18.06 | The Messiah We Wanted
Luke 4:16-44
‘And he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up. And as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read.’
Luke 4:16
This wasn’t the Messiah we wanted.
Luke takes us to the earliest days of Jesus’ Messianic ministry in today’s passage. The scene is Nazareth, the town in which He’d grown up. These are the faces that He has known from childhood. He’s lived alongside them. He knows which market stalls they run, in what trade they make their living. He knows who is the parent of who, and who drank too much at that wedding party last month.
And He opens with the Scriptures.
This is significant. It is significant because Jesus is rooting His life and message in the backstory. He is pulling together the threads of the Story of God through history, as told by historian, priest and prophet, and is locating the fulfilment of all of these things in Himself. And the passage He picks is beautiful.
Good news to the poor.
Liberty to the captives.
Recovery of sight for the blind.
Liberty for the oppressed.
The year of the Lord’s favour.
It all begins well, and yet something switches, with extraordinary speed. We move from all spoke well of Him to all in the synagogue were filled with wrath.
Why?
Because, this wasn’t the Messiah they wanted.
It wasn’t that they didn’t like the sound of the Scripture. Who doesn’t want the blind to see, the captives to be liberated, and the poor to hear good news?
Rather, they had two different problems.
The first was that they already thought they knew Jesus. This was Jesus, the carpenter. This was Jesus, who roamed the hills with their sons when they were younger. This was Joseph’s boy. The Messiah that they wanted was the Messiah of their minds. The Messiah of their imaginations. They loved the concept of a Messiah, but the embodied Messiah who walked into their synagogue that day and announced the arrival of God’s inbreaking age of glory was just, somehow, too specific. Much like us, they wanted a concept to celebrate, not a Lord to follow.
The second problem came when Jesus started defining those to be reached by this ministry. And He points directly at some of the awkward outsiders of the Old Testament.
The non-Jewish widow who housed the prophet Elijah.
The non-Jewish military leader who was healed by the prophet Elisha.
This wasn’t the Messiah we wanted.
The focus of this Messiah is so different. He does not come with an armchair spirituality for the synagogue, but with a vision of healing and resurrection that explodes beyond the walls of the comfortable and religious and into the lives of those who are the furthest distance away. The vision of this Messiah never squeamish in the face of struggle or sin. Jesus is presenting them with a spirituality that does not merely affirm their existing thoughts and existing prejudices: He is inviting them to inhabit the far more radical, messy, and extravagant love of the Father.
Reading Luke’s Gospel should come with a health warning. You’re not here to meet the Messiah of tidy synagogues and theological cliché. You’re not here to cherry pick from His teaching the parts you already agree with, looking for banal affirmation upon your existing ways and thoughts.
Rather you’re here to encounter afresh the wild-eyed visionary of Nazareth, who sets His sights not on the comfort of the religious but the consecration of a dying and hurting world back into the healing and life of God Himself.
Dangerous? For sure. Uncomfortable? Absolutely. But alive? You bet. Because His invitation is also for your healing. It comes through the laying down of every false concept of Him and every reduction of the heart of the Father. Because this Way, into the full and dynamic and outbreaking reign of Jesus, where we come and lay down every thought and thing before Him, is the precise avenue to our healing and resurrection too.
Reflect:
Where might today’s reading increase my vision of who Jesus is, and what He comes to do?
Pray:
Lord Jesus,
I find myself there in that synagogue,
Mesmerised by you,
And uncomfortable.
I find myself
Wondering if your unsettling words
Will be to my harm,
Rather than to my healing.
But Lord,
I have found something in you that I want to follow
And so,
I let go;
I let you in.
Come and smash through
The reductionism of religious boundaries,
And the smallness of limited grace;
Come and invite me afresh to a life
Of generosity, compassion, and power—
That the rigid walls of my synagogue
Be broken down,
And I may join you in your endlessly expansive vision of being.
Unto the healing and resurrection
Of this world.
In the Name Jesus,
The Messiah I receive,
Amen
Old Testament:
For those also reading the Old Testament this year, your additional readings are here:
Isaiah 1-2 | Proverbs 16:25-33