 400 years before Jesus, they establish the practice of reading a portion of Torah, “with interpretation,” every Sabbath. What we’re not sure about is the other reading, called the Nevi’im, a reading from the Hebrew prophets. That, too, is a Jewish synagogue practice used right down to the present day. Luke clearly describes Jesus reading the Nevi’im, from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Was it assigned by a lectionary? Or did Jesus have the freedom to choose it? We can’t be sure.
What we can be sure about from Luke’s account is that it is a crucial text from the Isaiah, what is often called the Jubilee text. The Spirit of Yahweh has anointed a servant — presumably the Messiah, because the title Messiah means “anointed” — “to bring good news to the poor. . . to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” It is called the Jubilee text because that last phrase, “the year of Yahweh’s favor.” It points to the Jubilee year, a practice prescribed in Leviticus 25, that dramatically extends Sabbath practices.
The Sabbath is what? Every seven days. It provides a reset to every week, a day of rest to meditate on one’s relationship to God. And so a reset of our relationships with each other, as well. On that Sabbath day, all Jews, all Sabbath practitioners, are equal before God. In Jewish practice, the number seven also translates into a Sabbath year. Every seventh year, a person is invited to take some extended time off for refreshment and retooling. We call it a sabbatical. Did you know that there’s a practice in the ELCA to grant pastors in the seventh year of a call to take a sabbatical? (Maybe I’ll talk to you about that six years from now.) Well, the Jubilee Year, prescribed in Leviticus 25 tops all of that. It comes in the seven-times-seven year, the 49th year. Roughly, every fifty years or so, the people of Israel are to dramatically reset themselves not only in their relationship to God, but also to each other. It’s a reset on a society-wide basis. All debts held between people are to be cancelled. All property and wealth are to be resolved with the lines redrawn to be equitable. Can you imagine that? If that were to actually happen every fifty years? All your debts cancelled? Everyone’s goods and properties redistributed evenly? Can you see why that would be good news for the poor? For the enslaved and oppressed? To actually have a Jubilee year, a complete reset in our relationships to each other? Mind-blowing, right?!
As it so happens, it’s so mind-blowing that we don’t have any evidence of it ever happening. But here’s Jesus in his hometown synagogue reading the prophecy of a Jubilee Year actually coming to pass. He rolls the scroll back up, hands it to the attendant, and says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Wow! That’s some Inauguration Day! Jesus is basically suggesting that he has come to bring the economics of God’s reign into the world. All this past year, we’ve been talking about the Good News of God’s reign as Jesus bringing God’s very different politics into the world. Now, in this year of Luke’s Gospel, we can talk about the Good News of God’s reign as Jesus bringing God’s very different economic relationships into the world. Luke’s Gospel has a special emphasis on economic relationships.1 The majority of his special material — passages unique to his Gospel — have to do with rich people and their relationship to the poor. There’s the rich fool of Luke 12 and the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16, just to name a couple. For the much of this lectionary year, we will be pondering the role of wealth and the wealthy in human societies.
So that’s what Jesus’ Inauguration was about: the coming of not only God’s politics into the world but also God’s economic relationships — down-to-earth things like debts held with each other and how we view property. What about the Inauguration we experienced this past week? It’s, of course, never fair to compare anyone’s human economics to God’s very different Jubilee economics, which have yet to be truly tried in any human community. But there were some worrisome signs about Donald Trump’s Inauguration this week. The biggest worry is perhaps who the featured guests were, a gallery of the richest men in the world: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, and more. The graphic in your Sermon Notes puts the combined wealth at over a trillion dollars. There’s also a note, which you can’t read well unless its size is blown up, that says, “Since Trump’s election on Nov. 5, Elon Musk’s net worth surged 61 percent, rising from 264B to 426B.” There’s an apt word for what this seems to represent: plutocracy, which simply means “ruled by the rich.” Are we heading into more of a plutocracy than we already experience? Moving further away from a true democracy, government by and for the people? Toward a plutocracy, government by and for the rich? It remains to be seen.
