
Grace, mercy and peace be to you from God our Father and our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen!
Years and years ago when I was in university at Concordia in Edmonton, I was taking a Sociology of Religion class. As part of an assignment, we had to attend a religious service of some kind, but it had to be something we had never experienced before. Then you had to do an essay or a paper about the experience, reporting where you went and what it was like, etc. I elected to go to Beth Shalom, a Jewish Synagogue down on Jasper Avenue. I didn’t really have any previous Synagogue experience, other than walking by the remnant of Moose Jaw’s House of Israel Synagogue on my way to High School. It’s the now abandoned and boarded up Denee School of Dance on 3rd Avenue right behind Western Appliance off Caribou. The tell tale Star of David stained glass window they had is also boarded over. But back to Edmonton. On Saturday morning I had convinced a friend to come with me and to the Synagogue we went. We walked up the stairs and were met by a greeter and immediately they knew we weren’t kosher! They welcomed us and gave us a loaner yarmulke hat to put on. Upon going inside, they had pews like any church you’ve ever seen. Stained glass images of Old Testament bible stories. The service was liturgical as you would expect. There was much chanting of the Psalms in Hebrew. And much like our Gospel reading of Jesus in the Synagogue in Nazareth, the Torah was read. It was kept in a special cupboard, almost like a wardrobe, and then the huge Torah scroll was taken out and paraded up and down the Synagogue in a procession. They had the utmost respect for the word of God. Then it was brought back to the front and unrolled on a great big table that functioned as a lectern. It was read by the people, chanted actually, then followed by a kind of short explanation, much like a sermon. Truly a fascinating experience as a complete outsider. It was foreign, but being that Christianity has Jewish roots, it wasn’t entirely unfamiliar.
This is where we are at today on this third Sunday in the season of Epiphany. We’re in the Nazareth Synagogue on the Sabbath. Our Lord’s hometown where He was brought up. A common and very familiar place where He had been a million times before. Jesus opens up the scroll and reads from the Prophet Isaiah, our Old Testament lesson which we heard read this morning, in fact. Our Lord could have picked any Scripture, so it is very interesting that of all the passages our Lord could have read, He reads this one. It is interesting because the words written by Isaiah all those many years ago are now fulfilled in Jesus Christ. We hear that the Spirit of the Lord is upon Him. We know this because Jesus was just baptized and the Spirit descended upon Him. He was anointed for a purpose: to proclaim Good News to the poor! To proclaim release to the captives! To restore sight to the blind! To send out those who have been released from oppression! And finally to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor: the year of Jubilee! All eyes in the Synagogue were transfixed on Jesus. Then He proclaims boldly to all who were there: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (LK 4:21).
But what is the back story and the greater context of these words from Isaiah that our Lord proclaims? We rewind back to the people of Israel and when they entered the Promised Land, there was a system of starting over, a reset button of sorts. God told them that every seven years all debts were cancelled and all debtors were set free. This is found in Deuteronomy 15 (1-18). Here’s a little excerpt: “7 “If among you, one of your brothers should become poor, in any of your towns within your land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart or shut your hand against your poor brother, 8 but you shall open your hand to him and lend him sufficient for his need, whatever it may be. 9 Take care lest there be an unworthy thought in your heart and you say, ‘The seventh year, the year of release is near,’ and your eye look grudgingly on your poor brother, and you give him nothing, and he cry to the Lord against you, and you be guilty of sin. 10 You shall give to him freely, and your heart shall not be grudging when you give to him, because for this the Lord your God will bless you in all your work and in all that you undertake. 11 For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ’You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land” (7-11). Pretty mind blowing stuff, isn’t it? This is a far cry from the debt-saddled world we live in! We’ve basically become tax and debt slaves until we die! This is the root of our term Mortgage after all, a “death pledge” from Latin into French! But not so in Israel. Total debt forgiveness every seven years. Wow!
