A Sermon for the Fourth Sunday of Epiphany, January 27,
2019
St. Dunstan’s Anglican Church, Largo, FL
The Very Rev. J. Michael Strachan
Luke 4:14-21
Let’s start with an interesting
question: Did Jesus preach the Gospel? The Gospel, as we normally define it, is
something like what Paul says in the opening verses of 1 Corinthians 15. Paul
says, “Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which
you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold
fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain. For I delivered
to you as of first importance what I also received: that the Messiah died for
our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was
raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared
to Cephas, then to the twelve” (1 Cor 15:1–5). The Messiah, invoking the full
Jewish story of God’s promise to Abraham, died for the sins of the world, was
raised from the dead on the third day, and appeared to the Apostles who now
announce to the world what God has done through the Messiah.
If this is the Gospel (and it is),
then the answer to the question “Did Jesus preach the Gospel?” is “No, he
didn’t,” and that’s a pretty remarkable fact. Jesus doesn’t, so far as we know,
and except for a few occasions where he was speaking to his disciples
privately, ever tell someone, “Here’s what’s going to happen. Here’s what you
need to know. You’re a sinner, and I’m going to go to Jerusalem, die for your
sins, and be raised on the third day, and you need to believe in me if you want
to be saved.” That doesn’t happen.
So, if Jesus didn’t preach the
Gospel, what did he preach, and why did it make everyone in Nazareth so mad?
The lectionary cut the story short this morning, but you’ll remember that the crowd doesn’t take too kindly to
Jesus’ preaching, and they try to throw him over a cliff. It’s a slight
consolation, I suppose, that I’ve never finished preaching a sermon and had
someone try to throw me off a cliff. I was tempted to say that that must mean
that I’ve never preached a sermon that bad, but maybe it means I’ve never
preached a sermon that good. Maybe that’s the mark of an exceptional sermon,
people trying to throw you over a cliff. Let’s hope not.
So, if Jesus doesn’t preach the
Gospel, what does he preach? Luke gives us an example this morning. This account of Jesus reading Isaiah in the
synagogue at Nazareth isn’t just one example of Jesus’s preaching, but rather
it is prototypical for everything that Jesus will do in the remainder of Luke’s
Gospel. Jesus goes to the synagogue at Nazareth on the Sabbath, unrolls the
scroll of Isaiah the prophet, and whether that was the assigned reading for the
day or whether Jesus was looking for a particular reading in the scroll, we
can’t be sure, although it seems like the latter was true. Jesus comes to the
spot he was looking for, and he reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good
news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at
liberty those who are oppressed, to
proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Luke 4:18–19), and then he stops.
Two things are notable here. First,
Jesus, as he reads Isaiah 61:1-2, leaves out the line about announcing “the
opening of the prison to those who are bound” perhaps because John is still in
prison. Sorry cousin, I didn’t come to do
that. Second, Jesus stops right before the line that would have been most
exciting to his audience. Remember that the people of God are waiting for the
Lord and his Messiah to show up in judgment, for the Messiah to do like Judas
Maccabeus before him and purge the nations from the land of Judah and bring
judgment upon the heathen. And so it’s noticeable when Jesus stops the reading
right before Isaiah says, “and the day of vengeance of our God.” Right when he
gets to the line about venge
