NOTES for Luk 4:18-19

We can attribute to respect, worship, and even complaisance the fear that inspires us how to live in the presence of the Lord. Unfortunately, it is mostly our will to consider God equal to us, by saying " I feared thee, because thou art an austere man: thou takest up that thou layedst not down, and reapest that thou didst not sow." (Luc 19:21). We portray a horrible, abominable, vindictive, and at the same time impersonal “being”, from whom it is necessary to run away without looking backward when we try to justify ourselves of our own passivity, our laziness, our unwillingness to give everything back to this “being”. And quite as Adam, we realize at this moment our nudity, our weakness and our solitude in an unknown and horrible world (see Gen 3:10). A dire poverty stifles in us the will to live. We lament and tumble, we cry and we are distressed of the impossibility or the incapacity to bear the horror which surrounds us. We understand that we are enslaved by this fear, in a way that we cannot even move. We are tormented and led until the ultimate limit of despair. Being thirsty of deliverance, we turn out to be subject of sin and death; and no one knows how to get out of this trap: even being aware of all this, we do not find a solution for oneself, let’s not talk about finding it for somebody else . It is impossible to a man to surmount this terrible rupture by his own strengths. It is possible only for the One who can say that He came to preach the Gospel to the poor, to heal the broken hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised. The favorable summer of the Lord begins for us from the moment we are conscious of these facts and receive into our life the One who gives all this.