Saint Callistus

First Reading: Nehemiah 8:2-4, 5-6, 8-10
Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 12:12-30
Gospel: Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21

Today in the Gospel, Jesus declares that he has fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.”

Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God. The deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised to life, the poor have the Good News preached to them, enemies are forgiven. And ultimately, in the Resurrection, Jesus’ followers saw that the old world—the world predicated upon death and the works of death, the world that had done Jesus in—was now defeated. God had definitively declared his opposition to that world and his support of the new one.

So awed were they by the Resurrection—and you can sense it in every book and letter of the New Testament—that they awaited the imminent arrival of the new state of affairs, the return of Jesus and the establishment of God’s kingdom. Though Jesus did not immediately return, the old world was over, broken, compromised, its destruction now just a matter of time.