Jesus starts his public life in his hometown synagogue by quoting Isaiah 61. For 500-ish years, Isaiah’s listeners and readers would have been looking forward to this moment. Jesus claimed it was here, now. Quite a claim! We’ll look at Isaiah and Luke this week in our readings.
John (”the immerser”) is introduced by Luke as the one spoken about in Isaiah 40 (Note John doesn’t make that claim himself). John is calling people back to right living (be generous, don’t overcharge, don’t extort), and points to the Spirit coming. How is John’s challenge to people the same or different from what Jesus said in Luke 4? (to dig deeper, last week’s Bible Project podcast talks a lot about John and Jesus’ baptism.)
Once you hear Luke apply this to John its obvious. Would it have been so obvious to you before?
Luke makes sure we know that Jesus was filled with the Spirit (after being baptized by John and then twice in Luke 4, before the synagogue scene). Imagine yourself in the synagogue that morning, at the moment he stopped reading the scroll. Would you have anticipated his next line? But what does Luke say made the people angry?
The dead sea scrolls version of the Isaiah scroll is about 24 feet long. This was a big scroll, filled with columns of consonants and no chapter markings. Jesus would have been familiar with Isaiah and, like many Jewish boys, may have had it memorized. It would have been a dramatic ritual to open the scroll and find the reading. Do you wish you had that sort of relationship with God’s word?
Jesus and John were cousins and the same age — they probably grew up together. John knew that Jesus was something special. He’s in prison for speaking truth to power, and maybe only hears rumours and reports about Jesus. Even he is wondering if Jesus is the King. Both Jesus and John knew Isaiah well. Does Jesus answer sound familiar? What do you think of Jesus answer to John?