But, brothers and sisters in Christ, are we called to notice these things and to evaluate them according to God’s very different politics? In what’s left of our democracy, can we be advocates for moving toward a more true democracy and away from plutocracy? Comparison isn’t necessarily fair, but I believe we are called to tentatively do so, nonetheless. We are called to measure our economics with God’s to advocate for change. To advocate for what might be more fair and just.
How can we begin to do so? I believe that the prophecy of Jubilee which Jesus came to embody gives us a good measure: how can every person be equal before God in their worth? Jesus treated everyone as of equal worth. When he healed, for example, he didn’t ask them for their insurance. He healed across all human boundaries of wealth and status. He died on the cross for every person’s sin, the things we do that continue to divide us. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus will have more to say about equity in terms of economics, rich and poor.
I would like to introduce a modern tool for evaluating economic equity: the GINI Coefficient.2 It’s a mathematical measurement from zero to one: A score of zero represents every person in a group having the same wealth — in other words, the elusive Jubilee conditions. A score of one represents one person holding all the wealth and everyone else nothing. Obviously, GINI scores are always somewhere between zero and one.
Let’s take a look at how this works out among the nations and whole population of the earth. The GINI Coefficient is highest on a worldwide basis because of the great disparity of wealth between nations themselves. Nations like the United States are so wealthy that we dwarf the poorest, underdeveloped nations, accounting for a great gap worldwide between rich and poor. Jesus came to teach us that this just isn’t right. It’s not OK for just a few people to be so rich and so much of the world’s population to be so poor. Luke’s Jesus will have a lot to say about this throughout Year C of the lectionary cycle.
The global situation is reflected in the pyramid figure on your Sermon Notes.3 Each little person represents one percent of the world’s population of 8 billion — meaning 1% is 80 million people. You can see the problem right away. 42% of the world’s wealth is controlled by 1%. It’s even more drastic when you consider that the top 100 billionaires alone control more wealth than the bottom 50%. With that kind of disparity, the global GINI score reached its highest level of equality in 2000 at .72. In the last 20 years there have been a lot of people working very hard with effective programs that are beginning to put a dent in that disparity. Currently, the global GINI score has risen 5% in equality to .67
Nations are a different story as most nations are either rich overall or poor, and the disparity tends to be less — so lower GINI scores. I think this congregation, with its Danish heritage, will find it very interesting that among the nations with the lowest scores, those with the highest measure of equity, are the Scandinavian countries: Norway .263, Finland .277, Sweden .298, the scores of Danish related regions are the lowest: Faroe Islands .210, Iceland .250, and Denmark .283. Here’s the rub, though: the United States currently holds the highest GINI score of all the larger industrialized nations at .413. We have the greatest gap between rich and poor! What will it take to get better? Can we learn from the Scandinavian countries what economic policies might make things more equitable?
So here’s closing questions for us, since we all have personal stakes in this: would you and I flourish more in this country if we had economic policies that are more equitable? Can we use a place like Denmark as a model? Wouldn’t each of our lives be better, more manageable if we can we contribute to making our communities, our nation, more equitable? Do we as followers of Jesus have guidance to offer in light of the Jubilee economics of God’s reign in Jesus Christ? Does the Good News we can proclaim to the poor go far beyond charity to the very structures of our economic policies? Can our economics be about more than the bottom line of profit? Can we also take into account a more fair distribution of wealth? Can we persuade our fellow citizens that it’s in everyone’s interest to live into a Jubilee economics? Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, January 26, 2025
YouTube: https://youtu.be/tefRWpKJXDI
Notes
1. There is a new book (this week!) on Luke’s Gospel that will be a guide throughout the remainder of Year C: Healing Affluenza and Resisting Plutocracy: Luke’s Jesus and Sabbath Economics, by Ched Myers. Myers reads Luke’s Gospel through the lens of Sabbath economics, with Luke 4 as the announcement of Jubilee to set the tone for Jesus’ ministry.
2. There’s plenty of information on the GINI Coefficient by searching it on the Internet. I first was introduced to it in macroeconomic books that analyze the inequality of wealth. See, e.g., the books of Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, such as The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (W.W. Norton, 2024), The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (W.W. Norton, 2012) and The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We Can Do About Them (W.W. Norton, 2015).
3. The graphic in the Sermon Notes is itself taken from Myers, Healing Affluenza, 7.
