On the day of Pentecost, Peter speaks a prophecy out of the book of Joel to describe the church’s mission. Peter said that God’s Spirit calls us to announce the good news like the prophets of old (Acts 2:17-18). According to an earlier chapter (Acts 1:8), the most critical element of this mission involves testifying of Christ to all peoples.
While evangelism is undoubtedly central to our mission, our writer, St. Luke, would suggest that we should not neglect another prophetic theme. As Joel provides our marching orders in Acts, a prophecy of Isaiah provides Jesus’ inaugural message in the Gospel of Luke.
A few years ago, a phone salesman selling security systems called me. As we chatted briefly, he said. “I don’t want to sound prejudiced, but do you realize there’s a lot of Section 8 housing on this block?” Of course he was thinking that the presence of low-income families should have alerted me to my need for home security. I am concerned about my neighbors, but not out of fear that they will break into my home. Too often we become isolated from our neighbors, and then “those people” that we are afraid of can become an excuse to remain estranged from one another.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” (Luke 4:18-19)
Throughout Luke’s gospel, Jesus places the love of God and neighbor at the center of the good news he preaches. This good news is at the core of a community marked by reconciliation and one-another behavior. Jesus’ ministry reenacts God’s history of calling people out of their situations in the world and restoring them to be a peculiar people—people who often don’t fit together in the eyes of the world. Common logic of the day worked to keep the rich and poor apart—what should the privileged have to do with the powerless?
This is why the good news in Luke is so striking: the proclamation of the gospel is the announcement that in God’s kingdom, a whole new and upside-down order has begun. In God’s new creation, a significant reversal of social and economic systems is unfolding. As a part of this new and different ordering of the world, we are called to something different than the world around us.
We are called to something more.
Jesus’ message in the synagogue in Luke 4 offers a stark warning for us today. The Spirit has empowered us to cross cultural, economic, and other barriers with Jesus’ message. That message is one of concern for the people around us. It is a message of liberation, justice, and salvation. To follow him and proclaim that message, we must be ready to go beyond the assumptions of our culture just as Jesus did, and both proclaim and live whatever God declares in his word. Jesus wants to join his people into unity with one another, beyond our ethnocentric, nationalistic, or even egocentric prejudices. We want to continue to carry on the mission of bringing the good news about God’s kingdom and caring for all people’s needs.