Sermon for January 26, 2025

Luke 4: 14-21

There’s a couple of downsides to a lectionary approach to reading and preaching about the Bible. The first is that the text gets cut up into strange and sometimes unwieldy pieces, (artificial?) like this week and next week’s text on Luke 4—in this week’s section, we hear the text Jesus would preach on in the synagogue; next week we hear his sermon and the response of the congregation. It’s a strange way to cut up the text.

The second downside of preaching with the lectionary, and by focusing only on the passage in front of us, we risk losing sight of the themes that Luke is carefully weaving. I’d like to back up a bit and look at the context of this passage. Earlier in this gospel we hear Mary saying in her Magnificat, “He has scattered those who were proud in the thoughts of their heart. He has brought down the rulers from their thrones, and has exalted those who were humble. He has filled the hungry with good things; and sent away the rich empty-handed.” We hear Jesus addressing these same themes in the text he chooses to preach on.

Looking at context again, before Jesus begins his ministry, one of the first things Jesus does is go out into the wilderness where he is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness. Tempted by food, the needs of the physical; by power over the kingdoms of the world; by religious power over people’s beliefs. It seems as if Jesus is intentionally rejecting the opportunity for power, even though he could rightfully claim it; instead of domination, he opts instead for a quiet subversion of power. He walks among the poor and downtrodden, not hobnobbing with the rich and powerful.

Today’s passage is the first time in the Gospel of Luke that Jesus speaks about his calling or perhaps this week in particular we should call it his inaugural address, and it’s a much different one than the one we heard this week elsewhere. Because his address is to the outcasts of society. He has come for them.

The text he chooses from Isaiah seems specific to this calling. I found this cool site that has the original Greek next to the literal English translation of every word, and I’m going to read Jesus’ text again as literally as I can, with a little commentary as I go:

“I’m anointed to bring good tidings to the poor and destitute…” The word translated “poor” indicates economic status, true, but it includes other factors lowering status in the first-century world—factors such as gender, genealogy, education, occupation, sickness, disability, and degree of religious purity. I think it’s important that Jesus and Luke place this phrase first.

“…I proclaim deliverance and send forth the captives…” Notice the present tense. Imagine how hopeful this phrase would have sounded to a people occupied by Rome for nearly a hundred years.

“…and give recovery of sight to the blind…” I wonder, could Jesus mean the physically blind or spiritually blind?

“…I send forth and deliver the shattered…” Not just “downtrodden,” or people under the foot of the powerful, but “shattered” people. They’ve not only been stepped on but they’ve been shattered under the foot of the oppressor. The shattered, broken people are not just delivered, but they’re “sent forth.” In their shatteredness, they become useful in bringing the gospel into the world.

“…I proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.” Jesus’ hearers would have recognized this as the year of Jubilee, that mythical year when debts are forgiven, slaves are freed and land is returned to the original owners and is allowed to rest.

All these are very visceral words, which we tend to take on a spiritual level. But Jesus, in his inaugural address, as he puts forward his agenda, program, ministry, whatever you want to call it, is at least in this passage not at all on a spiritual plane. It’s earthy, physical, emotional. After this passage he would begin to heal sick people, actual, physical sick people. What Mary’s Magnificat hints at and now Jesus openly states is that He came into the world to upend society, the actual, physical thing of it, not just to free people’s souls. “Accordingly, this good news comes first of all not to the free but to captives, not to the comfortable but to the disadvantaged and downtrodden, not to the strong but to the vulnerable.” (SaltProject.org)

It’s interesting to note where Jesus stops his reading. Let me read you the line in Isaiah that Jesus doesn’t use: “To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord…and the day of vengeance of our God.” It’s hard to imagine a phrase that would have rung truer to an occupied group of people living under the thumb of Rome. They would have dearly wanted God to bring vengeance against the Roman atrocities perpetrated against their people. But Jesus is not fulfilling the vengeance of God. So as visceral, physical as Jesus’ deliverance is to the weak and downtrodden, it doesn’t include vengeance against the downtrodders. He completely leaves that part out.

Jesus reads the passage from Isaiah, and then he sits down. This is how rabbis preached, sitting down in the benches of the synagogue, but it calls to mind how Jesus, after he finishes his work on earth, sits down at the right hand of God. His work is finished, and he sits down.

After a weighty silence as Jesus’ hearers wait to hear how he will interpret the passage, Jesus says, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” In Greek this is in present tense. Jesus is claiming it as fulfilled in his hearer’s time, and he’s sitting down, resting at the side of God, since it’s in the present tense it’s being fulfilled in our time as well. It’s always both fulfilled and still being fulfilled. I have wrestled with this idea of present fulfillment as I’ve studied for this sermon, and I’m still not sure I have a complete handle on it. How can it be that Jesus sat down, that the work is done, and that it’s still being done today? Certainly we look around us and see that the poor still need good news, there are plenty of people in need of freedom from their oppressors.

