Luke 4:14-30
The following is the text I used for the sermon I gave at Imagine Church on 5/16/21. Link to the video can be found here.
Thank you Josh, and good morning everybody! It’s great to be back up here, and I’ve gotta say...so, I preached here a couple months ago, back in November, and I was excited for the opportunity to come back when Josh asked, but I do have to say that when I looked back at that sermon to see about how long I needed to make this one, and I saw the word count, my brain was like “WHAT DID YOU JUST AGREE TO?!?”
But then, you know, I’d talk myself down, “It’s cool; it’s fine; you’re using a passage you’ve talked about before; you’re talking about something you care about; you got this.” But the more I tried to write this out, the more that cycle would repeat, until I realized that, maybe what I was trying to write and what I actually needed to say were two different things. So while we are going to dive into a couple different passages today, what we’re going to be talking about maybe dives a bit deeper into a more personal, more testimonial side of this topic than I’d initially anticipated.
So if you have your Bibles or your Bible apps, turn with me to Luke chapter 4, verses 14-30. Luke is one of the four gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, which are right at the start of the New Testament, roughly ⅔ of the way through your Bible, or like 3 clicks away for those of you with apps. And while we’re turning there I’m going to go ahead and pray for us.
“Lord, we come before you today and ask that we may feel your presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit, with us as we approach this text. We pray for eyes to see, ears to hear, and an openness to receive what you would have us learn today. May your words, thoughts, and voice guide mine as we go through this message together. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit we pray, Amen.”
When I was a sophomore in college, I went on a mission trip to Chicago that sort of served as the culmination of what at that point was about a year’s worth of learning. It was a time when I started asking a lot of questions about Christian interaction with issues of race, justice, poverty, and any other number of social issues, questions I hadn’t even known existed. I had gone to Bethel University after graduating from Park Center Senior High, and I thought I had sort of a basic grasp of diversity after going to high school there, some sort of a simple ethic around these issues, you know - racism is bad, good thing we don’t have to deal with a lot of that stuff anymore.
But then there was an incident on campus, a racially charged incident, of a student performing in blackface at this male pageant/fundraiser event for an extra-curricular group. And somehow, in the aftermath of that, I ended up in a meeting with a number of students who were trying to figure out how to respond both to the incident and to the school’s response. I saw and sat with their pain, real pain, emotions I’d never seen before. I listened as one student in particular asked the question, “how can the people who did this not understand how wrong this is?” And I sat there, quiet, in a corner, thinking “I don’t understand why this is wrong either.”
And so the next year served as my introduction to the previously mentioned topics, taking classes, reading books on my own, and finding my way to Chicago. The mission group we worked with, along with having service projects for us to work on during the day, would give lectures at night for all of the participants, talking about issues in their community, how they had a disproportionate effect on certain groups, especially groups that would be seen either as minorities or marginalized, and they discussed how a lot of these issues were not even a consideration for people living outside of these communities.
Now, I’ve tried to figure out how to describe my response to this without, sort of...catastrophizing my language, but the best language I have is that, on the Thursday night of that week, I had a breakdown. I didn’t really understand what I was reacting to at the time, and my answer to someone who asked what was wrong really deferred away from my actual feelings, but I looked at all of this information we’d been learning, and thought, why don’t we care about this? Why don’t people I know have the questions I have right now? How am I supposed to interact with this?
So when I got home from Chicago I had a conversation with my mom, and basically said, “I don’t know what this is, but I feel called to move forward in a direction to learn about these issues,” and I officially dropped my STEM focused majors to turn fully into the Reconciliation Studies program.
