Grace to you and peace from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.
Jesus had returned home to Nazareth. Luke doesn’t tell us
why. Tradition says that by this time Joseph had died; perhaps Jesus wanted to check
on His mother and care for her before His ministry began in earnest. Perhaps He
was simply nearby. Whatever the reason, He returns to His hometown. While He
was there, the Sabbath came and Jesus went to participate in synagogue worship.
Synagogues were like local chapels, small churches where the community gathered
for study of the Scriptures and for Sabbath worship in between pilgrimages to
Jerusalem and the Temple. In the tradition of Ezra, one of the more learned
men, perhaps a local rabbi, would take the appointed scroll for the day and
begin reading and “give the sense” – preach – the text. It was also a custom
that if a wise man, a scholar, or a more learned rabbi were passing through, he
would be given the honor of reading and teaching that Sabbath.
Reading the scrolls and giving the sense of the reading was
no small thing. By the time of Jesus, Aramaic was the common language, but the
scrolls were written in ancient Hebrew. Modern Hebrew, what I studied in
undergrad and Seminary, uses both consonants and vowels, clearly combined and
separated into individual words, and other markings to determine verb tense,
singular/plural, and so on. The ancient manuscripts had no vowels. Because the
scrolls were so valuable and the space so precious, there was also no spacing
between words. So, “run,” for example, would have been “RN.” Or, was that
running, or ran, or will run? Or, was it actually part of the words before and
after it? To an uneducated reader, it was nothing but long, long lines of
characters. The next time you read a paragraph, imagine it without vowels, no
punctuation, and no space. Then, imagine having to read it out loud and you get
a greater appreciation for those who stood up in the Synagogue to read. It was
not for the faint of heart or the unequipped mind.
Although it was early in Jesus’ ministry, He was already
gaining fame. People in Nazareth heard of His teaching and His miracles. It
would be a privilege and honor to have someone like Him, the famous hometown
boy, read and interpret the Scriptures in their own Synagogue. I imagine the
synagogue was full that Sabbath as Jesus took the place of honor.
The Synagogue attendant gave Jesus the scroll of Isaiah.
Unrolling it, He found the passage that we know as chapter 61:1-2, “The Spirit
of the Lord is upon me, because He has anointed me to proclaim good news to the
poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of
sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the
year of the Lord’s favor.” Luke offers a
simple sentence of summary of what Jesus taught: “Today, this Scripture is
fulfilled in your hearing.”
Today, this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.
Consider that for a moment. Isaiah, writing 700 years earlier, prophetically
spoke of a Servant of God who would redeem God’s people. They were on the verge
of destruction. Surrounded by foreign enemies, corrupted by evil and politics
from within, and the right worship of God reduced to not much more than a
punchline, Isaiah had spoken clearly and powerfully against Israel’s sins and
the hot wrath of God’s anger. Yet, in His mercy, God promised He would not
completely destroy His people. He would rescue; He would save. The agent of
salvation would be God’s Servant, the Messiah.
That day, that today in Nazareth, Isaiah’s words were
fulfilled. Jesus, freshly baptized with water and anointed Spirit, was
beginning His ministry. He would do what Isaiah had foretold. A new era of
salvation was beginning that day in Christ Jesus with the proclamation of
liberty.
The synagogue was full of Nazarenes who were there to see
the hometown hero. They had heard of the miracles He had already performed. The
word was being spread that His teaching was, indeed, powerful. They probably
agreed that, on the one hand, He was a tremendous preacher and teacher. They
marveled at His ability. But it was the words, the words of grace, that caused
a problem. He was applying Isaiah to Himself. He was overstepping Himself. They
knew who He was: son of Mary, son of Joseph, an iterant preacher who didn’t
even have a permanent address, a wannabe rabbi whose students were a ragtag lot
of misfits including a tax collector and some uneducated fishermen.
