Wednesday
Wednesday
The Nazareth Manifesto
The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.
Luke 4:18
Matthew and Mark place Jesus’s visit to the Nazareth synagogue later in his ministry. But Luke deliberately puts it at the very beginning of his ministry, because he sees it as a prophetic preview both of Jesus’s message and of his rejection by his own people.
Jesus read the first two verses of Isaiah 61 and immediately claimed that Isaiah was referring to him. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). He was the Messiah, the anointed one, who had been commissioned to bring deliverance to four categories of people—the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed.
The crucial question is whether the condition of these groups is spiritual or sociopolitical. Different answers are given. Some spiritualize the gospel, as if it offers only salvation from sin. Others politicize the gospel, as if it offers only liberation from oppression. But neither is satisfactory, for neither on its own does justice to the text. The spiritualizers forget that Jesus did fraternize with the poor, while the politicizers forget that the Greek word for freedom (v. 18) can also mean “forgiveness.”
The only way to resolve this dilemma is to say that both are correct, since Jesus taught both. The poor in the Old Testament are both the humble poor who cry to God for mercy and the oppressed poor who need to be liberated. Further, “the gospel comes as good news to both. The spiritually poor, who … humble themselves before God, receive by faith the free gift of salvation…. The materially poor and powerless find in addition a new dignity as God’s children, and the love of brothers and sisters, who will struggle with them for their liberation from everything which demeans and oppresses them.”1
What is true about the poor (both materially and spiritually) is also true of the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed. The gospel is good news for them in both senses too.
For further reading: Luke 4:14–21