INTRODUCTION
Hi everybody, great to be here with you this morning. Happy Australia Day to you all! I acknowledge that for many Aboriginal Australians it’s an unwelcome reminder of past sorrows; so, as we celebrate our National Day today let us redouble our efforts for Reconciliation and look to a future in which all Australians – Aboriginal, European, Asian, Pacific Islander, African, even Latin and North American – we’re such a wonderful multi-cultural mixture – all Australians live together in harmony and freedom.
In fact, today’s Gospel passage, Luke 4:14-21, by a wonderful, seeming co-incidence, speaks directly into this. One day, early in his ministry, Jesus walks into the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth and reads the lesson for the day from the scroll of Isaiah, Chapter 61 – “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners” – or words to that effect, the English translations vary. Jesus self-identifies as the Messiah of Hebrew prophecy, and his message is one of … yes, Reconciliation … the prophecy taps into, as we’ll see, the Old Testament notion of Jubilee, which, through Jesus, becomes the Kingdom – a wonderful future in which all people, everywhere, live together in harmony and freedom.
But there’s a twist! The prison cells didn’t suddenly burst open when Jesus arrived on the scene – in fact the people of Nazareth responded to Jesus’ declaration by trying to grab him and throw him off a cliff! – as we’ll see in next week’s Gospel reading. And, to this day, the poor and oppressed are still poor and oppressed, and the prisons have still got plenty of people in them!
So, what sort of setting free of prisoners was Jesus actually referring to, when he read from Isaiah 61 on that day? We’ll try to get to the bottom of this in our Message today, coming up later in the service – so stay tuned!
GOSPEL READING: Luke 4:14-21
Jesus reads the prophet Isaiah
4:14 Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding region.
4:15 He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.
4:16 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,
4:17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
4:18 “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 set free those who are oppressed,
4:19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
4:20 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.
4:21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
THE MESSAGE
What an amazing story! One minute we have Jesus getting up in his home-town synagogue, reading the prophetic words from Isaiah, then, very dramatically, announcing that he is the fulfillment of that prophecy, identifying himself as .. the Messiah. The next minute – as we’ll see next week – the people, his own hometown people, are trying to throw him off a cliff; and not all that long after that, as we know, the Romans succeed in brutally torturing and executing him! The prison cells didn’t suddenly burst open, and there’s still plenty of people in prison to this day. Go figure!
So, when Jesus says, “He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners”, what exactly does he mean? He is the Messiah, the Saviour, so exactly what sort of Messiah or Saviour is he??
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Let’s go back to the start of the story. In Luke’s Gospel – the only one of the four in which this episode is depicted – we start early in Jesus’ ministry, no more than a year in, perhaps, after his Baptism in the Jordan by John, and the 40 days of temptation in the desert. But by this time Jesus has already generated a lot of interest:
“….. a report about him spread through all the surrounding region,” we read in verses 14 and 15, “He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone.”
It would have been with great excitement and expectation, therefore, that Jesus was welcomed to the synagogue in Nazareth – the hometown boy made good! He immediately gets up – “as was his custom”, Luke’s account explains – to read the scripture for the day. Presumably, before his baptism, Jesus had been a regular at the synagogue, well-respected even though relatively young; growing up in Nazareth, studying at the synagogue, learning the Law and the Prophets, showing exceptional promise and wisdom beyond his years, perhaps – little is really known of what happened during this period of his life.
But this was the new Jesus, the Baptised Jesus, definitely not the old one: “Then Jesus, in the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee”, and came to Nazareth. Something new had been released in him: spiritual anointing, empowerment for ministry. The people, the locals – Jesus’ old family, friends, and neighbours – were in for a surprise, a shock.
He stood up to do the reading, from the scroll of Isaiah the Prophet. The book of Isaiah is believed to have been written around 700 BCE, a tumultuous period in which the Assyrian Empire continually threatened the kingdoms of Israel and Judah, and in which tens of thousands of Israelites were exiled in Assyria – modern day Northern Iraq. The book might have had three different authors, scholars now believe, but is typically ascribed to the one person, the Prophet Isaiah himself.
The first of the two verses Jesus reads has a double intention. On one hand, it is referring to the future, prophesied Messiah, the once-off Saviour/King that God would send to, yes, literally do all those things: proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind, release of the oppressed. Set the people of Judah and Israel, God’s chosen people, free from the yoke of the evil empire, the Assyrians. As it turned out, however, not only didn’t that actually happen, there were not one but two more evil empires about to descend on the Israelites: the Babylonians 150 years later, then the Romans another 400 years after that.
On the other hand, the prophecy of setting free of prisoners, release for the poor and oppressed is linked to the Law, the Mosaic Covenant, to the so-called “Year of Jubilee”, when once every 50 years slaves were to be freed, debts cancelled, and ancestral property returned to the original owners’ family. This is the reference of the second of the verses Jesus reads: “the year of the Lord’s favour”.
