This morning’s Scriptures are: Psalm 119:145-176; Micah 2:1-13; Acts 23:23-35; Luke 7:18-35

This morning’s Canticles are: following the OT reading, Canticle 11 (“The Third Song of Isaiah,” Isaiah 60:1-3,11a,14c,18-19, BCP, p. 87); following the Epistle reading, Canticle 16 (“The Song of Zechariah,” Luke 1:68-79, BCP, p. 92)

In Luke’s Gospel, John the Baptist (JB) had been looking forward to One more powerful than he baptizing with “the Holy Spirit and fire” — coming to gather the wheat, “but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Luke 3:16,17). JB had been prophesying a single coming of God with a double effect: blessing and judgment. The kinds of things that are being reported to JB in Herod’s prison are indeed signs of the inauguration of the blessings of the age of the Spirit: the sick are being raised up, and even the dead (Luke 7:1-17). But where’s the fire? Where’s the burning of the chaff? Where’s the reckoning for the likes of Herod who has arrested JB (see Matthew 11:2)? How is JB to reconcile the coming of the good (the healings) with the continuance of the bad (the persistence of evil)?

“The year of the Lord’s favor.” It is to make a dual point that Luke narrates today’s story. The message parallels Luke’s earlier account of Jesus’s reading of Scripture in the synagogue in Nazareth (Luke 4:16-21). There Jesus had ended the reading of the Isaiah passage with “the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:19; Isaiah 61:2). He had not included the next phrase in Isaiah, “and the day of the vengeance of our God.” What’s being fulfilled at Jesus’s coming, and in his reading, is the blessing of God’s people. For now, punishment of God’s enemies is being delayed. The Lord has come with the benevolence that the prophets had promised, but not yet with the final reckoning against all that is evil. A new age is arriving, the ushering in of an age of blessing: of “good news for the poor,” of “release to the captives,” of “recovery of sight to the blind,” of “letting the oppressed go free.” But not in totality—because the final settling of accounts and the ultimate meting out of judgment, is still “not yet.”

Thus, in today’s passage, for the sake of JB’s emissaries who are wondering on his behalf where is the combination of the Spirit of blessing and the fire of judgment, Jesus performs another clutch of messianic miracles. Doing so, in Luke 7:22, he points to the way these miracles prove that the Age of the Messiah—the Age of the Spirit—has indeed come: the blind receive their sight (Isaiah 35:5), the lame walk (Isaiah 35:6), the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear (Isaiah 29:18), the dead are raised (Isaiah 26:19), the poor have good news brought to them (Isaiah 61:1). 

But then Jesus says (I paraphrase Luke 7:23), “don’t stumble over the fact that God hasn’t taken Herod out yet, nor freed you from prison, nor wiped—just yet—all evil from the face of the earth.” 

John the Baptist’s task. In this passage, Jesus provides his most extensive commentary on JB’s role in the history of redemption. The OT prophetic point of view had been that a day is approaching—a single day—in which God will come to bless his people and punish his enemies. JB is the last and the greatest of the bearers of this message. The sobriety of JB’s ministry is that his job was to issue a call to repentance, a call for preparation, a call for getting one’s house in order. In the metaphor that Jesus uses, JB’s presence in the wilderness was a “wailing” that amounted to an invitation to weep over sin and unworthiness. Weep, for judgment is coming—that’s his message. 

Invitation to the dance. What is actually happening, though, is that God’s coming is being staged in two parts. First, the Lord comes to bless—to open up an era of hope, of healing, of opportunity. First, he comes to provide redemption and to offer “a place on the team,” so to speak. At this first coming, he is being welcomed by all those who know they need grace to stand in the “day of vengeance of our God.” God’s Messiah is being welcomed by all those who know he has come to bring a forgiveness they desperately need. This first coming of the Lord (announced as the glad invasion of “joy” and “peace on earth” by the angels in Luke 2:10,14) is, in terms of the metaphor Jesus uses in today’s passage, “playing the pipe,” inviting people to dance (Luke 7:32). This Messiah has come “eating and drinking,” befriending “tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 7:34-35). 

I pray that the graciousness of the first coming of Jesus is not lost on us. I pray that we respond to his invitation to “join the team”—or, better, as the metaphor suggests: join the dance, grateful that the Dancer-from-Heaven delights in kicking up his heels with “tax collectors and sinners” like us. 

Be blessed this day, 

Reggie Kidd+