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 let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’
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’ (Luke 4:16-21).
(For the full text of the story (4:16-30), click here.)
Political election seasons expose our dissatisfactions. Many complain about grocery and housing prices. Others do not want an influx of refugees in dire straits. Many choose freedom from association with people they deem “different.” Taxes vex us, and we remain suspicious of how the government uses the money. When we hope for social change regarding issues like abortion, growing income disparity, racial and ethnic discrimination, health care, and climate change, we do not want to be told what to do. Or we want the government to make everyone else do what we think is right.
This is nothing new. By nature, homo sapiens are dissatisfied. Our powerful brains always envision fresh possibilities and develop strategies and technologies toward those ends. Wonderful, but on the flip side, nothing satisfies us because we regularly judge the way things are – even the way we are – inferior to the way things are in our sweet imaginations. In turn, we can always find some target for our objections.
Moreover, we define “something better” relative to our neighbors, making us more or less competitive. We want an edge on the Joneses next door. We want our group to hold an edge on the group on the other side of the tracks. So we have winners and losers, and the winners develop sophisticated moral and legal justifications to protect their privileges. Meanwhile, the losers must conform, revolt, or redefine what it means to be a winner.
Jesus came for losers. Part of the project was helping them see that in the eyes of God, worldly winners will lose and the losers will win. The first will be last and the last, first, as he said repeatedly. To get that across and to make it happen, he had to become a loser himself.
That was nothing new either. That is what prophets do, at least legitimate ones. They stand with and for society’s losers and end up persecuted and often killed.
As Luke records Jesus’s inaugural address, so begins the hard vocation of a prophet. Jesus came to his hometown, Nazareth, after starting his ministry among neighbors who were mostly Gentiles, different from these folks with whom he grew up. But in his hometown, he shared his mission statement adopted from the prophet Isaiah (61:1-2, 58:6):
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 let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18-19; see Isaiah 61:1-2, 58:6).
In reclaiming this version of justice, Jesus stood in line not only with Isaiah but Elijah, Elisha, and others in the core of the prophetic tradition. Call it prophetic justice. It measures economic success not by the accumulation of wealth and power by the haves but by the security and wholeness of the have-nots. It aims for shalom, peace that is absence of conflict but presence of much more – health, belonging, hospitality, liberty from oppression in any form. This justice does not devalue prosperity and independence but insists that there is enough for each so all can enjoy their share and live with dignity. Jesus’s inaugural address states it succinctly.
As a political goal for human beings, it is unrealistic. We cannot do it. It precipitates too much anxiety and insecurity even among the most mentally healthy. Trusting an unseen, silent God to lead us into it and keep us safe on the journey overwhelms us with doubt and worry. So we pack our guns, watch our wallets, stay with our tribe, and do not trust strangers.
We also carry our Bibles. The good people of Nazareth did too, which meant going to the synagogue and sharing words from the scrolls of the law and the prophets like the scroll of Isaiah from which Jesus read. Luke emphasizes the commitment Jesus had for the scriptures and his continuity with them. In Jesus’s inaugural address taken from Isaiah, he boldly declared his continuity with it when he closed with the words, “This scripture is being fulfilled today even while you are listening” (v.21 NJB).
In other words, Jesus’s inaugural address claims those words for him. As one anointed, he had God-given power like King David, power from the Holy Spirit to accomplish what we cannot. Prophets need that power more than kings because they will get in good trouble without troops to protect them. Furthermore, they get in trouble not only with kings and other people of power but with the poor themselves. Not only the Roman governor and Jewish Sanhedrin called for Jesus’s crucifixion later on. The crowds did too. They thought they needed a winner who rattles his sabres, but they needed a fellow loser who suffers with and for them.
Prophets are not crystal ball gazers and palm readers. They are social critics who speak from the depths of prayer, having not just spoken to but listened to God. Prophets are radicals: The Latin root for “radical” is radix, meaning root. They know and speak and act from the root of the tradition, from the heart of the law and the prophets, from what we today call the Bible. And when someone comes along and points out the root, the heart of the Bible in which we heretofore felt securely grounded, we get embarrassed. They expose our hypocrisy.
In Nazareth, Jesus reminded them that God’s will in the Torah is rooted and grounded in the memory that God set their slave ancestors free, so they should join God in setting others free. Leviticus literally states a law that every half century, they should have a Jubilee Year. Then all debts are to be forgiven, all slaves freed, and all land returned to the original owner. But nobody ever did that. The haves could not let go of what they possessed, or what possessed them. Jesus’s inaugural address promised this “year of the Lord’s favor,” which embarrassed them.
Another embarrassment: The Torah reminds them that their ancestors were refugees seeking a homeland, so they should welcome strangers and aliens with hospitality. The people in his hometown did not like it. Granted he impressed them with his eloquence, but isn’t this Joseph’s boy? Why isn’t he blending in? Why did he preach and heal among the Gentiles in Capernaum before this visit? Jesus himself waxed philosophical that “no prophet is accepted in his hometown” (v.24).
The verses just following the lectionary reading for today make it clear that Jesus did not try to smooth things over. To the contrary, Jesus pressed his lifelong neighbors to the brink by reminding them of the scripture. During the great famine, the prophet Elijah provided miraculous food for a Gentile woman before anyone in Israel. And among many lepers, the prophet Elisha healed a Gentile military officer prior to any of God’s chosen people.
Jesus’s pediatrician, fourth grade teacher, childhood buddies and their parents, even his youth pastor and the rest of town got so mad they drove him to a cliff to throw him off. But something, perhaps the memory of him when he was just a kid, stopped them. He walked right through them to the road to more healing and teaching and making people angry with the truth.
The Bible includes arguments on both sides of many issues that divide us. That includes whether to circle the wagons and protect our identity from the intrusion of outsiders, which the purity codes and the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, tend to support. But Jesus challenged that with the larger, more essential literature on crossing boundaries and welcoming people outside our racial, ethnic, national, and socioeconomic divides because the times changed. Now is the time for God’s people to be the salt of the earth and the light of the world. For that vocation God chose Israel and adopted us, the church, in the first place. Whether we do it as Americans, we must do it as baptized Christians and church members.
We cannot do that on our own. How do we dare become losers with him as he wins the world for God’s kingdom? But we have the risen Christ and the Holy Spirit, and through offering the world whatever gift God gives us, however small, God will use us to bring peace on earth. Unless, perhaps, that makes us too anxious or embarrassed. Unless, therefore, it makes us too angry. But even then, nothing is impossible for God.
This sermon was delivered at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Rome, Georgia on January 26, 2025. To watch on YouTube, click here. If you only wish to hear the sermon, forward to 31:48.
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Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you (Matthew 5:11-12).
Image: James Tissot, “Jesus Unrolls the Scroll In the Synagogue,” Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Wonderful and definitely appropriate sermon for today and many days in the future. Nothing is impossible for God. Thank you Marshall,
Thanks, David! I am touched and encouraged by your response and so many others to the sermon. Friends like you at St. Peter’s mean so much to me!