And then he says “Today this scripture has
been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Today. This scripture
has been fulfilled.
Today!
More than one person has said to me that
the New Testament is about grace and love, while the Old Testament is about
punishment and vengeance, and that the New Testament overturns the Old
Testament.
But look and listen to what Jesus does in
the synagogue. He reads from the prophet Isaiah, then says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled.
Jesus not only affirms what was said in Isaiah; he says: “What you read about
in Isaiah, that is what I’m here to
do.”
In Luke’s gospel story, this is how Jesus
introduced himself to the world. We know from our reading last week that in
John’s gospel story, Jesus introduced himself to the world by… changing water
into wine. But in Luke, Jesus reads from Isaiah, and adopts what Isaiah said as
his own personal mission statement. In Luke’s gospel, that’s how he introduces
himself and what he stands for.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has
anointed me to bring good news to the
poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives.
He has sent me to proclaim recovery of
sight to the blind.
He has sent me to set the oppressed free.
Now if you were a first century person
hearing Jesus read these words in the synagogue, you would recognize them. If
you were in the synagogue listening to Jesus, you would know, even if he didn’t
say so, that he was reading from Isaiah. And you would know that Isaiah wrote
during a very troublesome time.
The people in Israel had been in exile:
captured, and made to live in a foreign land. In exile, their one great longing
was to return home.
By the time we get to this part of Isaiah
– chapter 61 – they had already returned
home. The events that are described in Isaiah’s earlier chapters are now long
since passed. In fact, this part of Isaiah wasn’t even written by Isaiah. It
was written years later by someone else.
As he says, he inherited the title. And
the man he inherited it from was not the real Dread Pirate Roberts, either.
As he says: “The Dread Pirate Roberts had
grown so rich, he wanted to retire. He took me to his cabin and he told me his
secret. 'I am not the Dread Pirate Roberts' he said. 'My name is Ryan; I
inherited the ship from the previous Dread Pirate Roberts, just as you will
inherit it from me. The man I inherited it from is not the real Dread Pirate
Roberts either. His name was Cummerbund. The real Roberts has been retired 15
years and living like a king in Patagonia.'”
And by the time of the third Isaiah, the
exile is over, and the people of Israel are back home.
You might think that, now, back home, all
their hopes and dreams would come true. But their return wasn’t all they had
hoped or imagined.
Their return didn’t quite live up to their
expectations.
They were home, but they weren’t really in
charge.
They were home, but most of their land was
now owned by someone else.
They were home, but they were oppressed by
the powers in charge and by the people who now owned the land on which they
lived.
Many of them lived in poverty. And they
were still very much captive – captive, now, in their own land.
And as third Isaiah makes clear: poverty
and captivity are unacceptable to God. Poverty and captivity are not a part of
God’s vision for the world.
The people who heard Jesus read Isaiah’s
words would have recognized that Jesus was comparing their current situation to
the situation of people in Isaiah’s time. Because in Jesus’s time, the people
still lived in an oppressed state.
The Romans were in charge.
Their rule was corrupt.
The way the Romans ruled penalized the
poor and benefited only a few elites.
The people were kept in poverty, and most
were not able to own land.
They were taxed heavily, but benefitted
little from the wealth that went to the government.
Rebellions came and went, each one crushed
violently by the Roman army…
This was not what God had in mind when God
created the world.
So God sent Jesus to the world, to save
the world from the mess it was in, to save the people, to bring good news to
the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, and freedom to the
oppressed… to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor, the time when all things
will be made right.
So now that we see the similarities
between Isaiah’s time and the time of Jesus, what about our own time? How does
our own time compare to those times, the time of Isaiah, and the time of Jesus?
Is there a need today for the Spirit? Is there a need for a proclamation of
good news to the poor release to the captives, freedom to the oppressed?
In other words, are people still being
economically oppressed – are they still being held captive – in our time? We
need to know the answer to this, because if
the answer is yes, then we – the body of Christ – clearly have our work cut
out for us. After all, poverty and captivity are unacceptable to God. After
all, the one we claim to follow declared it his mission to end oppression and poverty and captivity.
Are people today economically oppressed?
Yet somehow, they – and other wealthy
business owners – have convinced our government that they – and not the poor –
are most in need of tax breaks.
So our government gives huge tax breaks to
corporations, so that companies like Walmart pay very little in taxes. And a
number of major corporations even have a negative tax rate, meaning they
receive more in subsidies from the government than they give in taxes.
Meanwhile, the Walton family uses their
considerable influence to fight against things that would help their workers,
like increases to the minimum wage.
Here’s another example of how current laws
oppress the poor. Last year, Martin Shkreli, the CEO of a big pharmaceutical
company, raised the price of Daraprim by over 5,000 percent, from $13 to $750.
Daraprim is a lifesaving drug that thousands of people with AIDS depend on, but
that didn’t matter to Shkreli. And what he did was perfectly legal.
A few months later, Shkreli was arrested
for securities fraud. This time, his victims were Wall Street executives. For
that, he was arrested.
This shows that, in this country, you can
cheat the American public, no problem, just don’t cheat the people with money.
We live in a system that economically
oppresses the poor.
Almost one hundred years ago, we had a similar
situation. The Roaring 20s were a remarkably good time for wealthy business
owners. But the economy could not sustain such a huge gap between the wealthy
and the poor that existed then, and it all came crashing down in October of
1929.
Is our own economy sustainable? History
teaches that it’s only a matter of time before it crashes down once again.
Unless we can fix it.
And we need to fix it, not just to avoid
another crash, but because Jesus calls us to proclaim good news to the poor, to
end economic oppression in our time.
In our own time, we know that
African-Americans are incarcerated at a rate more than six times their
representation in the general population. Clearly, Black lives don’t matter in this country, which is
why the church needs to proclaim that Black Lives do matter.
And speaking of incarceration, our laws
allow a person to be put away in prison for using marijuana, but not one major
Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for unethical practices that led to
the near collapse of our economy in the last decade.
In addition, many prisons are now being
run by for-profit companies, which use their influence in the courts to
maintain a certain number of prisoners simply because they need those prisoners
in order to remain profitable. People thrown in prison for corporate, economic
gain.
Jesus read the words of the prophet
Isaiah, and adopted them as his own. The prophet, in making his declaration, is
uncharacteristically bold and self-affirming. He affirms the Spirit’s presence
within him. He declares what the Spirit has called him to do.
That’s what Jesus did, and it’s what we
need to do as well.
We need to recognize and affirm the
Spirit’s presence among us. We need
to declare, boldly, what it is that the Spirit is calling us to do. We need to
put before our world the vision of the prophets, the kingdom of shalom
described by Jesus.
Finally, if we read just a little further
in Isaiah 66, we discover that the prophet then goes on to give praise to God.
The prophet’s final word is a word of praise.
The same needs to be true for us. We give
praise to God, because in the face of oppression, inequality, poverty and
injustice, our God is not silent. Our God demands a more just society. Our God
insists that everyone gets to share in the benefits of a growing economy.
We give praise to God, because God does
not look the other way when people are being mistreated or abused.
We give praise to God, because the words
of the prophets are fulfilled in Jesus.
We give praise to God, because the words
of the prophets are fulfilled in us.
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