There were a variety of things that I found to be very difficult about this change in focus, and I think one of the hardest from a personal perspective was a shift to a field in which I rarely seem to encounter solid, concrete answers. Rather, what I found was that my questions would either breed more questions, or would breed debates about different possible answers. But what kept coming to the front of my mind as I continued to study and interact with any number of different issues was that I would look around, over and over, and I still wouldn’t see very many people asking the questions I was asking. In fact, hardly anyone seemed to, outside of what started to feel like a very fringe group. And as I noticed this, what I began to understand was that my experiences and the different information I’d studied had led me to a different conclusion than a lot of the people around me regarding one particular question, the question of how closely this idea of actions around what many consider to be “social justice” issues should be connected to the gospel, and how these issues should be integrated into Christianity and the church.
So, I want to explore that question today, and I want to turn to Luke 4:14-30 as our entryway into the conversation. This is a passage that many people use when taking one side or another on the way to answering this question, largely because of how the passage is framed in the broader context of the book of Luke.
Let’s start with verses 14-15: “Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread throughout the whole countryside. 15He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.” Upon first glance, nothing seems to be out of the ordinary here. Jesus has just come back from being tempted in the desert by Satan, so it seems that this might just chronologically be the next step in the story. But looking at where Matthew and Mark place this story, they record it as happening about halfway through Jesus’ 3 year ministry, not right at the start like Luke. Indeed, even later in this passage we will see that Jesus talks about things he did in the city of Capernaum, a place we don’t see him go in Luke until after this story. So what it looks like, and what is widely accepted to be true, is that rather than just taking us through Jesus’ ministry, Luke takes an event from further in and places it here instead.
Why might Luke have done this? Well, what it appears, and again what is widely understood, is that Luke did this to highlight the passage thematically. What he is doing here, placing this at the start of his presentation of Jesus’ ministry, is showing us what he sees as Jesus’ mission statement for His ministry. In the passage, Jesus both defines what His mission is, and who the mission is for; both of which we’re going to take a look at.
So, with that in mind, let’s continue with the passage, starting in verse 16: “He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21He then began by saying to them, ‘Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.’”
There are some pieces here about who the mission and message of Jesus is for, but we’re gonna focus first on the definition of the mission, and we’ll start by looking at this quote in verses 18-19. This is actually parts of two different passages from the book of Isaiah: the bulk is from Isaiah 61:1-3, and the rest is from Isaiah 58:6. Understanding the importance of where this quote comes from is going to be important for understanding what Jesus is doing here, so we’re gonna take a really quick look at that context. In the book of Isaiah, chapters 55-66 focus on restoration of the kingdom and the coming of the Messiah, or the savior or deliverer of Israel, and they form a literary device called a “chiasm.” In a chiasm, an author will make a list of points which basically come to a crescendo right in the middle, and then make the same points in reverse order. This is done to put primary emphasis on the point made in the middle, which in the case of Isaiah 55-66 happens to be these verses, 61:1-3. With the emphasis being here, and with the section being about restoration and the coming of the Messiah, the point is that these attributes, essentially, are how the people will be able to tell who the Messiah is. So when Jesus reads these words and says ‘Today the scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,’ what he is doing is making the claim that he is the Messiah.
This is obviously a very serious claim, and we see the response to this claim in Luke 4:22: “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. ‘Isn’t this Joseph’s son?’ they asked.”
See, they understand what the Isaiah passage points to, but they also know Jesus; after all, this is his hometown. And I wonder if they’re getting hung up on this. Maybe some of them are saying, “who does this guy think he is?;” maybe some of them are saying, “wait, if he’s the Messiah, what might that mean for us?” And I think this sort of an inward focus we’re seeing is a reflection of their misunderstanding of what Jesus is saying, which leads into the rest of the passage.
Starting from verse 23 to the end: Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’ And you will tell me, ‘Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”
24 “Truly I tell you,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy[a] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian.”
