Daily Gospel Reflection – Thursday after Epiphany

Daily Gospel Reflection – Thursday after Epiphany

January 6, 2022 

Thursday after Epiphany 

Gospel: Lk 4:14-22a 

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news of him spread throughout the whole region. He taught in their synagogues and was praised by all. He came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: 

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. 

Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” And all spoke highly of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. 

*United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 

Bishop Robert Barron

Friends, today in the Gospel, Jesus declares that he fulfills 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, enemies are forgiven, and the poor have the Good News preached to them. And ultimately, in his 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 and broken. It was fully compromised, its destruction now just a matter of time.