Jesus’s Hometown Address
In the US, there is a tradition among politicians. When running for office, they often return to their “hometown” and make their announcement to run amid great publicity. In Luke’s Gospel today we see Jesus returning to His hometown of Nazareth to make an important announcement about his plan for the future.
Jesus has just begun His ministry. At this point, He has not even called His apostles. His preaching in Galilee has obviously been powerful. Luke records, “Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about Him spread through all the surrounding country.” To carry the political analogy just a bit further, imagine a young politician whose early career and speeches have created a media buzz. Our imaginary politician has now decided the time is ripe to reach for higher office.
As Jesus comes into Nazareth His actions clearly diverge from those of any politician, now or then. Jesus does not call attention to Himself with fanfare, as we would expect from a modern politician. Nor does He make Himself known through the exercise of sheer power and might as would have been likely for a politician in occupied Israel. He simply goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, “as was His custom.”
What Jesus did next was extraordinary and clearly separated Him from any politician or religious leader before or since. He read a well-known (to His audience in the synagogue) passage from Isaiah:
“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 be free,
To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
This passage would have spoken to His fellow Jews on many levels. First, in its historical context as a fulfilled prophecy of the release of the Jews from their Babylonian captivity. Also as a hoped for prophecy of the future, for the return of a new David, a warrior king who would throw off the despised Roman occupation. We can imagine Jesus’s next words echoing through the tense and expectant synagogue, as they have continued to echo through the ages, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
At first, the crowd was full of admiration and praise. Perhaps because a hope was welling up in them that Jesus was announcing Himself as the long awaited political and military Messiah? Jesus’s following words dashed their hopes. Jesus wrapped Himself in Isaiah’s scripture and explained that His good news to the poor was a message of grace; that He Himself was to be the light to the blind; His freedom was the freedom of redemption from sin. Furthermore, He explained this in a manner that, by highlighting their lack of faith, disparaged His audience – something no politician would do!
Jesus’s Universal Address
What about us today? Like the Jews in that Nazarene synagogue two millennia ago, we are filled with our own worldly hopes and desires. The specific objects of our desires may have changed but the underlying motives of a search for more acclaim, more material goods, and more pleasure remain the same. Most of our lives and most of our thoughts focus on the enlargement of our own egos.
Jesus’s message should take us back as much as it did His contemporaries. We are struggling with our own lack of faith, our own blindness and captivity. Jesus tells us that only by aligning our will with God’s purpose for us do we find redemption from sin and thus regain true sight and freedom. For the Jews in ~ 30 A.D. their redemption was not to be from military occupation. Our own redemption will probably not be as we expect either.
