[Machine transcription]
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
Dear Saints, it’s nice, I think, to hear in the text, in the ancient Word of God, the people doing just exactly what we’re doing today. They gather together, this was in Nehemiah chapter 8. They gather together, they had built the walls, they’re working on rebuilding the temple, and they get together and Ezra the priest stands up and he opens the book and he reads it, and he explains it. It hadn’t been done in a long time. They had skipped years and years of church, and all the people hearing the words of God, especially the words of Moses, and they were weeping.
And Ezra says, “Don’t weep, today’s holy; you’re hearing God’s Word. The Lord Himself is speaking to you. Have joy, rejoice.” In fact, if you’re an artist or you like to do this sort of thing, the last words of that Old Testament lesson are words to make into art. They’re really quite comforting and joyous words. The end of Nehemiah 8, 10, “The joy of the Lord is your strength.” That’s a beautiful text.
And then the same theme is there in the gradual that we sang from Psalm 19. Psalm 19 is one of the three Torah psalms. That’s what the ancient theologians called these, the psalms that are about the Lord’s Word, and I like it because it’s easy to remember. The three Torah Psalms are Psalm 1, Psalm 19, and Psalm 119. So you only have to remember 119 and you’ve got all three memorized. I like it when that happens like that. But they’re Psalms that are about the Lord’s Word, the blessings that come from the Lord’s Word, the strength of the Lord’s Word, the clarity of the Word of God.
Listen to what we had there. “The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul. The testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart. The commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever. The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether, more to be desired than gold.” And then as if David doesn’t think you’ll believe it, he says, “Yes, more than much fine gold.”
There’s a couple of other gems in that psalm. In fact, it’s Psalm 19 where we hear about what the Lord does with our hidden faults. This is when people say, “Pastor, what if I don’t know the sins I’m committing? What if I’m not aware of the commandments that I’m breaking?” And for that, we go to the Lord’s Prayer, “Forgive us our trespasses,” but most especially actually we go to verse 12 in Psalm 19, “Who can understand his errors? Cleanse me from my secret faults.” So the Lord forgives, can you imagine? The Lord forgives us of the sins that we’re not even aware of. Now that’s wonderful.
And then in the gospel lesson, we see the same thing happening. The people of Nazareth were gathered to church, to the synagogue on Saturday to hear the Lord’s Word and to hear it explained. Now this is in Luke chapter 4 and it’s probably about a year into the ministry of Jesus. So remember this, that Jesus was, he grew up in Nazareth from age, what do we think, maybe age 3, 2 or 3 after the flight into Egypt, from age 3 all the way to age 30. So Jesus was the hometown boy, that’s where Mary and Joseph lived until we presume Joseph’s death and Mary continued to live. That was Jesus’ hometown. And this was His home church. It was His home synagogue.
And He’s now back into it, even though He had been baptized a year ago. He had been performing miracles in the region, in Capernaum, and even in Cana, which is four, five miles away, really close. But Jesus hadn’t been back publicly until this particular moment. I want to walk through the text together, if you want to look at it, and we can look at it together because I think there’s some wonderful things in the text that are, you just, it’s easy to miss the first time through, so I want to walk through the text and then we want to come back and ask the question, why were the people so upset?
Why? I mean, it seems like it escalates really quickly, right? They listen to Jesus preaching and they, it even says that they like His preaching, but then all of a sudden things turn and it goes from liking what He’s preaching to trying to push Him over the edge of a cliff. I think I probably preached some bad sermons in my time, but I’ve never thought that people were going to grab me by the scruff of the neck and throw me over the cliff. But it wasn’t even a bad sermon. It was a good sermon. So we’ve got to try to understand that, but we’ll come to that at the end.
So at verse 16, “So Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day.” The synagogues were kind of open rooms, and they had benches on the side. People could stand or sit in the synagogue, and every Saturday the people would gather there, and different people would take turns reading and also teaching the text. They had a, like we do, they had a lectionary, so they had certain readings that were scheduled to be heard on certain parts of the year, and so it looked like Isaiah was assigned.
And so, the attendant gave the Isaiah scroll to Jesus; it was his turn to read. And so, he was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah, verse 17. And when he had opened the book, he found the place to where it was written. Now remember, at this point it wasn’t a book; it was a scroll. And this seems to indicate that they handed Jesus the scroll open to a particular passage that was to be read that day, and Jesus flipped the page. He went to a different reading, says, “I want to give you a different text,” and he goes and he reads.
