The Ripple Effect
Michiel Peeters - Dear friends, the first scene today’s readings describe to us is when the Jewish people has returned to Jerusalem after decades of exile in Babylon. They gather in the open place before the Water Gate. Then the priest Ezra opens the scroll and reads the entire law of the Lord, from the beginning to the end, “from daybreak till midday.” While Ezra is reading, all the people start to weep, for they realize that they haven’t been paying attention to what God had told them. They have forgotten Him. They have followed their own instincts and ideas. Realizing this, they weep bitterly. But Ezra says: don’t weep, don’t remain stuck because you didn’t heed Him for so long. Remember Him now. Not what you have done, your remorse, or even your future good deeds, but “rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength.” “Rejoicing in the Lord must be our strength.” Our strength is our joy because of the Lord’s presence among us.
The second scene we heard in the Gospel reading is after his baptism and presence at the Cana wedding, on a sabbath, when Jesus goes, as was his habit, to the synagogue of his hometown Nazareth. In that time, in the synagogue, if someone would have to say something, he could stand up, read the scroll with the reading of the day, and explain it. Jesus stands up and is given the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. […] He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a [new era] acceptable to the Lord.” It was a prophecy about the Messiah, the promised one, who would finally bring to fulfillment the people’s deepest desires. Then Jesus sat down and said, simply: “What you have just heard is happening here and now.”
That is to say: I am this Messiah. If you are poor in spirit enough to verify the glad tidings I bring, you’ll experience liberation, recovery of sight, a new era.
Was he out of his mind? Maybe not. We’re here because some people heard his words and claim, and were so struck by his eyes and the way he spoke that they began to follow him, to verify Him. And this changed them so much that they went into the world and history to bring Him to us today. In what form? In the form of the unity of their changed personalities.
Because those who, like John and Andrew, Magdalene, or here in Tilburg, Peerke Donders, recognized the exceptionality in that face and started to follow and verify Him, became stronger united, over time and space, than any bond of blood, skin color, gender or social status could have done. This is what St Paul says, when he calls the Christians “the body of Christ”: “For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit. Now the body is not a single part, but many. You are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it.” Since we are brought together by Christ and because of Christ, we, the Baptized, are his body, his physical presence, his face, here and now, in our universities and cities!
20250126 3rd Sunday in Ordinary Time C (Neh 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10; 1 Cor 12:12-30; Lk 1:1-4; 4:14-21)
The author has not revised the text and its translations.
