I got a pleasant surprise when I looked at the scripture readings for today. Not only is the Epistle reading from First Corinthians one of my favorites, the Hebrew Testament lesson from Jeremiah is going to be read at my ordination to the transitional deaconate which is 39 days from now (not that I'm counting the hours [936]). This Jeremiah passage is at the beginning of that book where Jeremiah is explaining how he became a prophet by God's doing. And that is a theme that runs throughout today's three scriptural readings....prophesy and God's work in the world: in particular this theme runs through our Gospel selection.

Today's Gospel picks up where last week's left off, with Jesus having just unrolled the scroll handed to him and having just read "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor...to proclaim release to the captives...recovery of sight to the blind...." In fact the last line of the Gospel we heard last week is the beginning of today's Gospel of Luke: "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

And then something seemingly odd happens: Jesus starts to sternly scold the people of his hometown. This is odd as Luke does not have the people of Jesus' hometown question him, or repudiate him as we see in the other synoptic Gospels of Matthew and Mark. In those Gospels the people from Jesus' hometown castigate him for going beyond where they think his station in life should be, even though Jesus had been doing great miracles all around Galilee. But the Lukan passage is very different and in fact, Luke has this incident at the very beginning of Jesus' ministry. Just before today's passage in Luke Jesus was in the desert being tested and being moved by the Spirit Jesus' first stop in the Gospel of Luke is his hometown.

For those of you who like Bible trivia, there is an interesting answer to a trivia question in our Gospel selection today. When Jesus is beginning to castigate his neighbors in Nazareth, he says they will ask him to "Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum." Well, in Luke, Jesus hasn't been to Capernaum yet, he goes there next, after his visit to Nazareth, after he has been chased out of Nazareth.

So what's going on here? We have Jesus seemingly in an unprovoked manner verbally attacking his hometown neighbors and referring to events in a town where he hasn't visited yet. What is Luke doing? Well, the easier one to answer is the Capernaum question. Luke utilized Mark and Matthew as models for his own Gospel, lifting whole bits out, re-organizing and re-structuring the stories. Sometimes, as here, Luke simply left something in that could have been edited out.