The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.
When Jesus gets up in His hometown synagogue to read a passage from the Scriptures, He chooses Isaiah 61:1-2a, which begins with the words of our acclamation today. Jesus applies these words to Himself in a very literal way. The Spirit of the Lord has fallen upon Him at His baptism when He symbolically accepted our sins as His own burden and when the Father's voice rang out announcing that Jesus is His beloved Son. Jesus was anointed with the Holy Spirit at that very moment and prepared to begin His public ministry.
What is that public ministry? Jesus Himself tells us. He will bring glad tidings to the poor. And we are all poor. We are weak and sinful, and we fall continually. We need God at every moment to sustain us. We do nothing on our own.
Yet Jesus brings us good news. God does indeed sustain us at every moment, and Jesus has come to save us from our sins, to open the gates of Heaven, and to fill us with His grace that we might have eternal life.
On another level, we can make this Gospel acclamation our own. At our baptism, we were filled with sanctifying grace, and the Holy Spirit came upon us. At our confirmation, we were anointed and filled with the Spirit in an even deeper way and prepared for our adult mission in the Church. We are called to bring glad tidings to the poor, the materially poor but also the spiritually poor. By our words and our actions, we are called to spread the Gospel and to proclaim Jesus Christ to the world.
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