28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
So what just happened? Because suddenly this crowd has gone from pretty docile to incredibly homicidal. What we see is Jesus giving examples of two prophets from the history of Israel, prophets who were alive during some of the most wicked times in the history of Israel, who were rejected by the Israelites, and who instead helped Gentiles, or non-Israelites, at the direction of God. Jesus is, to their faces, comparing them to some of the most wicked and unbelieving generations in the history of Israel, as an acknowledgement that they and many others in Israel will reject him as the Messiah. But, just as importantly, he is showing that the Messiah is coming to present the message of salvation for all people, not just the Jews. While this is good news for us and for the world, for that group in Nazareth, that would have been seen as anything from a deep and pretty intentional insult to a complete warping of their religion, and worthy of this severe response.
But for our purposes today, I want to return to the first major section we went over in this passage, where Jesus reads the text from Isaiah. The debate in Christianity now is not the same as it would have been in Nazareth, about whether salvation was solely for Jews. It is universally held in Christianity that salvation is for all people. The major debate now, or at least, one of the major debates with regards to this passage, relates back to my broader question from before: what, if any, is the connection between preaching the gospel and with any other actions, a debate that in some ways hinges on the quotation from Isaiah. Look again at verses 18-19. The debate gets to be so in depth as to look at each specific word. When Jesus reads the words “he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor,” two questions arise - what does he mean by “poor,” and what does he mean by “proclaim?” Take this for any of these groups here: poor, prisoners, blind, oppressed - are we to understand these as groups who experience these realities physically, or solely as groups who experience these spiritually? Take the word proclaim - are we to understand this solely as telling these groups of their salvation, or actually acting to change their situation?
Now, what I’m not going to do here is take us through a word study. I literally wrote out just the beginnings of this for one word and I was like, “wow. Very technical, and very helpful, in a very specific setting. But perhaps not necessarily the best use of our time at the moment.” So what I want to do instead is use some other passages to build up our context here, starting with the Isaiah passage we haven’t looked at yet.
Because like we said, In addition to 61:1-3, Jesus quotes from Isaiah 58:6, so I will start there and go to verse 9:
“Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
7
Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe them,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
8
Then your light will break forth like the dawn,
and your healing will quickly appear;
then your righteousness[a] will go before you,
and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard.
9
Then you will call, and the Lord will answer;
you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
In this passage, what we see certainly seems to be a meeting of physical needs - feeding the hungry, providing shelter, clothing the naked. In fact, it sounds reminiscent of another passage, from Matthew 25, where Jesus states that active care and attention for groups like this is reflective of care and attention for Jesus, while rejection of these groups is also reflective of a rejection of Jesus.
So, the shape we are beginning to get seems to be that there is evidence that Jesus means to describe these groups from verses 18-19 in the physical form - the poor, prisoners, blind, oppressed. Even the final line, verse 19, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” refers to the Jewish practice of the year of Jubilee, a year when financial debts were forgiven and plots of land were returned to the families who originally owned them.
But, even with this lean to define these as physical, there is still the chance to say that we are meant to understand these physical needs as metaphors for spiritual needs. For example, we use the idea of the physically poor to understand the needs of the spiritually poor; we use the physically blind to understand the spiritually blind, and so on. But I don’t think this spiritualization of these groups aligns with what Jesus appears to think his ministry points to.
In Matthew 11, John the Baptist wants to be sure that Jesus is indeed the Messiah, and sends his disciples to Jesus to ask. In response, Jesus says, “Go back and report to John what you hear and see: 5The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor.” Even here, when asked to provide evidence that he is the Messiah, it seems that Jesus uses examples that point to his ministry as including these physical groups to point to his role as the Messiah.
But then the question arises, are we, Christians today, called to do the same exact ministry as Jesus? The arguments from some still stick on that word “proclaim,” or point to something like Jesus’ command in Matthew 28 to “Go and make disciples,” as pointing us to a priority of evangelism, a priority of strictly telling others of the gospel message. And my response is to say that there is a difference between going out and evangelizing and going out and making disciples.
