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The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to [Jesus]. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: \u201cThe Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news\xa0to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord\u2019s favor.\u201d Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down.\xa0The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.\xa0He began by saying to them,\xa0\u201cToday this scripture is fulfilled\xa0in your hearing.\u201d (Luke 4:17-21)

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This Coronavirus 2019 crisis began for us in Canada on Wednesday, March 11, 2020 when the WHO declared it a global pandemic.\xa0 Within a week, our life had changed drastically.\xa0 In the church calendar, the season was Lent. \xa0The season of giving things up in order to focus on God.

As we begin again into Lent this year, I can\u2019t help but think of our Lenten journey of last year.\xa0 It seems almost that Lent never ended.\xa0 We got stuck somewhere around Good Friday, but never quite made it into the freedom, light, and life of Easter Sunday.

We passed through not just a pandemic, but a confrontation with deep racial disparities, injustice, and prejudice\u2014not just in the US, not just in Canada, but within our very selves.\xa0 We witnessed deep political divides and deep divides over how to navigate pandemic restrictions that drove families, churches, and neighbours apart\u2014and that still do.\xa0 We witnessed a lot of injury, disease, mental health challenges, substance abuse, and death, too.

But into this too-long Lenten journey enters Jesus, speaking the same words spoken at the last funeral in our church.\xa0 Jesus enters, and in the face of the death, injustice, and divisions before us\u2014he proclaims good news to the poor, hit disproportionately hard by pandemic restrictions; he proclaims freedom for the prisoners of human trafficking; recovery of sight for the blind majority who cannot see their own misery and need for salvation; the setting free of those oppressed by racially biased structures in society; the year of jubilee to effect a true, just, and restorative reconciliation between us all.

\u201cToday,\u201d Jesus said, \u201cthis scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.\u201d\xa0 Jesus was anointed by the Spirit to make these proclamations and also to make them true in the real lives of real people in this world.\xa0

Dare we believe that this is the work Jesus is still doing among us?\xa0 Even now?\xa0 Even today?\xa0 Even in the midst of so much death, division, and despair?\xa0 That Jesus still proclaims the Good News of the Gospel of Salvation in Him, and the promise of freedom, restoration, renewal, and a great setting-right of all things now wrong?\xa0

In just that peculiar belief, lies our Christian hope.\xa0

Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of the season of Lent.\xa0 But instead of focusing on ourselves and the things we need to give up, confess, or do better in (as we might usually do for Lent), we\u2019re going to focus instead on our Christian Hope in these things that God has done, is doing, and will do until they are done.

For us as Christians, that hope begins and ends with Jesus.

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