So, do the miracle, Jesus. Show us what you got. Give us an
example of what you’ve done elsewhere. You want us to accept that you’re the
one Isaiah spoke of, the one God promised, that you’re not just the boy we
watched grow up and leave, then do some miracles for us, Jesus. Give us a show.
Do some of that prophet stuff and let’s see just who you are. When Jesus
compared the people of His hometown to the unfaithful at the time of Elijah, and
then had the audacity to say, “No prophet is acceptable in his own hometown,” it
was just too much. The worshipping community became a mob; the sanctity and
solemnness of the synagogue was ruined. The people whom He knew, Mary neighbors,
Joseph’s customers, kids who He once played with and who now had children of their
own, the ones who, moments earlier, were amazed at His words became insulted by
His words, determined to no longer listen to what He had to say. Jesus was
driven out of the synagogue, out of the town, and to the very edge of a cliff
where they intended to throw Him into the abyss.
For the Nazareth crowd, they couldn’t make that jump. When
we hear that word, “liberty,” we are probably inclined to think social,
political liberty. The people of Nazareth and ancient Israel had much the same
misconception of the work of Messiah, that He would toss out the Romans and
reestablish the Kingdom of David. Theirs was a narrow view of Messiah, a
near-sighted understanding of His saving work. It would be a problem all during
Jesus’ ministry, even up to His entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday to the
shouts of Hosannah, save us. If He could speak like that, do miracles like
that, then surely, he was going to the be the Messiah like that, the one they
wanted to give them the liberty they wanted.
There it is: what they wanted. It's easy to look at the
people of Nazareth and think, they should have known better. But, if we’re
honest, we’re not all that unlike them in how we see Jesus. We want a Jesus who
will give us what we want instead of the Jesus who is given to us in the
Scriptures. We want to be the drivers telling Jesus what to do, not the
recipients who simply receive by grace and faith. We want to be in charge, determining
what we need, not waiting, passively and faithfully, for God’s Fatherly
goodness and His gifts of daily bread. Like Patrick Henry, ours is the battle
cry, “Give me liberty and keep us from death.”
A better way to understand the word “liberty” is “release,”
or even better yet, “forgiveness.” This is what Good News is: forgiveness from
the sins that would otherwise entrap God’s people into eternity, absolution
from that which would blind, redemption from the devil’s oppression,
culminating in the resurrection of the body into life everlasting. The Good
News promised by God through Isaiah is coming to fulfillment in the life and
ministry of Jesus, the Messiah, the Christ. In Him, all of creation will be
freed from the bondage of the world’s fallenness.
That day in Nazareth, that today, these words of
Isaiah were fulfilled. Even though the cross is three years distant in the
future, even though the sin-payment and death-price would not happen on that
hillside in Nazareth but on a hillside outside Jerusalem, Jesus could say the
Good News was happening that day. Today. Today, because the promises of God are
always yes, now and amen, even if the consummation of that promise is still in
the distant future. Although the hammers would not yet ring out against the
nails piercing Jesus hands and feet, with the promises of God standing in
fulfillment in His Son’s arrival, it was as if it was already complete. Now,
today, here is Good News of release. I have come to set you free.
Every day that God’s people gather together, around Word and
Sacrament, and receive the Good News of Jesus, the Christ, the Messiah, every
day Christians can say, “Today the Scriptures are fulfilled in our hearing.”
Today, there is forgiveness of sins. Today, there is good news for the poor in
spirit. Today, there is good news for those held captive by guilt and shame and
the devil’s lies. Today, there is good news for those who have been spiritually
blind. Today there is good news for those who are oppressed by the strong and
powerful. For you, today, there is release, there is forgiveness, there is
absolution, there is good news for you. Today, through Jesus’ death and resurrection,
all of creation is set free.
Today, and every Lord’s day, the Scriptures are fulfilled in
your hearing. And, today, we look forward to the day when the Lord returns to
give us the eternal today of the resurrection.
