If we read between the lines, we might see that St. Luke isn’t over the moon with ‘other accounts’ of the ‘events that have been fulfilled amongst us’. Not so much, we might say with the facts, but how these events are to be understood. St. Luke wants a ‘deeper understanding’ of the life, death, resurrection of the Beloved Son of God. The question is, do we?
Jesus experiences Himself as God’s Beloved Son, filled with the Spirit. The Spirit takes Jesus into the wilderness, where the devil tempted Him to act out as Beloved Son as a personal privilege. With promises that He would never be hungry, that he would have power and territory and religious safety, the devil casts his lure. When Jesus responds with a powerful NO! The Spirit fills Him completely. So it is, ‘filled with the power of the Spirit’ He returns to Galilee.
It looks as if Jesus is trying to develop a fuller understanding of ‘Spirit filled Beloved Son of God’. What this does not mean has been clarified in the desert sand, in mid-air and on the pinnacle of the Temple. What it does mean will unfold in the synagogue in Nazareth. Here, the book of Isaiah is handed to Jesus. He bypasses the ‘Reading of the Day’ and searches for the one that will best describe the Son of God and His Mission. What the people in the synagogue hear is that He is on a mission of liberation. Wherever life is made poor, imprisoned, broken or impaired, it will become enriched, free, and well again. For Jesus, Son of God is not a Title of privilege, it is a call to transforming action!
Luke has made good on his promise. The reader now has the words to understand Him and then to understand exactly what they mean when they call themselves His disciple.
So, have you ever had an experience of God? What was it and, more importantly, what did you do with it? In The life of Jesus, the gift He received had to be continually unwrapped. A kind of spiritual pass the parcel. With each unfolding it becomes clearer what the original experience was and what it means. Sometimes for us, these events come in prayer, sometimes in nature, at the birth of a child, the death of a parent, by falling in love, by searching for truth, by practiced compassion for the poor, by working for
justice. In and through these events, Gods love begins to shine brighter. But the experience needs to be courted and pursued. It’s meaning must be tested and enlarged. Sacred books must be consulted if the full meaning of the event is to be understood. In short, it demands our cooperation!
And then there are the times when the very ordinariness of our life suddenly breaks into an experience of God. Michael Novak hints at the holiness of the factory worker, the shop assistant, the cleaner, the secretary, the artist, the writer, the computer analyst. He writes,
“We didn’t give ourselves the personality, talents or longings we were born with. When we fulfil these – these gifts from beyond ourselves – it is like fulfilling something we were meant to do. It is a sense of having uncovered our personal destiny, a sense of having been able to contribute something worthwhile to the common public life, something that would not have been there without us – and, more than that, something we were good at and enjoyed”.
(Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life [New York: The Free Press, 1996]36)
This second way reverses into the Sacred in all things. But, either way, the quest for understanding will lead us to the stream in the desert, the shelter in the storm, the rock when things are falling apart. The ever present and ever elusive Spirit will reveal God’s heart to all who search for the truth.
