This coming Sunday is the 3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time and Jesus is in the synagogue in his hometown of Nazareth. In the previous post Jesus proclaimed a reading from the Prophet Isaiah. In this post Jesus’ first words are recorded.  How appropriate that the first record of public ministry is the very living Word made flesh sharing the Word of God. Luke records these first spoken words of Jesus’ ministry:

¹⁸ “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, ¹⁹ and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”

What is recorded is not, per se, directly from one continuous citation of Isaiah. Luke 4:18–19 brings together in modified form verses from the Septuagint (LXX) version of Isa 61:1 and 58:6. Once more, the reader is given indications that Luke has carefully chosen and arranged elements of this account in order to tell the story in a particular way and express certain ideas to the reader. The Lucan modifications are shown in italics:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor [Luke omits: to bind up the brokenhearted.] He has sent me to proclaim liberty (release) to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free [Isa 58:6], and to proclaim the year acceptable to the Lord.”

Significantly, Jesus does not go on to read the next phrase in Isa 61:2: “and the day of vengeance of our God.”

The text from Isaiah (61:1–2) is a promise of the restoration of Israel. The original context is the anointing of a prophet, but the figure of the promised Messiah, the kingly Anointed One, is also implied in Jesus’ usage of the text. He is the spirit-bearer foretold by Isaiah (Isa 11:2), the Prophet and Messiah who will usher in a new age of freedom and divine favor. The reference to an anointing by the Spirit is not a separate anointing from that given at Jesus’ baptism. It points to the baptismal anointing that was more than a single event; it is a state of being, a way of life. The first part of the Isaian quotation explains the significance of the Spirit and serves as a confirmation of Jesus’ authority when later we read of activities that illustrate Jesus’ fulfillment of the four phrases in this text (bring, proclaim, set free/release, and proclaim).

The unique feature of the Lucan account is the OT quotation itself (from Isa 61:1), which does not occur in the other Gospel accounts. Even though the idea of “fulfillment” is introduced by Jesus himself here (v. 21), Luke does not really present the OT passage as a prediction whose fulfillment offers proof or even witness of who Jesus is. Given the beginning of Jesus’ ministry is preceded by the baptism and the temptation narratives, the Isaian reference defines a particular role for Jesus and His ministry. The significance is not related to prophetic utterances as much as it demonstrates Jesus’ taking to himself the role of the servant described in Isaiah. This becomes an important aspect of what Luke understands to be the role of the church (developed in Acts of the Apostles)

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Image credit: Eleventh century fresco of the Exorcism at the Synagogue in Capernaum | Wiki Commons | PS-US