A Year in Luke/ActsNäide

Imagine the scene; it begins as if it were just a normal Sabbath in synagogue. Then, a local lad, Jesus, gets up to do the reading. He is given the scroll of Isaiah and chooses what is now known as Isaiah 61, a messianic passage about the Lord’s Anointed (masah in Hebrew, where Messiah comes from). He sits down and says, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” All eyes are on him. There is something about the way he read this passage that no one had ever seen before. It was as if he really saw a world where there would be freedom for the oppressed, brokenhearted, captives, and prisoners. But then reality begins to set in, “Hold on a minute, isn’t this the carpenter’s son who himself has been a carpenter for the last few years? Who does he think he is!?”

And so Jesus is rejected and narrowly escapes being stoned. What is going on here is significant, though. Jesus chose this synagogue in his hometown to announce his ministry. Again, the theme of the outsiders being the ones who will accept the message is front and center. In his response to the Nazarites, Jesus uses examples from Israel’s scriptures of times when it was the outsiders who received God’s blessings because Israel was not ready or willing. The same is happening now.