The Sermon So Nice It Got Preached Twice
Good Morning!! We have a very special lesson from Isaiah this morning that I would like to dig into for my first sermon of the year. It’s good to use it as a first sermon, because it’s the text for the first “recorded” sermon Jesus gave. We can begin with my sermon title, that is a sermon preached twice, hundreds of years apart. Before we talk about Luke 4, where Jesus preaches our Old Testament text, lets dig into what’s directly going on here.
Isaiah 61 is describing a conversation. One voice is God on His Heavenly throne. The Main Voice is someone, not Isaiah, describing His mission to serve God by the power of the Holy Spirit. But the text reveals to be, as you continue in the chapter, to be the voice of God Himself. God the Redeemer, promising the Redemption of God’s People to God who Sits on the Throne.
While hopefully we as Christians can see this as a picture of the Trinity in the Old Testament, God the Son speaking with God the Father, I am sure that Old Testament believers had a hard time understanding this picture of God promising to God the redemption of God’s people.
That may be why it was Jesus first sermon.
The passage begins The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me. Very important here. The speaker calls himself the Anointed of the Lord, in Hebrew “Mashiach” which is where we get the word Messiah, or Christ from Greek. The Messiah then describes what he will do.
The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; 2 to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor,
That last thing refers to the Year of Jubilee, which freed everyone from all their debts every 50 years. The Torah said that everyone was to be forgiven all debts and return to ancestral homes every 50 years regardless of if they had to sell them, or whatever they owed. All debts are wiped away. So it’s easy to see how having our debts forgiven can be seen spiritually.
It’s especially neat that Isaiah says the mission of the Messiah begins with the blessing of the Holy Spirit, and Anointing of God the Father, because that’s where Jesus’ ministry begins, after His Baptism, where God the Father tells the world of His Son, the Messiah, and the Spirit descends on Him like a dove.
Luke 4 then tells us that after the temptation in the wilderness, Jesus began preaching in northern Israel in a region called Galilee.
Even though He’s a carpenter with no training in Jerusalem, Jesus amazes the people of Galilee with his teaching about God. Everything was going well until he returned home to Nazareth, where he preached on our Isaiah lesson.
Luke 4:16 describes how every listener eagerly awaited his sermon, and it seems it was short. The summary of Jesus’ Sermon was this: It is now fulfilled, Today, Just now! What Isaiah wrote hundreds of years ago about the redemption of God’s people? Good News, that’s all about me. I’m the guy who spoke those words that Isaiah recorded.
Now that may have been a summary, but that’s all Luke includes. And it’s hard to imagine the full impact without being there.
First, nearly all of them would likely have been very familiar with that passage about the coming day of the Lord, just like we are with John 3:16. It is a passage, they were all expectantly waiting to see fulfilled. And they would have been especially excited to hear what the hometown preacher was going to say about their freedom from bondage. But what bondage? To Sin, or to the consequences of sin?
As usual, their eyes were on the wrong prize, because they didn’t see themselves as slaves to sin, just slaves to their Roman captivity the fault of other’s sins, so they thought.
Jesus knew their hearts, and their lack of faith. Apparently, they heard he did wonders while preaching nearby in a town called Capernaum. Jesus knows deep down they don’t want to hear him preach. What they want is not words, but a show of power in fulfillment of prophecy. Prove it, prove you’re the Messiah.
And here, Jesus comes with the hammer, because this is no way to approach God. One Christian Apologist said recently that at an atheist convention, when they were surveyed as to whether, if they were directly told by God that He existed, would they believe, would they follow God. 70% said no. They all had reasons, saying it would be an illusion, it might be aliens, or a bad dream. The bottom line is, God doesn’t meet their expectations.
Jesus reply is that God doesn’t have to meet our demands, because he is God. We come to Him poor, the captive, the blind, the oppressed. It’s an amazing picture of just how broken we are, that we come with demands concerning the qualifications of our rescuer. We all do.
Jesus knows they don’t want to hear what he has to say, So to help, He gives them examples from the Old Testament about those who came to God, but he lists two gentiles, people they consider unclean and outside of God’s effort.
The point in each case was, despite the fact that each was told to do something that they considered impossible, because the man of God told them it was the truth, they did it. They obeyed God and followed.
They, the Gentile believers, thought they could see, but when the prophet told they were blind, they said, yeah, you’re right, I am blind. I am blind to spiritual truth, and I will follow God.
The people of Nazareth didn’t see themselves as spiritually poor, blind, oppressed, and enslaved spiritually, just physically. Because of their heritage, and their good efforts in life, they saw themselves as deserving the benefit of the doubt from God, after all, deep down, God knows they were good, right? No, deep down, we aren’t good. But Good News, God loves us anyway.
So, in review. First Isaiah 61 reveals to us that Jesus, the Messiah, is God, just like Isaiah revealed hundreds of years earlier. Second, He came not for those who sit in judgment of God, as to whether God is doing what they expect Him to do. He came for the redemption of the confused, the sick, poor, and to free captives from their sin.
And thirdly, for you. We didn’t get into this in the Isaiah piece. As the chapter continues God reveals that he saves his people to make them His priests, meaning his intercessors, his messengers to the unbelievers. That’s Isaiah’s prophecy. Jesus does that, as, just before he ascends, he commissions his disciples to bring the Good News to the World.
