Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins his Galilean ministry with a prophetic message in the synagogue at Nazareth: “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.”

The moment has arrived, the privileged time, the kairos; something that human beings have been longing for and striving after and hoping to see has appeared. In Jesus of Nazareth, the divine and human have come together in a salvific way, and this reconciliation is the long-awaited kingdom of God.

One motif in Scripture is persistent: the passionate desire for deliverance, the cry of the heart toward the God from whom the people feel alienated. What Jesus announces in his first sermon, and what he demonstrates throughout his life and ministry, is that this wild desire of his ancestors, this hope against hope, this intimate union of God and humanity, is an accomplished fact, something that can be seen and heard and touched.