And even more than that, in Leviticus there was the concept of “jubilee.” After 7 times 7 years - 49 for you mathletes out there - in the following 50th year, you had this return to the original allotments of the promised land. Tribes and families would return and re-patriate the land God originally gave them, along with all this incredible debt forgiveness. All slaves in the land would be released. Everyone was reset in this massive wave of forgiveness that washed over all aspects of society. A totally wild concept! Talk about good news of great joy for the people of God who were slaving away in Babylonian exile in Isaiah’s day. This why Isaiah writes about it. He is encouraging God’s people with the light of God’s kingdom while they live in a very dark time.
We hear all this and think it would be totally awesome to have our credit cards wiped clean, our car loans gone and our houses paid for! But it also required that same level of forgiveness from us too. A hard pill to swallow when you’ve stewarded your money shrewdly and others owe you lots. But the emphasis is on God being so incredibly gracious. And when you see that light shining in the darkness, you don’t worry about your losses. Because you know that the Lord will provide for His people lavishly. That all of our money and blessings come to us because of His fatherly hand. And because of this, we come to learn that you can’t out-give God. The Lord provides again and again and again. This is why Deuteronomy emphasises being so gracious to the poor. “Open wide your hand” to those in need because the Lord will richly supply you to do so. Don’t be stingy with God’s money. Be generous in every way, reflecting the light of God’s kingdom. Donate to the food bank. Volunteer to help feed people with our Outreach Team and Hope Ministries. Leave a 40% cash tip to the waitress! Be wild and crazy with your generosity as the Lord your God is wild and crazy with His!
So now, you couple all of this backstory and context and pair it with Isaiah’s prophecies about the Messiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, on account of which He has anointed me; He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal those who are crushed in heart, to announce release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord and the day of repayment, to comfort all who mourn, to give to those who mourn in Zion glory instead of ashes, the anointing of cheer to those who mourn, a garment of glory instead of a spirit of weariness” (Isa 61:1-3 LXX). This is the content of our Lord’s first public preaching. He reveals that He Himself is indeed this promised Messiah: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (LK 4:21).
Our Lord’s entire earthly ministry is encapsulated here in these words from Isaiah. It’s a snapshot of what the Kingdom of God looks like and how Jesus’ life brings it about. You’ll notice from the Isaiah scroll, there is no distinction for Jesus between the spiritual and the physical! The Kingdom of God is shown in the spiritual by people being released from demonic possession and oppression as well as the most important forgiveness of sins that Jesus gives. The Kingdom of God is also shown in the physical. The release from disease, the recovery of sight to the blind, the miraculous healings. These all point to one place: the resurrection and life everlasting! A time will come when all sin, sickness and death will be finally gone from human existence. It is a time that has already begun, yet is not here fully yet. One thing is for sure, this Jesus of Nazareth would turn this world on its head. This text from Luke begins the Great Reversal. From sin and death to righteousness and resurrected life. From darkness to light.
And as we heard, there were those who marvel at our Lord’s words and speak well of Him. They rejoice in His message that God’s promise of a Messiah has come to pass in their midst! And, there was also those who fiercely rejected Him! He can’t be the Messiah! The Messiah appears from nowhere! This is Joseph’s son, from right here in town! To which our Lord speaks those now iconic words “no prophet is acceptable in his hometown!” I myself quote those words all the time when you people get the pitchforks and torches out! Then the whole synagogue is filled with wrath and try to take Jesus to the train station! It’s not just Wyoming that has a big cliff, they had one in Nazareth too! But this is not how the Messiah of the world would give up His earthly life. That would come much later on the Roman cross rather than the Jewish cliff. “Passing through their midst, He went away” Luke tells us (4:30).
The Messiah marches on. St. John tells us plainly “He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. 12 But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (1:11-12). God’s baptized children. What an awesome message to proclaim to an unbelieving world! What a great comfort it gives us to know that when our world seeks to tear us down, we are valued and loved by God in Christ Jesus. What an amazing gift to know you have been lovingly made by Him. And that your life was worth dying for - even death on a cross. What a mission we have before us! This whole world needs the message that you know. God has paid your debts in full! God’s favor and Jubilee are here! They are here today! They are here in Christ! Amen!
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