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The Today Factor Luke 4: 14 – 21 |
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Summary
The Today Factor Several years ago, a man named Robert Hastings wrote an essay called “The Station.” Its point was that we should close the door on the past, leave the future to God, and relish the present. The essay got wide attention after syndicated columnist Ann Landers ran the essay in her column, and many people were moved by it. After Hastings died in 1997, Landers ran the essay again, saying that it was one of the most requested item by her readers in the many years she had been writing the column. Here’s one line from the essay, which summarizes its point: “Yesterday’s a fading sunset; tomorrow’s a faint sunrise. Only today is there light enough to love and live.” In short, the essay advises us to take the time to appreciate the present. Hastings was not the first to give such advice, and we’ve heard it in other forms, such as the admonition to “stop and smell the roses.” But Hastings’ form of the advice struck a chord for many. Quite a few people reported that they had changed the course of their lives after reading his essay. And its popularity was such that it was eventually reprinted in the Reader’s Digest and in one of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books. If we were to read the essay just for its literary value, we would probably not consider it great; it’s nicely written, but not world class. And its sentiments are pretty common. What accounts for its popularity, I think, is that Hastings put into words what many people feel they are missing: an appreciation for what they have today. Many of us carry so much baggage from the past or are working so hard for future changes that the present seems to zoom past us. There is a spiritual application to the idea of not missing today, too. Within the Christian message, there is a strong emphasis on the future where, in the end, God will right all wrongs, where his kingdom will fully come and where the faithful will receive eternal life. It could be argued that without the confidence in that ultimate accounting, there could be no Christianity as we know it. Such an expectation, however, can cause us to undervalue the fact that where Christianity has the most ongoing impact on us is not the future, but the present. And our reading brings that home for us. In the chronology of Luke’s gospel, the opening act of Jesus’ ministry took place in the synagogues of Galilee, one of which was in his hometown of Nazareth. There, Jesus was invited to read the scripture of the day. He choose a passage from Isaiah 61 where the prophet speaks of the “good news” which he was “anointed” to deliver to “the poor” — news of release from oppression, recovery and the year of God’s favor. Jesus then sat down, and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In so saying, Jesus was telling the congregation that those words from Isaiah defined what the Father had sent him to do. The “anointed me” reference in the Isaiah passage meant “made me the Messiah,” so Jesus was saying, in effect, that he was the one God appointed to bring good news and hope to the poor. He was the fulfillment of this Old Testament prediction, and with his arrival, a new era of God’s blessing began. Daily work to do We could talk more about his mission, but for our purposes, take note that aside from reading the scripture from Isaiah, the first public word the adult Jesus speaks in the book of Luke is “today.” “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus said. Commentator Fred Craddock notes that in Luke’s gospel “the time of God is today” and that throughout Luke’s gospel, “‘today’ is never allowed to become ‘yesterday’ or to slip ... into a vague ‘someday.’” In other words, the call of God is always for right now. Eternal life and the coming kingdom are, of course, critical parts of the Gospel, but Jesus came not merely to help people in a someday realm, but to give spiritual “release” and “recovery of sight” right now. Jesus’ mission was to proclaim that “the year of the Lord’s favor” was that year. In fact, the call of Jesus to us is always about today. We can quickly see that doing good deeds, loving our neighbor, expressing our devotion to God and so forth, all need to take place in the present for us to make any reasonable claim that we are followers of Jesus. We can’t realistically say we are Christians because someday we are going to do good deeds and love our neighbor and serve God. Christianity only makes sense as an immediately applied faith, in which there are daily and tangible expressions of it. And we demonstrate our understanding of that part of the today factor when we continue to work to bring about constructive change in society, continue to help the poor, continue to minister to those in prison, continue to struggle for justice for all. It matters what we do. Daily benefits to receive But the “today-ness” of Christianity is about more than the things our faith impels us to do in the present; it is also about what we receive from it in the present. This very thing came up in an adult Sunday school class one morning. The teacher posed this question: “If you knew for a fact that there was no resurrection, no eternal life, would you still choose to be a Christian?” Now surely you recognize that if you remove resurrection and eternal life from our faith, it becomes something other than Christianity, and the class members understood that, but they were in agreement that if that were the case, they’d still want to be followers of Jesus and continue to participate in all that Christianity entails in the present. Various class members explained their answer by saying that Christianity gave them peace, comfort, support from fellow believers, a satisfying way to live, values they believed in and were glad to stand by, insight for growth and self-understanding, and other interior benefits that they saw as important for life day by day. Their response was, I think, like that of psalmist who said, “This is the day that the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.” Daily tending to perform Some of us might give similar answers, but there is a problem with relying exclusively on present benefits of Christianity: Such benefits can come and go. For example, many people who undergo a religious conversion report that one of the first things they experience is a sense of overflowing happiness or joy. But for most people, that proves to be a passing thing, at least as a surface emotion. Talk to people who have been Christians for years and only a few will mention happiness as an abiding experience. That tells us that the today factor in Christianity means not only that there is daily work to do and daily benefits to receive, but also daily tending to perform. That’s because the natural tendency with most things that stir our passions is for them to eventually subside. Our personal faith, which may have once burned like a fire, becomes, without tending, little more than faintly glowing embers. Adam Hamilton, a Christian in Kansas, has written about this business of tending our faith by comparing it to being in love. He says that over his 22 years of marriage, he has fallen in and out of love with his wife several times. There are times when he has been passionately in love with her and times when he has felt nothing, when he was simply going through the motions of being in love with her. He says that among the things he has found helpful in rekindling his love is to begin asking God to fill his heart with love for his wife. He then begins giving thanks in prayer for her, recalling the blessing she has been and continues to be in his life. He has found that these words of gratitude about her lead to feelings of gratitude for her. He then begins focusing on doing more loving things toward her and intentionally spending more quality time with her. That same kind of intentional tending applies to our passion for Christ. Indeed, one reason for praying prayers of thanksgiving is to rekindle the fires of gratitude to God and daily joy that once burned brightly within us. They can help us to focus on ways to express our love for God in service and to spend more quality time in his presence. Daily connection with tomorrow But there is one more word about the today factor that is essential: While in God’s scheme, today is where most of our attention will be, it should never be divorced from God’s tomorrow. What I do today, how I live today, the tending of my faith today, should never be separated from the fact that I will one day answer before God for how I have lived. So my todays should reflect his tomorrow. We have seen several horrible instances in the news recently of people who unlinked today from tomorrow. People who have gone on shooting rampages have, in effect, taken their today and made that the whole thing. They have behaved as if there is no tomorrow, and for them, there usually isn’t, at least not in this world. Those examples may be too extreme for us to identify with, but whenever we decide to ignore the values our faith puts before us, whenever we decide to chuck everything that is right and go in a different direction, whenever we decide to blow everything for one brief time of wild abandon, we are unlinking today from tomorrow. When Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he was actually linking both to past promises being fulfilled and to the future God is sending, but he was putting the emphasis where it belongs for it to have meaning for us: right here, right now, today. We, too, need to keep them linked: the faith as it has been understood and explained over centuries past, the promise of the kingdom to come, and all of it lived, practiced, tended and enjoyed today. |
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