One of my professors at Bethel used to use the imagery of the cross to help explain this point. Take the vertical line of the cross and think of that as the relationship, or interaction, between God and humanity. Now take the horizontal line and think of that as the relationships or interactions between humans. When either of these relationships is emphasized more than the other, the image of the cross loses its focus. We are invited, we are called, to use a lens that focuses these relationships in order to see the gospel represented in the cross. This is a thread that runs through the entirety of the Bible; the physical and the spiritual are inextricably linked in the gospel. Or, as scholar Christopher Wright has said, “we are in need of a holistic gospel because the world is a holistic mess... How we are to live, and what we are mandated to do as God’s people in the world, are constantly rooted in the facts of who God is and what God has done.”
As we look to wrap up here, I want to turn to think about the groups in the Bible that are often defined as vulnerable - the poor, the widow, the orphan, the migrant or the immigrant - or maybe think of the same or similar groups today, groups we might call underprivileged, underserved, underfunded…When we think about the cross, and this interpersonal, human connection, there is a need, I believe, to focus on these groups. Not from pity, not from charity, not from superiority, but from a biblical mandate to focus on these groups because they are groups God cares for but who humans overlook. There is a call to focus on these groups and help address their physical needs.
What I don’t think this means is finding another way to spiritualize the physical needs. We often see that people who have less or who are more aware of their need for help are more likely to fully embrace the message of salvation through Christ than many who may not recognize this need, but this does not mean we turn this understanding into a metaphor to bolster our understanding of our own spiritual lives. Seeing places where we have need should not lead us to justify a focus solely on ourselves. Many of us over the last 14 or 15 months have seen either instances or more prolonged stretches of physical or spiritual needs, but we need to be able to recognize that, while our needs are valid, there may be or are other people who see those needs fail to be met daily.
We must also recognize that a failure to meet physical needs can be a hindrance to the acceptance of the Gospel. For example, we know that schoolchildren perform more poorly than their peers when they are hungry, serving as a hindrance to their education, which is one reason this church partners with ministries to provide food for these children in local schools. Imagine how similar scenarios could affect someone as they hear the message of Christ. I think of ministries I have seen or have been a part of which provide an evangelistic message and then either leave an area or send a person off with no sort of support system or no effort to change the surroundings of that person, wondering the whole time why people can’t stay committed to Jesus in an unhealthy or dangerous physical situation.
And I feel the need to acknowledge that there are places in society where unaddressed sins have an impact on the most vulnerable. From agreed-upon wages being unpaid, to certain demographic groups being more likely to end up in prison, to sexual crimes, how money is spent personally and on a broader community level, where and to whom violence is done, how medical care is offered, to any additional racial, gender, age, or ability based discrimination, and beyond, each of these things have a negative effect on our interpersonal, human-to-human relationships which are detrimental to our understanding and presentation of the gospel.
I’ll close by saying that I know people will ask me, “so what specifically should we do?” If I’m being entirely honest, it’s a question I fear being asked in some ways because, even after 10 years, I’m still trying to figure out how to answer this question for myself. It feels so difficult when there seems to be this option paralysis in my brain; being so overstimulated by so many potential options and then trying to provide an answer to someone else feels so incredibly daunting. But, if there is one thing I know I see in the evangelical church as a whole, it is that we have an incredibly difficult time even agreeing that we need to prioritize thinking about these issues or building a consensus on this foundational piece of theology. And so I think my hope as a potential initial response to this sermon is that, if you or we haven’t already, begin to consider the connection between the gospel message and action, between the spiritual and the physical. Begin to use this as a lens to see the world. Reflect on how you may think about groups that would be considered vulnerable, and ask if you also need to apply this lens to those thoughts. And, for those of us who are already Christians, perhaps we need to return to some of the stories we have grown up with and see if there may be more we can glean with this lens in use.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we come before you and thank you for who you are and what you have done. I will admit that I do not know where we all stand, nor how much we understand, with regards to you, your care for the world, or how we align with your mission in the world. I pray that we may continue to feel your presence, to feel the inspiration and understanding that can come with the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit. I pray that we may continue to be shown how to engage with the world. In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit I pray, Amen.