First Pass at This Weekend's Bible Lesson: Luke 4:14-21

[Most weeks, I present as many updates on my reflections and study of the Biblical texts on which our weekend worship celebrations will be built as I can. The purpose is to help the people of the congregation I serve as pastor, Friendship Lutheran Church of Amelia, Ohio, get ready for worship. Hopefully, it's helpful to others as well, since our Bible lesson is usually one from the weekly lectionary, variations of which are used in most of the churches of the world.]

The Bible Lesson: Luke 4:14-21
14Then Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee, and a report about him spread through all the surrounding country. 15He began to teach in their synagogues and was praised by everyone. 16When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: 18“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, 19to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 20And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”

General Comments
1. We continue, on this Third Weekend after Epiphany, to look at signs given that Jesus, Whose birth we celebrate from December 25 to January 5 each year, is more than a human being of lowly birth, but also the promised Messiah King (the Christ) and God in human flesh. This, if course, is the theme of the Epiphany season. (See here, here, here, and here.)

2. We're in what's known as Cycle C of the three-year plan of Bible lessons called the lectionary, explained here. Throughout this year, most of the Gospel lessons will be drawn from Luke. (Cycle A revolves around Matthew and Cycle B, around Mark. John doesn't get his own year. But because Mark is so short, a lot of John's Gospel shows up in the Mark year. John's Gospel also makes appearances elsewhere in the lectionary cycle, as we saw last weekend and on Christmas Eve.) This weekend's lesson is from Luke, of course.

3. When we think of Biblical signs, we're apt to imagine miraculous events. In fact, over the past two weekends, we've remembered signs that were miraculous: the declaration of Jesus' deity by a voice from heaven at His Baptism two weeks ago and Jesus' turning water into wine during a wedding at Cana last week. But what's the sign here?

One sign for certain is Jesus' overt declaration of Himself as the prophecy from Isaiah of a Messiah, an anointed king from God who would set things right.

Another, also evident in that section of Isaiah's book that deals with the "suffering servant," is that of a king who would die for his people, though rejected by them.

In Nazareth, very literally and specifically, we see what John talks about in the prologue to his Gospel:

He was in the world, and the world came into being through him; yet the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him. (John 1:10-11)

Of course, John is speaking globally: the whole world, Jew and Gentile, spurned, rejected, and killed Jesus. But you might say that the spurning of Jesus by the people of Nazareth is an early warning sign of what the whole known world soon would do. As we proceed through the Epiphany season, for all its faith-stirring signals that Jesus is God and Savior, we also pick up increasingly the scents of Good Friday and Jesus' death.

But all isn't hopeless for us. As John goes on to write in that prologue:

But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God. (John 1:12-13)

4. One of the key principles for understanding any given passage of Scripture, as I've written many times before, is to pay heed to the context in which the passage appears. Context lends accessibility to content.

Notice where the incident in this weekend's Bible lesson falls. Immediately preceding it, Jesus was baptized (and affirmed by God's voice), only to be driven into the wilderness where He is tempted by the devil. Immediately following, Jesus travels to Capernaum where He will cast demons out of a man---only after the demons proclaim Jesus "the Holy One of God," something the people of Nazareth would have been loathe to call Jesus. Then, we're told that people marveled at His power and were abuzz about Him.

What does this context tell us about our lesson for this weekend? Several things, I think:

• It establishes that when Jesus moves to call people away from sin and to repentance and new life with God through faith in Him, He will encounter opposition, from the devil and from the world.
• It establishes that opposition to Jesus, though veiled in religious piety, is really about repudiating God's authority, living not in the freedom that Christ gives us to become our true, God-designed selves, but in the license of self-worship. Later in this Gospel, Jesus will encounter a man filled with demons and He will send them into a nearby herd of pigs. The pigs will run pell mell over a cliff. The people of the region ask Jesus to go away. They will rather live in the slop of evil and the devil than be cleansed of their sins. They stand in contrast to the boy in Jesus' story, the prodigal son, also told in this Gospel, who, lying in the slop with the pigs, sickened by his sin, turns away from evil, and turns in repentance to his father. (Remember that Jesus and His fellow Jews considered the pig to be a filthy animal and wouldn't eat any of its meat.)
• It establishes that Jesus doesn't force faith onto any of us. We must look at the signs, including Jesus' death and resurrection, and decide for ourselves whether to let Christ be our Lord. This too is a recurring theme of Luke's Gospel.

More tomorrow, I hope.