When I was in seminary we had a dear professor, a brilliant man, named John Weborg. It was funny because he was, and is, one of those amazingly brilliant but also humble persons whose every word and phrase was filled with wisdom. Dr. Weborg had suffered through, and nearly died of polio as a child and this affected him physically. He was nearing retirement age while I was at Seminary, but his body was much more frail than someone in their early sixties. Dr. Weborg had this spectacular office up in a corner of the Seminary building, filled with shelves and shelves of books with a window looking over the campus. When you walked into his office you felt that you were traveling to an old English college town, to Oxford, a couple hundred years ago. But he had to move his office down to the first floor so he didn’t have to deal with the stairs. My second or third year at Seminary, they put in a chair-lift in the building stairways mainly to help Dr. Weborg get to classrooms that were on the second floor. And then I remember him getting to the point where he needed to sit as he taught the class. He apologized to the class for this, for sitting in front of us as he taught us. Unfortunately, this is all that his body could do. But whether he stood or sat, his words continued to be full of great wisdom, words that you could just hang on to because of their depth.
I remember telling him, though, that he shouldn’t apologize for having to sit as he taught us. You see, in Jesus’ day that is what was done. When someone was going to read scripture they would stand, but if they were going to teach or discuss that scripture they would sit in front of the assembly. Therefore, Dr. Weborg was just going back to an older form of teaching, where he would sit down and we could all listen to what it is that he had to say.
Of course, we do it differently today, and I think we’ve got it figured out better than they did. I know that if I was able to sit down while I preached, you’d never be able to stop me from talking. But in today’s scripture we are told that Jesus got up and read scripture and then he sat down. As we listen to what it is that Jesus had to teach the assemblies in his day, let us listen with the intensity that the people of Nazareth had as they listened to him.
I. Hometown Boy
The different gospels focus on different parts of Jesus’ ministry. They weave around each other as they focus on different important events in Jesus’ ministry and as we read them we get a bigger picture about who Jesus was and what he was about. Matthew, Mark & Luke all talk about Jesus being baptized then going into the wilderness for forty days to be tempted by the devil. But then, when Jesus returns from his time in the desert they each pick up in different places, with Matthew and Mark both skipping ahead to Jesus traveling to Galilee and beginning to teach there. But Luke, Luke tells us that Jesus first returned to his hometown, to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and he preached in the synagogue there. Now Jesus had difficulty in Nazareth. People didn’t want to take him seriously. If you go past what we read this morning you discover that people really were upset by what they heard Jesus say. Why? Because they had known him since childhood and didn’t think much of him. He was an ordinary guy to them, with an ordinary life. He was Joseph’s son; just a carpenter. Why was he getting delusions of grandeur?
But we are let in on the truth. We are told that he had the power of the Spirit of God upon him and his words were more than human words, but holy words; and his teachings were telling the people the mind of God.
And so, the people in Jesus’ hometown gathered together on the Sabbath and they came together in the Synagogue to worship. And Jesus got up and took out a scroll, for their scripture wasn’t written in books like ours, but in long scrolls. He rolled the scroll to the right passage and he began to read. “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” After reading from the scroll, Jesus sat down. This seems odd to us today because we are used to a person who is speaking in front of a group standing. But, as I mentioned earlier, in Jesus’ day the common practice was to sit when you taught an assembly. And so, when Jesus sat down all the eyes in the assembly were on him. He was going to teach them and they wanted to know what it was that he was going to say.
And Jesus’ words were powerful. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
II. Fulfilled
Jesus is claiming to be the answer to Isaiah’s promise. The scripture that Jesus quoted was the beginning of Isaiah 61, where God is promising to bring an end to the pain that God’s people feel. The people of Jesus’ day knew that the Day of the Lord would come and they knew that it would be a day where wrongs would be righted. Throughout the Old Testament prophets we see the Day of the Lord talked about and it is talked about in different ways in different places. Sometimes it is mentioned as something to fear. That’s how it is treated in Amos, for example. People should fear the Day of the Lord if they have taken advantage of others, they will be getting their comeuppance. But there are others who should look forward to the Day of the Lord. And who are these? They are the poor, the prisoner, the brokenhearted, the captives, those who mourn, the weak. And these are the people that Jesus seems to be claiming here to come for.
The scripture that Jesus is quoting says that the Spirit of the Lord is upon him and therefore those who need help are going to have their wrongs made right. Now there are a couple things this does for us today. First, it reminds us something that the Bible is continually reminding us, something that I feel I am continually pointing out, and that is that Jesus, that God, doesn’t like to meet our expectations. Out of all the expectations that the people of Jesus’ day had for a Messiah, caring for the poor was pretty low on their list. No, they were much more interested in what the Messiah, what Jesus could do for them. And they were much more interested in what he would do for them politically. What do I mean by that? That they wanted the Messiah to come in and rule over them and vanquish the Roman soldiers, the Roman rulers, from their land. But in identifying with this scripture, Jesus is instead focusing not on the political desires of the people of Israel, instead he is focusing on something more real. Jesus says that he is going to bring comfort to those who need it. In other places through the gospels Jesus says similar, somewhat crazy things. He tells the people around him that the well don’t need a doctor, it is the sick who do. Therefore he is here not for the righteous but for the sinners. The Pharisees could not believe that Jesus was the Messiah, not necessarily because he didn’t conquer Rome, but because he hung out with sinners. We often look down at them for this, but their reasoning makes sense. If God came to this earth today wouldn’t we expect him to hang out with us here at church? Wouldn’t we expect him to spend his time with those of us who have been faithful and doing our best to follow his path in our daily lives? But Jesus didn’t do this, instead he went out to the troublemakers and spent his time with them.
At another point in the gospels, John the Baptist sends some of his followers to ask Jesus if he is the Messiah. Even John the Baptist, the one who is preparing the way for him, is confused about this issue. Jesus’ response is thus: “The blind are able to see, the hungry are being fed, the lame are walking, so, what do you think? Am I the Messiah?” Jesus sees himself connected to this prophecy in Isaiah. He believes that the Spirit of the Lord is calling him to help the helpless.
III. Helping the Helpless
And that brings us to the second thing that this scripture tells us today: that when the Spirit of the Lord comes, that Spirit is about helping those who are unable to take care of themselves. Last Sunday we talked about how the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Lord, gives different gifts to different people. We looked at 1 Corinthians 12 where we see that the Holy Spirit has different things planned for each of us to do and we cannot spend all our time focused on how much better we are at things than those around us or how we are lacking gifts or skills that we wish we had. Instead we are called to use the gifts that we have to help those around us, to show God’s love to those around us. We can go a step further and remind ourselves that as Christ’s church we are a body and we are all called to work together and share our gifts and pick up where those around us are lacking.
But today’s scripture truly reminds us what it is that these gifts we get from the Spirit are for. They are to preach good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, and to release the oppressed.
You see, as the church, as the Body of Christ, we are anointed with the same Spirit that Jesus was and we are called to reach out in the same way that he did. We all have different ways we do this, we all have different gifts that God has given us for this, but in whatever way we do it, we need to be sure that we are doing what God has called us to do, through his Holy Spirit, following in the footsteps of our Savior, Jesus. Amen.
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