The text that he reads, and this is very interesting, is Isaiah chapter 61, verses 1 and the first part of verse 2, mostly. If you open your Bibles to Isaiah 61, you can do this later, and you can read it, the first few verses. It says, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” Remember, that’s what happened when Jesus was baptized. The Spirit came upon him. That’s when he was christened or anointed for the work of being the Christ. Because he has anointed me, and remember that Hebrew word anointed is Messiah, the Greek word is Christ. Because he has messiahed me, he has appointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted, wanted to proclaim liberty to the captives, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.
There’s one line that Jesus takes from Isaiah 58 and adds to the text, and “recovery of sight to the blind.” That’s not in that particular passage; it’s in a passage up the page a few inches. And that’s really quite interesting. What that probably means is what Luke is giving us here as the Scripture that Jesus is reading is not only the Scripture that Jesus was reading, but also an indication of how Jesus was preaching that text, that Jesus is making a certain point in that reading of Isaiah 61.
And that point is going to get the people pretty riled up, but back to that in a little bit. And then Jesus closed the book. He rolled up the scroll. He hands it back to the attendant and then he sat down; that’s how they would preach in those days. They would sit down, which I don’t know if that’s a, maybe that’s a nice idea actually. When I get to be an old man, we’ll remember this text and we’ll put a high chair here for me or something like that. He sat down to preach and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Why? Well, Jesus was reading from a different place than they expected, what’s he up to?
And also, they had heard about Jesus. They had heard that he was baptized by John. They had heard that he had visited the temple and overthrown the tables there. They had heard of the miracles that he did right down the street in Cana and in Capernaum. They in fact are hoping that he would bring some of that miracle power home to Nazareth. I imagine they’re, you know, “Hey, Jesus, remember how you turned water into wine? We like that idea.” They’re waiting to see what he’s gonna say.
And he began to say to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” This text from Isaiah 61 is one of the three texts that the Jewish rabbis had connected between the Messiah and the Spirit and the work of redemption. This is one of those texts that the ancient Jewish Church was looking forward to being fulfilled by the Messiah, and Jesus is saying, “It’s me. I’m the one that all those promises have been pointing to. I’m the one that you’ve been waiting for.”
You see how it says in the text that he began to say to them? That’s a way of translating that that’s pretty helpful. It means that that wasn’t the only thing that he said, but that was kind of the summary of the bigger and larger and longer sermon that Jesus was giving to them. And it was a sermon that Jesus loved to give. It’s the sermon that Jesus preached on the road to Emmaus. Remember when He taught them from Moses and all the prophets that the Son of Man had to suffer before He entered into His glory?
Jesus loves to teach how the Old Testament prophets were all pointing to Him and the redemption and the salvation that He was going to win and going to accomplish. And so He preaches that sermon and the people were amazed by it. Verse 22, “All bore witness to Him and marveled at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth.” But then they said, “Wait a minute, we know this guy. This is Joseph’s son. How can he make such bold claims about himself?”
Now there was a custom in the synagogue that the text was read and then the sermon was preached and everyone listened to the sermon in silence. But then when the sermon was done, they would have time for question and answer. And I think that’s kind of a nice idea, actually, but we’ll have to talk to the elders about it. But there was a time for conversation, and so Jesus now enters into that time of conversation, and He’s waiting for them to ask questions, but nobody says anything.
And so Jesus, who knows the hearts of all, says, “Well, here’s what you’re thinking, here’s what you want to ask, here’s what you want to say,” verse 23. He said to them, “You will surely say this proverb to me, ‘Physician, heal yourself. What we heard had been done in Capernaum do here in your own country.'” So he said, “Assuredly, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his home country.”
And Jesus goes on to prove the point. And this is quite an amazing point. It reminds us of the preaching of Stephen right before he was stoned in the Book of Acts. He brings two Old Testament examples to bear on what was happening in the people’s hearts right there in Nazareth. He says, “There were a lot of widows in the time of Elijah the prophet, but only one of them was blessed by miracles and she was not an Israelite; she was the widow in Zarephath. And there was a lot of lepers at the time of the prophet Elisha in Israel, but none of them were healed. There was only one leper healed and he was named Naaman the Syrian, not the Israelite.”
In other words, even in the Old Testament, the prophets did their miracles to the people who were not of Israel but were foreigners. And so Jesus is pointing out the hardness of their own hearts, that they cannot receive Him as the Messiah or receive His gifts. And the result, whew, verse 28, “So all those in the synagogue when they heard these things were filled with wrath and rose up and thrust him out of the city and led him to the brow of the cliff on which their city was built; you can go and visit it now, that they might throw him down over the cliff.”
