Nehemiah 8:1-3, 5-6, 8-10

Nehemiah was an advisor of the Persian king and apparently the governor of Judah. This is after Babylon is defeated by the Persian King Cyrus and Jewish people return from their exile. Here, Nehemiah records the public reading of the Torah by his contemporary, Ezra the priest. This would have been an important time for that collection of writings, a time when they were coming in to the form that we are now familiar with. We see people standing for this reading, people of all stripes and ages. This probably went on for hours. This is an age of interpretation. Ezra will go on to explain contradictions in Exodus, and of course clear them up, but the point is, they knew these contradictions existed as they were assembling the text.

1 Corinthians 12:12-31a

Pentecost in Year A overlaps with this text. I mentioned the book "Sacred Cows Make Gourmet Burgers" then. It discusses this idea of the analogy of the body that Paul lays out pretty well here. I can't remember where I heard it, but I heard parts of this used as an argument for being inclusive of homosexuals in church. Particularly, verse 15:
12:15 If the foot would say, "Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body," that would not make it any less a part of the body.
You can't declare yourself not part of the human race and no one should be able to say who deserves to be included or not. That kind of thinking has kept us from discovering how to make the blind see and how to feed the world. As we have opened education to more and more people, to anyone who is willing to do the work and dedicate themselves to study, we have found more and more who can contribute in ways we never dreamed. Paul's vision of what gifts people have were limited by his understanding of how healing actually worked or what speaking in tongues was all about, but the philosophy of honoring everyone's contribution is well stated.

Luke 4:14-21

The quote is from Isaiah at 61:1 of that book, pretty much verbatim. Isaiah was a well known text of the time. Isaiah goes on to say that God will bring comfort to those who grieve and ancient ruins will be rebuilt. Isaiah (or second Isaiah if you prefer) was writing in the time of the return from exile, a time when Jerusalem was in ruins and there were plenty of poor and brokenhearted folks around. He proclaimed all of this to be the year of the "Lord's favor".

The time in which Jesus is saying this is similar, maybe worse since they are actually occupied by an oppressive government and their own leaders are working with the oppressor. The idea of a year of "favor", sometimes also called a "Jubilee Year", would not have been popular with that leadership. It is a tradition (that was probably never actually practiced) of forgiving loans and letting land go fallow and letting prisoners and slaves go free. Obviously this is something that is difficult to implement, contracts wouldn't mean anything. But to suggest doing it at all would be a threat to anyone who made their living off slaves and ownership of property. This passage that comes early in the book, is about what this Jesus character is up to and could explain why things get so difficult for him later.