Yet Jesus’ reads the passage and, radically, outrageously, claims to his hearers that he has fulfilled promises that Isaiah made millennia ago. Maybe the members of the congregation looked around and notice the same thing we do, that the blind still needed their sight and the hungry still needed food. “What is he saying?” they might have asked one another. “He hasn’t fulfilled any of this.”

They were “wondering at the gracious words which were falling from His lips…” I like the phrase “falling from his lips.” It’s another visceral phrase. We can see the words falling from his mouth to the stone floor of the synagogue. Not just falling on deaf ears but falling to the floor, never heard at all.

This is the artificial end of today’s passage, but if I can just maybe creep a little forward into the passage for next week (spoiler alert:) Jesus continues his inaugural address by saying, “You know all those beautiful words from Isaiah that I just said. None of them are for you.” Jesus’ hearers in first century Palestine could have rightly claimed a place among the captives and oppressed, since they were under the thumb of the Roman Empire. But they had become the empire. They were participating in the same subjugation. If they had gone into the wilderness as Jesus had, they probably would have taken the power that the tempter offered them. Instead of looking to God for their liberation, they offered themselves as collaborators in order to buy their own freedom.

We today have the same choice. We don’t have to collaborate with the oppressors in order to redeem the world ourselves. We can choose instead to collaborate with God in the remaking of this world.

I find myself always a bit wary towards people trying to remake things. There are way too many people trying to remake just about everything these days. There’s a branch of Christianity that is always discussing being culture warriors and fighting, spiritual warfare, it’s exhausting. It looks a lot like standing on a pinnacle of the temple and choosing to throw yourself down, demanding the powers of heaven to save you, choosing to gain power for yourself. Perhaps though there aren’t nearly enough choosing the quiet way that Jesus chose, trying to remake the world for the benefit of the poor, the downtrodden, the captives, the blind.

Where do we go with this? Jesus is saying this work is done and also it is ongoing. We both need to see where we can join this good news and how we can survive in a world where it looks like what Jesus said isn’t happening.

There’s always a tension in churches about how we read the Bible and think about our calling. On the one hand we have Christians who say, “You’re not doing enough. Work hard. Be perfect. God asks everything of us.” And on the other hand, we have grace: “It’s all God’s work. Let God do it. Nothing is required of you.” Both of these poles are deeply problematic, and I find myself teetering between them, unsure of what, if anything, God is actually asking of me. Too often I try to shove the question aside because no matter which side I take there’s compelling biblical arguments for the other side as well. In my own life I tend to have landed a lot closer to a belief that it’s about what God has done and is continuing to do in the world. That we’re meant to point out what God is doing and how God is remaking, it’s supposed to be a celebration, a party.

Reading today’s passage puts us right back into this conundrum: Is God done with all this work? Is it already done and fulfilled? Or are we called to participate in the work?

I think I will continue to teeter between these questions, but some Sundays, when we step forward for communion, I realize that we are bringing into ourselves not just bread and wine, but we are physically joining with Jesus’ agenda. As we take Christ’s free gift of his grace into ourselves, we’re also taking his work into our lives, an agenda of love and figuring out where we can assist in the upending of the world for the benefit of the shattered, the outcasts, the captives.

The crowd at the synagogue doesn’t like the sound of this. They weren’t sure what they had wanted to hear from the hometown boy, but it wasn’t this. They take Jesus out to pitch him off the cliff above town. Jesus’ silence as they are taking him out to kill him is deafening. He’s said all the words that needed to be said. At the edge of the cliff Jesus turns “passes through their midst”—literally, the Greek says that Jesus passes through their middle, as if he were piercing through their bellies.

Jesus passes through them, leaving them with exactly what they brought, what was in themselves to begin with. They are still blind, they are still participating in enslaving the downtrodden, holding onto debts and captives, hoping to take power back to themselves, with no good news. They are still participating in a society that is clearly not bringing about the kingdom of God.

I guess that’s one reading, and not a very hopeful one. What if Jesus walks through the middle of that crowd as their intended victim and takes all of their stuff with Him? Taking up their blindness and captivity, their grasping for power and revenge, he takes it all with him, and walks away from that cliff. The question is, do they, do we, continue to walk off the cliff or do we turn around and follow Jesus back?

Resources used:

workingpreacher.org

saltproject.org

greekbible.com

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