The Inaugural Address – Part III

Luke 4:18-19

Even today, Jesus’ words that he quoted of the Prophet Isaiah can give us a double take when we reexamine them to see what he is really saying. To those of us familiar with the passage, we get so used to these words that we no longer hear them as someone reading them for the first time. We read into them our own worldview, a world shaped in our own image. We see in them what we want to see and hear in them what we want to hear. But to the first time hearer, they are revolutionary – for they really are.

Good news doesn’t come to the poor. Talk about ministering to the poor and what do you hear? Jesus own words taken out of context and thrown back in his face: “The poor you always have with you.” So we reinterpret what “poor” means or we spiritualize the ideas in the passage. We who say we take Scripture literally are in the end afraid to do just that. We want to believe that God’s word is true, but we don’t take Him at His word when he says he will release prisoners and set people free and proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Why we don’t even bother to research what “year of the Lord’s favor” actually means. We don’t check back to see what the context of these lines were in Isaiah, a context with which Jesus and all his listeners were so intimately familiar. When he read those few lines, he was not lifting them out of Isaiah, he was drawing all of Isaiah, that entire context, with them into his “here and now.”

“Today, right here, these words are fulfilled in your hearing,” Jesus was saying. The world as you know it is going to be turned upside down. The old order is passing away. The new order is being born. Not two thousand years or so later when I return (if that is when I return), but right now in this poverty ridden and Roman oppressed crossroads in Galilee.

Most of his listeners reject what he has to say as farfetched. Others seize on it only to be disappointed when he doesn’t overthrow the Romans and restore the earthly kingdom of Israel. See, we say, that passage wasn’t to be taken literally. We have to spiritualize it. And when not every blind person gets their sight back, we just think of it as nice poetry, some sweet hyperbole.

What is Jesus saying here? Jesus is saying that the Age of the Spirit is dawning, when all God’s people will be anointed and not just a chosen few. When all who respond to God’s voice will be able to follow Jesus in turning the world upside down. But, we say, we look around us and the world has not changed. There are still prisoners and oppressed and blind.

And the reply is that this New Order overcomes the old not by banishing the old first, but by the new infiltrating the old in this very world in which we live. We don’t declare justice after injustice is done away with. We don’t bring mercy after the unmerciful disappear. We don’t start loving when hatred is banished.

Slowly it dawns on us like this new order dawns on the world. The promise is not at some future eschaton. The eschaton is right now. Does this mean that there is nothing to anticipate in the future? No, as Luke will later point out, Jesus will some day come back and finish what he is now beginning. But that is the point, he is beginning something right here, right now, in his home town in Galilee. And that something is of the same substance as what he will bring to completion someday.

He puts the focus on the present. Now is the time. Here is the place. Where the oppressed are to be set free. Where the blind are to see. Where justice will roll down like waters and all the earth will know and understand that our God is a God of mercy and love.

When I was a boy people used to preach about a “full gospel.” As I grew up, I realized that we who spoke of that full gospel were as focused on select passages as much as other people were. We really didn’t understand “full gospel” any more than anyone else. Jesus comes preaching all the gospel to all people – and it is still a far too radical message for moderns to hear as it was for those in tiny, ancient Nazareth. Our God is a radical God and what He says He will do He does.