INAUGURAL ADDRESS

​Luke 4:14-21

Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

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 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 began to say to them, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

We detoured a bit last week to talk about how we hear scripture differently if we read different translations, but before that we left off with Jesus just as he had been baptized by John in the murky waters of the Jordan.  This trip into the desert to hear and be baptized by John was the first we heard of Jesus since his birth and the visit of the Magi and a brief visit to the Temple when he was twelve.  Immediately following his baptism Jesus disappears again into the wilderness to fast and pray and try to figure out what had just happened to him.
 
Luke’s Gospel, which we are reading this year in Cycle C, is written as a series of vignettes.  Jesus episodes are strung together like beads, with little attention paid to what lies between the beads and we are simply left to wonder what happened in between.  Luke isn’t interested.  Jesus is born, but in this gospel there is no mention of visiting kings or of the flight to Egypt in Luke.  Luke does, however give us the one story we have of Jesus’ childhood years with the visit to Jerusalem and the Temple when Jesus was twelve – the “did you not know I must be about my father’s business?” story.  Luke’s is the only gospel to include this particular incident. 

Then there is the baptism by John and the temptation in the wilderness and, almost without further ado, Jesus suddenly appears with a full-blown healing and teaching ministry.  We are given two meager sentences - that’s it – to fill in this particular gap:  Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.

Since coming out of the wilderness, Jesus has apparently been traveling about teaching in various small town synagogues.  By the time we arrive at today’s story in Nazareth he has become a local phenom and crowds turn out to hear him.  Now, we do need to somewhat explain this word “crowds” in this context.  

We, who are used to arena events and media-fueled gatherings think of a crowd as maybe 100,000 people or so.  Nazareth, on the other hand, was a small country village of maybe a few hundred people, maximum, of whom maybe 20 or 30 routinely gathered in what passed as a synagogue for the reading and studying of scripture.  Add to this a few dozen more -- maybe -- drawn by interest in the new preacher’s current fame, and it is still a very small crowd gathered to hear Jesus give what many Bible scholars call his Inaugural Address, in which he lays out his calling and his plans to implement that calling.

He picks up the scroll and reads from the book of Isaiah, chapter 61 [Note: chapter designations are a fairly modern addition.  No one there that day would have thought of this as chapter 61.  That’s for our modern convenience.]  Anyway, Jesus reads from this section of Isaiah, and this is where it immediately gets interesting.  Isaiah 61 is all of one piece, 11 verses long, promising God’s restoration of the Hebrew people.  Of these 11 verses, Jesus reads aloud exactly one-and-one-half verses, then stops and rolls up the scroll again.  He actually stops reading in the middle of what we today recognize as a sentence.

Jesus ends with “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” but Isaiah actually had continued on with “...and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion.”  In Isaiah’s day, the Hebrews had been defeated and enslaved, and Isaiah was giving them God’s promise of a world of good things to come to make up for what they had suffered (even though Isaiah had earlier made it clear that they had brought their suffering on themselves).  Isaiah tells them they will not only be free – they will be rich and honored and those who oppress them now will be sorry one day.

Jesus gives the people of Nazareth none of this.  He gives them God’s good news and freedom from oppression – and tells them this is happening right now, right before their eyes – but he offers them no revenge against their oppressors.  He offers them justice and hope but no vengeance – and the men who listened to him would have both heard and noticed this omission.  Very likely, the vengeance thing would have been their favorite part of Isaiah 61 – and Jesus has left it out.  I doubt that was an accident.  And I doubt it went over real well with his listeners.  

They might have been impressed with the way he spoke but once they thought about it for a minute, they realized they didn’t like it one small bit.  We will get into that more next week, but you probably recall already that it did not end well.

What Jesus chooses to emphasize from the Isaiah reading is jubilee - the Hebrew practice of a complete forgiveness of debts which came around every 50 years.  Jubilee as practiced (in theory, at least - scholars are not entirely certain it ever actually was practiced) - anyway, it dealt primarily with property – land which had been sold for debt would revert back to the original owner at jubilee.  But Jesus offers here an expanded vision of jubilee – one which comes from God and in which all sins are freely forgiven by God.  The people could start all over again with a clean slate – with no past sins held against them any longer.  

This is the “year of the Lord’s favor.”  Justice for the poor; freedom for the enslaved; sight for the blind.  This, we would think, would be a pretty heady promise for a people who had for hundreds of years been subject to one oppressor or another.  It still sounds pretty heady to many of us today.  And yet, this promise has, for thousands of years, proved to be an extraordinarily hard sell.

We’ll leave this here right now and come back to it next week when we continue this reading in Luke and investigate the reaction of those who heard Jesus speaking that day.