Why are we here? Do you ever wonder that? Our young adults sometimes ask that question when they are in college seeking their vocation. Some of my oldest friends ask the same question when they wonder why they are still alive after all of their friends have gone home. Lester Collins memorably told of his mother in her nineties. She was weepy about still being here in the absence of her friends. Lester said, “But you know where your friends are.” Mrs. Collins reportedly said, “Yes but I’m afraid they are noticing my absence in heaven and thinking I went the other way.”
Jesus’ life was not easy, but it was greatly simplified by his clarity of purpose. In his hometown synagogue, he experienced the old adage, “You can’t go home again.” Handed the scroll of Isaiah, he turned to this beautiful passage. Jesus came to proclaim good news to the poor, liberation to the oppressed and sight to the blind. He came to tell the people in his world that “the time of the Lord’s favor has come.” This last phrase referred to the jubilee year, the year after the seventh Sabbath of years prescribed in Leviticus 25. So every fifty years, God said that debts should be forgiven and ancestral property should be restored to descendants. Historians tell us there is no record of the Israelites ever actually keeping the Jubilee year. In Jesus the whole Old Testament law is fulfilled.
What if we the followers of Christ continued Jesus’ message of good news? In Christ, we see the Lord’s favor for all. God has given us grace, freeing us from slavery to sin, exchanging our spiritual poverty for the riches of relationship with Christ, opening our blind eyes to see him. This is what we have to offer to the world. All we have to offer the world is exactly what the world needs: Christ. This is why we are here!
