Today’s Gospel reading reveals Jesus himself and his mission.  Jesus proclaims the following: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because 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 year acceptable to the Lord. This is quite a proclamation! The reaction to Jesus is positive at first with the crowd in amazement. They then are filled with fury and finally end with the thought of hurling him to his death.

I had to take a hard look at my own life when contemplating this reading. It mimics my own faith walk in many ways. In my youth, I was in awe of my faith and was well formed in my love for Christ. As I grew into adolescence, I began to question what I was taught, and turned more to worldly things and at time, even became enraged, for some unknown reason, at my childhood faith. Following this was a time where I hurled Christ out of my life and spent years in the secular abyss.

After a series of events I was brought to my knees and found only a complete reliance on God. Only with a surrender of my will over to Him, could I  turn my life around and walk with the Spirit. So it has been decades of relying on the grace of Christ as I grow in my journey. Despite all efforts I can still find myself, at times, going back into the cycle of awe, questioning and rejection. The one thing I have been most grateful for is that the times of elation and closeness to God far outweigh the other parts of this cycle. So I pray for the continual grace of God to accompany me in walking with my personal encounter with Christ.