Now that is pretty extreme. They grabbed Jesus off the chair that he’s sitting on and throw him out of the synagogue and throw him out of town and they go to throw him over the cliff. Why? Why such anger? Why such hostility? Why such a reaction to what he preached and what he said as he points out the hardness of their own heart? Jesus, by the way, just to make sure we get, he went through them. Some of the old theologians thought that he actually like walked through them like he walked through the door of the upper room after the resurrection, like he actually walks through the middle of them or whatever happens.
He sort of moves through the crowd and they, by his own divine power, are unable to grab him and throw him off the cliff because it’s not his time. There will be a time for Jesus to be murdered; it’s just not this time. And so he goes his way. But why so upset? I think we should recognize this about our own sinful flesh, that we are by nature the enemies of God. We are by nature children of wrath. Our sinful flesh is at enmity with God, and the reason why is because our sinful flesh is programmed to rise up in rebellion and anger to resist anything that would call it a sinner.
Our sinful flesh is ready to defend, even to murder, to kill, to steal, to do whatever, to destroy anything that would take away our claim of goodness. Our sinful fallen flesh is rabidly defensive of our own sense of righteousness. And that, I think, is what happens in this synagogue in Nazareth. Listen to how Jesus preached, and let me try to put the emphasis on this:
When Jesus reads Isaiah 61 and 58, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has appointed me to preach the gospel to the poor. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, to give recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty all those who are oppressed, and to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.” If you want to hear the gospel, you have to first be poor. If you want to receive Jesus’ healing, you have to first be brokenhearted. If you want Jesus to set you free, you have to first be a captive.
And this is what we hate. Remember Jesus says, “If the son of man sets you free, you will be free indeed.” And the people said, “Free? We’re children of Abraham. We’ve never been slaves to anybody.” This is our own sinful flesh. We don’t need healing because we’re fine. We don’t need rescue because we’re fine. Jesus came to save sinners. If you want his saving, you have to first then be a sinner. Here, and our sinful flesh, my sinful flesh, and your sinful flesh hates to admit it.
It would rather throw Jesus over the cliff than admit that we are poor, broken-hearted, enslaved, blind, and oppressed. This is why I think it’s a miracle. You know there’s a lot of miracles that happen here every Sunday. The miracle of Jesus putting his body and blood and the bread and the wine for us to eat and drink, the miracle of the absolution, that sins are forgiven, the miracle that we come here and even want to hear the Lord’s Word, that’s only by the Holy Spirit working that miracle in us.
There’s a lot of miracles that happen here, but one of the most profound miracles that happens is that you and I, standing or kneeling, confess this, that “I am a poor, miserable sinner deserving God’s temporal and eternal punishment.” That’s a miracle worked by the Holy Spirit, that our flesh could be so drowned that we could recognize that and even have the courage to confess it. We ought to say to one another when we hear that, and I’m growing more and more convinced of this, that when we’re confessing our sins we should probably listen to our neighbor and lean over and say, “Oh, you too?”
Because the miracle is not only in your own heart, it’s in the heart of the person next to you, that the Holy Spirit has convicted you of sin. The world goes along in an extreme blindness to their own sinful condition and thinks that, “I’m okay and you’re okay.” If you ask people, you know how this goes, if you ask people, “Are you a good person or not?” And people will say, “Well, I’m above average. I’m trying. Surely I’ll go to heaven. I’ve tried to be a good person. I’ve done all that I can. I mean, surely I’ve made mistakes, but I’m pretty good. I’m pretty good.”
So the Holy Spirit works through the law of God to convict us, to open our eyes, to give us this wisdom that we in fact are sinners, poor, miserable sinners. God be praised. Because you know what Jesus does with sinners? He forgives them. You know what Jesus does to the poor? He preaches the gospel to them. Do you know what Jesus has done to the brokenhearted? He heals them. Do you know what He does to the captives? He sets them free. To those who are blind, He gives them sight. To those who are oppressed, He gives them liberty.
You know what Jesus does to those who are dying? He gives them life. To those who are lonely, He gives them comfort. To those who are mourning, He gives them hope and joy and peace. He proclaims the acceptable year of the Lord. Jesus Christ came to save sinners, and save us He does. Forgive us He does. Redeem us He does. So we praise God. We praise God for giving us this faith, this gift of repentance. That these words of Jesus are not cause for rebellion in our own hearts, but because the Holy Spirit has found a place in each of our hearts, these words are words of comfort and words of peace.
The Spirit of the Lord is upon him. He has anointed Jesus to preach the gospel to you, the poor, and to heal you, the brokenhearted, and to proclaim liberty to you, the captive, and it is done. By the Lord’s work and by his word you are free and forgiven and saved. God be praised in the name of Jesus. Amen. And the peace of God which passes all understanding guard your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.