Luke 4:14-21
January 21, 2007
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Two weeks ago, Joy and I were summoned by our son and daughter-in-law to baby sit our two young grandchildren: Evi at 4 and Gavin almost 2 for five full days while their parents went to Mexico for a trip rewarded to our son from his employment. And as it turned out, this amazing trip will be their last time away before their third child arrives in a few months. We were happy for them and for us, let’s say, we survived and returned the kids with no new cuts, bruises or bumps!
While we were there, we did a lot of reading of children’s books. There was Bob the Builder, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Thomas the Locomotive, and Barbie’s Fairytopia which was new to Yeh Yeh this time. We happen to be in a bookstore and found this Barbie book about Fairytopia that turned out to be a sequel to a movie that they already had and which I also saw! We heard that a second movie will be released this Spring. Can’t wait to see what evil Laverna might do to Elina the good fairy!
Although our grandkids can’t read for themselves yet, they understand and enjoy the stories just by hearing them. They know the stories so well by heart that when you’re reading and getting to the end of the sentences, they can finish the sentences for you. And if you try to skip a sentence or a page to get to the end, they know. Just from hearing the stories, they now know them well.
We know that parents who read to their children from the time they are little, begin a practice that molds and strengthens their lives. Children who are read to are far more likely to read early and form a love for reading that they carry for the rest of their lives.
From our Scriptures for today, we see the power of being read to. Jesus returns to his home town and goes into the synagogue. As was the custom, he stood up and read the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61:1-2. After he finished, he rolled up the scroll and declared, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Once the people heard Jesus read Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus tells them that this is now fulfilled.
God’s Jubilee
The Isaiah verses Jesus read would have been familiar to the people. They probably were finishing up each sentence just like our grandkids did when we read them their favorite storybooks. The book of Isaiah reflects the restoration of the people to the land and proclaims God’s jubilee mercy of good news to the poor, release of the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and letting the oppressed go free. Jesus declares that the time of God’s gracious favor announced in Isaiah is now.
Jesus understands these passages as such and declares that this passage is a description of his messianic mission. Jesus said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me.” The “anointed one” in both the Hebrew and the Greek is “Messiah.” The anointing of God is a commission to bring good news to the poor, release the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom of the oppressed, and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor. Jesus understood this to be his call and after he read the scroll of Isaiah, he announced that this Scripture is now fulfilled because they have heard it read.
Hearing and Believing
Often when we read the Bible, we read it as history, poetry, wisdom, or biography. We can distance ourselves from the time and place in which the literature of the Bible was written. We usually say, “All of these things happened many years ago. They don’t pertain to us.” We can make it academic and insulate ourselves from its power.
Jesus calls us to proclaim good news. But one person’s good news may be another’s bad news. The gospel involves a kind of turning of the tables: those we assume were righteous are found wanting, and those we thought were beyond any possibilities are in fact the beloved of God. The good news is coming to the poor, those most in need, those left out. Are we the poor? There’s release to the prisoners, sight to the blind and freedom to the oppressed. We wonder if we are hearing good news or bad news.
Sometimes we who are sitting in the pew or standing behind the pulpit have a difficult time hearing what Jesus had to say. We often like to reframe Jesus’ words into something a bit more personal or a lot less literal. How easily we like literal translations when they fit with our lifestyle. But when the literal meaning is too unbelievable or challenging, we tend to spiritualize the content, looking for meanings beyond the words. “Is it possible that Jesus meant what he said literally?” Are we really expected to release the paroled and rehabilitated child molester into our own backyard?
But when Jesus read Isaiah, he felt he was fulfilling its spirit, he was living its teachings, and he was the embodiment of its truth. The Bible was about him, and he was about fulfilling what the prophets had written.
What if, when we read the Bible, we really meant to find ourselves in its pages, not in a messianic sense, but as disciples intending to be shaped by what we read? Even for us preachers, who read the Bible so often, we tend to take its truth for granted, to talk about its content as if it has little to say about our daily life. In Nazareth, Jesus read Isaiah as a description of his mandate. We should let the God of the Scriptures claim us as well.
Becoming Anointed
There’s a pastor who started his ministry in a rural town in Kansas. One of the characteristics of small towns is that since people know each other, they tend to place each other in cubby holes, stereotypes, and often it is hard to break out from everyone’s expectations of you.
The pastor tells about a man who had been named the “Future Farmer of the Year” when he was a senior in high school. While it was an honor, it was also a set-up that created jealousy in the minds of his classmates. For the rest of his adult life, he worked hard to live up to the expectations this award had placed on him. He started a huge mechanized cattle-raising operation. And then people wondered, “Who does he think he is?”
An honor had become a burden. This bit of publicity he heard and felt he had to live up to has taken a visible toll on him. Eventually both his business and his marriage failed, and the downfall for which some had secretly hoped for became a grim reality.
It takes a strong person to break out of the stereotypes placed on us by others. Jesus preached throughout Galilee and the surrounding territory, taught in the synagogue and was praised by all. But he faced his biggest challenge in his home town of Nazareth, where everybody knew him, his family and his trade.
But now, he was more than simply a carpenter, following his father’s footsteps. He was an itinerant preacher and rabbi, stepping outside of everyone’s comfort zone. One can almost imagine the eyebrows rising and people scratching their heads about just exactly what Jesus means by his statements. No doubt they had treated him politely up to this point, having granted him the privilege of asking him to read. But they weren’t expecting him to challenge them.
