Sunday, January 23, 2022

Today, the Scripture is Fulfilled - Luke 4:16-30

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.

 

 

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