This ‘Jubilee Gospel’ records how Jesus announced himself as the fulfilment of Isaiah’s prophecy: the one who proclaims the ‘year of the Lord’s favour’, a message of Good News. Who would not rejoice at freedom, healing, and favour from the Lord? No wonder that Jesus was ‘praised by everyone’ at the start of his public ministry.

For the Good News, is all about the superabundant generosity of God breaking into our world. In his book, Let Us Dream, Pope Francis speaks repeatedly of the idea of ‘overflow’ — the way in which God’s mercy and love, like a great river, bursts the banks of what we see as the limits of real life, creating new possibilities of abundance that we, for whom reality is defined by scarcity, cannot imagine without the grace of the Holy Spirit.

But embracing this abundance also requires letting go of patterns of living that uphold our security, our status, our sense of self. The world as we know it, is to a great extent, run by systems that have led to the poor remaining oppressed, captives remaining imprisoned, the sick remaining bound by their infirmities. But these same systems also provide us with some security — and leave us with a nagging sense that we are in various ways complicit with, and beneficiaries of, injustice. This contradiction explains why the crowds that praised Jesus would soon seek to destroy him.

In this Jubilee Year, let’s reject false systems and empty self images. Let’s embrace the abundance of God; let’s trust enough, hope enough, to expect and welcome the overflow of the working of the Holy Spirit, so that this scripture may truly be fulfilled in our hearing.

by Chad Hargrave