Instead of trying to be what others are expecting us to become, are we willing to read the Scriptures and invite God to come into our lives to transform us to become what God intends us to be? When are we willing to hear the Scriptures and invite God to anoint us as he anointed Jesus in the synagogue?
Jesus saw himself as anointed to bring a message. He had a sense of call, a vocation, and he saw his work as living out that call, that anointing. His call was more than that of ordinary synagogue worshipers, who might come to pray and listen to the teachings of the Scriptures. He saw himself as called to embody and live out the mandate announced by the prophet. He arose each morning committed to live them out, and to lead others to do so. So perfect was his commitment to his mission that his followers soon recognized him to be God among them, God in the flesh.
When we surrender our lives to Jesus, we recognize that our lives ultimately belong to Jesus. What Jesus teaches, we literally receive. As the spirit of the Lord is upon Jesus, it is also upon his followers in every generation. As Jesus is anointed, so are we anointed.
The evidence of our anointing is the same as Jesus’: to bring good news to the poor…to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.
Jesus knew who the poor were in his days; I wonder if we know the hungry and homeless today. Jesus knew the captives and prisoners in his days, I wonder if we know those who are incarcerated in our jails and maximum secured prisons today. Jesus knew those who were blind and unable to see any hope for tomorrow, I wonder if we know those who have lost their ways and need physical healing. Jesus knew the oppressed, the repressed, and the distressed victims of corrupted governments and regimes, I wonder if we know the Iraqis, Afghans, Sudanese, the Palestinians, and the millions of nameless and faceless victims of war, violence, and injustice around the world. We don’t even know the tragedies of Black youth gangs that are destroying innocent lives and families with their senseless acts of violence!
Jesus knew that when he read from Isaiah, he was fulfilling God’s word for his day and that it was the acceptable year of the Lord. Do we know that today belongs to God because it’s the acceptable year of the Lord? Even in the face of all this violence and madness, today is the acceptable year of the Lord!
God’s Favor Today
After Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah, he said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The promises of God’s gracious activity are fulfilled “today” in the ministry of Jesus. Liberation is not for the future only, but “today.”
We read in the newspapers this past week about the enormous number of refugees that are moving out of Iraq to neighboring countries, straining the abilities of those nations to welcome them in. The challenges for us as a nation is how open are we to welcome 20,000 of these refugees to permanently settle in our own country?
I think about our Zimbabwe friend Gregory whom I have shared with you a few times already. As a refugee who illegally entered into the United States by staying after his cargo ship left, he has become a man without a country. He’s been languishing in San Francisco trying to find enough work to survive. Are these the poor and captives and the oppressed Jesus was speaking of? And what does Jesus mean by “today?” Does “today” apply to us as well?
Quite possibly we can hear a reading from the Bible time and time again and yet miss its true meaning. In fact, our familiarity with a text can sometimes make it more difficult to perceive how God desires that word to be fulfilled in our world.
Such was the case with a young white Afrikaner minister of the Dutch Reformed Church in South Africa in 1960. As Beyers Naude read the Bible, he assumed that it supported his nation’s policy of apartheid. He had heard Scripture interpreted that way since he was a child, and it never occurred to him that perhaps that interpretation was mistaken and that God had other plans in mind. When Naude attended his first ecumenical church conference that was the first time he learned that other Christians around the world were questioning how his nation’s whites were reading the Bible. From that moment, “he knew then that he could no longer live with the civil religion that had shaped him and that he needed to walk in a new direction.”
He proceeded to preach a fiery sermon, renouncing apartheid, and at the end of the service descended from the pulpit and removed his black toga—the symbol of a Dutch Reformed pastor’s authority. At the door afterwards his congregation mostly walked by him in silence, testimony to the fact that many “white Afrikaners wanted a religion that would not disturb them.” But Naude had come to the realization, just as Jesus did, that the truth needs to be declared, even if it might disturb some people.
Jesus said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Today. Not in the dim past. Not in the distant future. Today, the scripture is fulfilled because you and I have heard it.
When we were baby sitting our grandkids two weeks ago, one of their bedtime rituals is singing one stanza of “Someday.” It goes like this: “Someday when I’m awfully low and the world is cold, I can feel the glow of just thinking of you. And the way you look tonight.” Then the kids quietly grab their stuffed animals and go to sleep.
But Jesus is not saying “someday,” he is saying “today.” The world is much too cold for the poor to wait; it’s much too cold for the prisoners to wait; it’s much too cold for the captives to wait; it’s much too cold for the blind to wait; it’s much too cold for the oppressed to wait. Jesus said, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
If you have missed it before because it was too familiar or you were napping or you were just not listening, now is the time to hear it again.
The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to Jesus. 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 of the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
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 said to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
So may it be so.
Let us pray.
O God, as we sit quietly, pondering your purposes, we hear again your call to justice and liberation. As we face the week ahead, we know that we will encounter situations where there are poor needing good news, where there are people held captive who need liberation, where there are those blind in different ways who need to see, where there are those oppressed by their life’s situations who need freedom.
Generous God, give us the mind of Christ. Let us be fervent disciples, believing we can be recipients and instruments of your grace and peace. In Christ, we pray. Amen.