So, the Messiah, and the Year of Jubilee – very potent references indeed. But now the punchline. Jesus finishes reading and sits down – apparently that was the tradition: stand up for reading, sit down for .. teaching. The eyes of all were fastened on him, with bated breath they waited for him to speak:
“Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
“Yes, I am the Messiah”, Jesus is saying, “and this is now the beginning of the Year, the Age of Jubilee; of” – and this is the word Jesus uses continually throughout his ministry – “the Kingdom” – the Kingdom of God, the Kingdom of Heaven.
The people were surprised, shocked, obviously, but, at least initially, they were delighted. The very next verse, verse 22, says:
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said [with wonder in their voices, we can imagine], “Is this not Joseph’s son?!”
But not long after this, in a few short verses that we’ll read next week, the people’s delight turns to murderous anger, when they start to realize that the setting free that Jesus offers will demand something of them themselves first – that they themselves are actually the jailers, the oppressors.
It’s the same for us. We’re always looking for a Messiah, a God, to save us from others, from the world – to heal us when we’re sick, to provide our daily needs and wants, to help us win the race of life, to set us free from trouble and care – are we not? And, yes, we might be truly poor, sick and oppressed – and, yes, we might be wanting this for others that we’re concerned for, family, friends, our own people. But may I point out that this is essentially a self-focused, selfish thing. I want a Messiah, a God, who takes care of me, who gives me what I want, what I think is my rightful due. A Messiah, a God, made to order, essentially in my own image.
Now, as a matter of fact the prison cells didn’t suddenly burst open, as I’ve already noted. And what the people in Nazareth quickly realized – what we too realize – was that Jesus wasn’t going to be the Messiah they wanted, a Messiah made to order to save them from the Romans, from what they perceived as their own poverty and oppression. Jesus had been preaching all throughout the region by this time, so his central teaching was well known.
“He [God] sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners”! No, not actually ordinary human imprisonment in a jail – the imprisonment, the oppression, the poverty Jesus has come to set us free from is …. of our own doing – our own self-imprisonment, self-oppression, self-impoverishment, each one of us. We are the jailers, oppressors of ourselves, we are in a state of terrible spiritual poverty, when we choose to live a self-centred life, living only for number one, treating others only as a means to the end of our own self-aggrandizement.
This is truly what Original Sin is – the very thing Jesus, the Messiah, was sent to deal with – our own natural-born self-centredness, the natural existential state of humankind. You can see it in little children, as I’ve shocked you by saying before: cute, cuddly, innocent, but natural-born narcissists – each one of us – and unless parents intervene diligently to teach them how to practice a little selflessness – to consider and respect others, say please and thank you, play nicely, take turns, be kind, generous, caring, and so on, at least some of the time – they’ll grow up to be very uncute, uncuddly, un-innocent adult narcissists, seriously bad and usually very unhappy people who cause a lot of trouble and whom nobody really likes.
So, Jesus actually came to set us free, not from imprisonment by somebody else, but from our own self-imprisonment. Through faith in Jesus, we can escape the closed circle of our selfish selves, and begin to live an open, free, truly fulfilling life, living and caring for others – which includes, by the way, caring for ourselves, learning to discern the difference between our own selfish, self-destructive desires and what is truly good for us.
But in our natural-born selfish state this is not the sort of thing which particularly appeals to us, or even occurs to us! It’s often only when our self-centred life schemes fail that we might suddenly be open to the possibility that we are our own worst enemy, our own jailer, own oppressor – but even then we are more likely to blame someone else, even blame the whole world, before it occurs to us to take responsibility ourselves!
So, like the Israelites, the Messiah we are always looking for is the one who will save us from others, from a world that frustrates our own selfish schemes, and when a Messiah comes along who initially seems to offer that, but invites us to accept responsibility and change ourselves first, we are, naturally, deeply hurt, very angry. However, yes, even if we are truly oppressed, impoverished, imprisoned or sick, Jesus, the actual Messiah, invites us to change ourselves first – and he provides the ways and means for us to do it.
“Be the change you want to see in the world” first – I added the “first” – the saying quoted by Barack Obama but attributed to Gandhi. Yes, all these things that we, like the Israelites, hope and pray and yearn for the end of – jails still full of people, in many cases imprisoned unjustly, social and political oppression, poverty, unequal access to health and other services – Jesus really did come to set humanity free from – this is the Kingdom of God growing around us – but only through first changing ourselves – or, rather allowing ourselves to be changed, transformed by the grace that is now available in the world through faith in Jesus.
“He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners.” Today, Australia Day, as we celebrate our nation, we acknowledge, as we did last Sunday, the high rates of incarceration of Aboriginal young people, and beyond that the spiritual imprisonment and impoverishment of many Aboriginal Australians, and of all of us, that is a negative impact of colonization; and we continue to pray and work for Reconciliation. The Year of Jubilee, the Kingdom of God, the coming Reconciliation of all things – that’s Colossians 1:20. Amen!
