Luke 4:14-21
Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding region. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
At this point in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus was early in his public ministry and already turning heads when he made his first trip back home. Jesus was the “local boy made good.” They felt they knew him. Knew all about him. Even formed him. The neighbors of Nazareth probably hoped that he’d bring some of that healing magic back to town, like a synagogue version of Jayden Daniels.
So they gathered for worship on the Sabbath, probably ruffled his hair, and handed him the scroll from Isaiah. Jesus could have doled out some Chicken Soup for the Synagogue Soul that day. Kept it light. Stuck to the crowd pleasers. A little Comfort comfort ye my people. Isaiah
- Do not be afraid I am with you. Isaiah 41. He scrolled by Isaiah 43, Those who trust in the
Lord will renew their strength and mount up on wings like eagles. No eagles flew that day. Out of
the 66 chapters in Isaiah, about 25,500 Hebrew words, he chose these for his inaugural words from Isaiah 61. This time, from the translation The Message:
God’s Spirit is on me; he’s chosen me to preach the Message of good news to the poor,
Sent me to announce pardon to prisoners and recovery of sight to the blind,
To set the burdened and battered free, to announce, “This is God’s time to shine!”
Jesus said this is what he was anointed to do. Anoint in Hebrew is Mesach, which is the root of the word Messiah. It wasn’t subtle. It wasn’t a suggestion. There was no maybe or mystery about it. There’s not even original homiletics. He just cut and pasted from the Scriptures, and added his exclamation point at the end: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” If anyone was confused about what the Messiah does, this is it.
Jesus proclaimed the Year of the Lord’s favor, and I imagine when he did, some of the people in Nazareth grumbled …hardly. I imagine they were just as full of pitiful predictions and sad certainties as we are.
But here is something beautiful about his words. Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” For all you grammar nerds, the verb tense is the perfect middle. It means something was completed in the past but is ongoing in the present. It conveys ongoing, participatory action. It is the verb tense that refuses to say whether it happened then or now. It says yes to both. The Messiah came and served and preached and fulfilled God’s promise. And that action is ongoing. The verb begs the question, “Is the scripture being fulfilled? How about now? How is it being fulfilled in your hearing?”
Luke’s Gospel is a highlight reel of Jesus doing the very things he preached from Isaiah. Before he was born, his mother, Mary, sang the Magnificat, with virtually the same emancipating message. Jesus’ boundary-breaking ministry among the broken-hearted, penniless, blind, sick, and imprisoned kept it going. And his resurrection became the ultimate exclamation point, declaring to the world that fear, rejection, violence and even death could not hold him captive. And then came the book of Acts, written by the same author as Luke, and that book chronicles how the Holy Spirit breathed life into the church with an ongoing mandate: To participate in the same work of Jesus. To ask itself, “How about now? Is the Scripture being fulfilled in our hearing?”
Now, you’ll have to come back next week to hear how the inaugural sermon of Jesus was received. If you want the Cliff’s notes, they tried to hurl Jesus off a cliff. An actual cliff.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. whom we celebrated on Monday also chose these words from Isaiah and Luke to preach when he went back to Ebenezer Baptist, his home church in Atlanta, the church pastored by his father and grandfather. King said that these are God’s guidelines if you want to be a church. These are the requirements if you want to draw funds of grace from the treasury of the divine. These are the demands of the Kingdom which are not performed in a misty place beyond the veil of history, or in the sweet by and by, but they are to be proclaimed in the here and now. I imagine some folks in the pews at Ebenezer in in 1962 thought to themselves, hardly.
King went on to say:
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will learn to live together as brothers.
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will keep their theology abreast with their technology.
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will keep their morality abreast with their mentality.
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain will be made low; the rough places would be made plain, and the crooked places straight; and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will do unto others as they will have others do unto themselves.
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when men will love their enemies, bless them that curse them, pray for them that despitefully use them.
The people at Ebenezer Baptist like the people at Nazareth probably believed they already knew what the future held. But they heard the words from Isaiah and Jesus and then they saw people around them live them out and that emancipated their imagination. The Holy Spirit unlocked something deep inside them. They started to wonder, Could I do that too? How about now?
I don’t have to tell you that the sermons of Dr. King were not met with universal ovation and the cliff-throwers were present then as well. But there is power in proclamation. There is power in speaking the faith, come what may. When people are trying to close the door of possibility with certain doom, proclamation is like sticking a foot in the door and hope comes running in after it.
You probably heard the sermon from Bishop Mariann Buddhe delivered for Trump’s inauguration. Maybe you loved it. Maybe you really did not. But she made a plea for mercy for immigrants and the marginalized, especially the LGBTQ community. The U.S. Conference of Catholic bishops spoke up this week along the same lines. They were speaking the vision of Isaiah 61 and Luke 4, the lectionary for the world this week, which is not always cozy, congratulatory language. Not for any of us.
But I heard an idea this week that has stayed with me. Ezra Klein on his podcast was lamenting the agitated state of our world, and he said, “the opposite of doom is not necessarily optimism. It is curiosity.” His guest said, I think that we live in a doom-obsessed time. We do not live in an age in which we have a conception of the opposite of doom. We do not live in an age where we have a lot of conceptualizations of utopias. There are different ages where all sorts of different people are planning their utopias: spiritual leaders, architects, political leaders. No one does that anymore.
GK Chesterton said, “The world will never starve for want of wonders, but only for want of wonder.” We need to keep Christ’s vision before us and get curious about how it might be fulfilled.
I’ll end with a story of when curiosity changed things for me. Early in my ministry, I was part of an interfaith group that wanted to fulfill that vision Jesus laid out. We wanted good news for the poor in Fairfax. But the truth was, we hadn’t spent a lot of time asking what the poor in Fairfax really wanted. So, we started listening. The Catholic church in Reston was saying the people on the very edge really were asking for dental care. Dental care? I was just out of seminary. I wanted to be an activist for bolder words like hunger, justice, freedom, radical welcome. Morals, not molars. But then I gathered a group from our Wednesday community lunch, full of recent immigrants and the very poor, and I asked, off hand, “Anyone here really need dental care?” And every single hand went up. One guy, my friend Eugenio, said, “I removed all my molars at home instead of going to the ER. Does that count?” My face turned green. “Yes, that 100% counts.” Story after story like that surfaced, and six months later, Eugenio gave me permission to share his story with a large group of leaders. Our local senator, Janet Howell, nearly toppled out of her seat hearing Eugenio’s story. And in that room, dentists and business folks and church leaders and synagogue leaders and fancy health people from INOVA pulled together funds, space, tools and dentists enough to open a dental clinic. I don’t know that I would ever say this about a trip to the dentist but after his visit, Eugenio said, “Jesus gave me my smile back.”
I don’t know what you are facing that might feel hardly like the year of the Lord’s favor. Tough times at school. Family strain. Uncertainty at work. Storms and fury in our politics. Maybe you feel you can’t escape it and maybe you want to tune it all out. Today’s may you
remember that curiosity is an act of faith. Curiosity is spiritual humility. Curiosity participates in the ongoing freedom of God, sometimes just by holding a foot in the doorway, despite all the evidence, and wondering if this might yet be the year of the Lord’s favor. A year of seeing things as they are and as they should be. A year of proclaiming that bold vision from Isaiah and Jesus, fulfilled and yet ongoing. A year of proclaiming the worth of the poor and wiping the cynicism of your vision and hard-won smiles because Jesus is still declaring the Lord’s favor this way and his resurrection wonder is everywhere. Maybe the captives that walk away free is us.