“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” It is still today. We celebrate the liturgy not as a pious memory of something that happened in the past. The liturgy is about today, about what God is doing in us. When we hear the mission plan of Jesus — to bring glad tidings to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free — we are being asked to follow in his footsteps. Obviously, on that day in Nazareth Jesus hadn’t done all those things but he would make implementing this vision of the kingdom of God a little closer to fulfillment by what he said and did. We cannot beg off the mission by claiming that we are not the Son of God as Jesus was because we have been given all that we need to play our role in the kingdom. We love God because he first loved us. Since we have the love of God as a freely given gift we are empowered to live in the grace and power of God in all that we say and do. It is not ourselves we are bringing but what God has done in us and for us in loving us. The kingdom of God is something we are passing on because it has been given to us in the love God has for us.
