The Great Sending, Chapter 4

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.
—Luke 4:18-19

STUDY 4: A Christ for All Peoples,
pp. 61-66

Scripture: Luke 4:18-21;23

by Reverand Dr. Dean Nadasdy

“Who are you?”

Saint Luke takes us quickly from our Lord’s confrontation with the evil one to His public appearance as a prophet in His hometown of Nazareth. Jesus had already been preaching and teaching in other synagogues in Galilee; however, it’s in Nazareth – before His childhood friends and kinfolk – that He formally reveals Who He is and why He has come.

As Saint Luke records later (Chapter 24), our Lord Jesus is the fulfillment of all that God had written in the Law of Moses, through the Prophets, and in the Psalms. So, Jesus turned to the Prophet Isaiah, the 61st chapter, to announce His mission.

Multiple points are packed into these few verses, but here we will focus on three.

1. Jesus is the Christ, the anointed Messiah, promised from of old to God’s people, Israel. He was anointed by His Father with the Holy Spirit in His baptism. He carries out His mission by and in the authority and power of the Holy Spirit.
2. His mission centers around the proclamation of the Good News from His Father. Saint Luke describes Christ’s ministry in a few ways. First, He ministers, literally, to good news people (εύαγγελίσασθαι), or, as my good friend and colleague Dr. Eugene Bunkowske often said, His mission is “to gossip the Gospel.” Obviously, a great deal of gossiping had already taken place prior to Jesus’ arrival in His hometown. Luke tells us that “a report about him went out through all the surrounding country” (4:14). The other verb, kurusso (κηρυξαι), often translated as proclaim, herald, or preach, expresses more formal and official communication – a king’s official messenger proclaiming a royal declaration to the king’s subjects. It should give us great personal comfort to note who Isaiah identifies as the King’s subjects: the poor, enslaved, blind, and oppressed. In short, His subjects are you and me. Whether formal or informal, the gracious words proclaimed by our Lord do exactly what His Father intends them to do – eternally bless the poor in spirit; set free those enslaved in sin; heal, both physically and spiritually, those who are blind; relieve those oppressed by the brokenness of this fallen creation; and rightly (justly) realign His creation to its divine and perfect order (a cosmic Shalom), just as the Year of Jubilee intended every fifty years for the nation of Israel.
3. Finally, Jesus tells us that He was specifically sent by His Father to accomplish these great deeds. The verb Isaiah uses to express this is apostello (άποστειλαι), from which we get the word “apostle” or “sent one.” And like the verb kurusso above, apostello denotes an official sending, which includes the requisite authority needed to complete the specific assignment or mission. In this case, our Lord Jesus was sent by His Father not to condemn the world, but to save it (John 3:17).

Unfortunately, Jesus’s understanding of His mission and its announcement ran counter to his friends’ and family’s expectations in Nazareth. They expected, perhaps even demanded, that He be their Messiah exclusively. In their minds, He owed them. Their sense of entitlement blinded them from seeing our Lord’s divine calling: being sent by His Father to be Savior of the world. When Jesus reminded his friends and family members that the great prophets of old had been sent to bring God’s favor not only to His people but also to the nations (including a widow from the Sidonian City of Zarephath and the lead general of the enemy army of Syria) they exploded with rage. The people of Nazareth labored vigorously to maintain their ceremonial purity – even down to the types of lamps and kitchen vessels they kept in their homes. They believed they deserved God’s favor by their piety and their purity.

Yet the unclean Gentiles did not deserve God’s blessing; they deserved only His wrath and judgement, as Isaiah stated in his prophecy, “the day of vengeance of our God” (61:2). (Interestingly, our Lord did not include those words of condemnation in His reading of the text.) Somehow and somewhere along the way God’s people had lost all sense of their Divine partnership – the covenant cut between them and their living God at Sinai (Exodus 19) – to be holy priests for the nations. Their penchant for personal purity blinded them to God’s compassion for the world. Their myopic understanding of God’s Kingdom, and, therefore, Christ’s Mission, moved them to reject Jesus as their Messiah, and to their great loss. “And He did not do many mighty works there, because of their unbelief” (Matthew 13:58).

There is so much to learn from this text! As prophets like Isaiah had long promised, our Lord Jesus was sent by His Father to redeem and restore His people as His own. His people include you and me. His people include vastly more than you and me. His Divine mission encompasses the whole world. His own people, because of their self-righteous pursuit of personal and corporate purity from the world, found it impossible to embrace Him as God’s chosen Messiah for the world, and as a result, precluded themselves from entering His Kingdom and its coming. Jesus’ announcement of His mission in Nazareth and His people’s reaction to it offer us a wonderful promise of grace and a dire warning against religious entitlement. As the poor, broken-hearted slaves to sin that we are, we need to hear His gracious words, which, when applied personally, sound like this: “My Father anointed and sent me to heal, forgive, release, and restore you.” We also need to hear those words in the context of His missionary heart and mind: “And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So, there will be one flock, one shepherd” (John 10:16).

His public announcement invites all who have “ears to hear” (Matthew 11:15) to be reconciled to His Father by grace through faith alone and simultaneously to join Him in the mission upon which His Father sent Him – to unite all things (and all people) in heaven and on earth in perfect shalom under our Messianic King.

Questions to ponder with
yourself and others

• The people of Nazareth thought they were entitled to receive Jesus’ gracious Words and deeds because they were His friends and relatives. What things cause us to feel entitled to receive God’s grace and mercy? How do we counteract this sense of entitlement?
• Nazareth was a thoroughly Jewish community. As such, the people labored non-stop to keep themselves pure from the spiritual uncleanness of the Gentile world surrounding them. Their penchant for personal purity, however, blinded them to God’s compassion for the world and their participation in His mission. We in the LCMS also have a penchant for purity; in this case, purity of doctrine. As essential as doctrinal purity is, when might our emphasis on it get in the way of our participation in God’s mission to the world?
• Our Lord once responded to those offended by His eating with sinners: “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.’ For I came not to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:13). Sacrifices were those things offered to God in praise, petition, and thanksgiving; mercy shows itself in the saving gifts of God we offer to the world in His Name. How do sacrifice and mercy apply to us today? Why does our Lord prefer mercy over sacrifice?

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