Jesus' Inaugural: Jubilee at Nazareth
Third Sunday after Epiphany, Year C; Luke 4: 14-21 (see also 22-30).
This story of a visit to the synagogue in Nazareth follows those of Jesus’ baptism and temptation (with the genealogy between them), at the very beginning of Jesus’ public activity. Although we are told he has already been preaching and has started to become known, Jesus here outlines a program for his public ministry, an inaugural address or manifesto for the work to which he has been called.
Despite its appearance at the start of Jesus’ ministry, this story is rather like those of synagogue visits in Mark (6:1-6) and Matthew (13:54-58) set later in time, but with the addition of this “manifesto,” as it has been called. The passage also includes the aftermath of local rejection as the other versions do, but that part comes only after this Gospel lection stops. This year most readers will miss the second part of the story which would have followed next week, the conflict that emerges at Nazareth from Jesus’ declaration, because in 2025 the Feast of the Presentation falls next Sunday when it would otherwise be read. This could be a time to exercise the discretion always available to lengthen readings.
Through these early stories, there is a recurrent character other than Jesus: “the Holy Spirit” has descended on Jesus as a dove (3:22), then Jesus “full of the Holy Spirit” (4:1a) is “led by the Spirit” (4:1b) to the desert for the temptation, after which Jesus “filled with the power of the Spirit” (4:14) begins this preaching tour of Galilee. Now in the Nazareth synagogue he quotes Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” (61:1). The fact of the Spirit’s presence and activity in Jesus isn’t ever in doubt—”the Holy Spirit” was even invoked at the Annunciation (1: 35)—but now the orientation or purpose of the Spirit, and of Jesus’ mission, are being revealed.
Per Isaiah’s text, the Spirit and anointing—meaning Messianic calling, the “Christ” part of Jesus’ identity—go together. Priestly, prophetic, and royal offices could all be marked by anointing. Scholars have tried to parse those expectations in more granular ways, but Jewish expectation of divinely-anointed leadership was in the air, and Jesus (and Luke) are working with this tradition freely and creatively, not merely signaling a single aspect of messianic expectation. Luke ultimately wants to present Jesus as fulfilling all of these offices, and only the context—or rather the Isaiah text—suggests the prophetic aspect is uppermost here, if not exhaustive.1
The reading and Jesus’ pithy interpretation take place in the synagogue on the Sabbath, during the communal gathering.2 The account of the reading (if it is that—see below) has a dramatic quality: Jesus stands, receives, opens, [reads,] closes, hands back, sits.3 Yet Jesus does not explicitly read here; he finds “the place where it was written,” then the quotation appears in Luke’s text, and then Jesus comments. We assume Luke intends us to think Jesus read aloud, but strictly the passage seems to read itself into the scene. The effect is that the reader hears the text as though we are present, and not just as a report of something being read to someone else at a past time. “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” is for us to hear too.
The text that is read however isn’t straightforward. It begins with Isaiah 61:1 but then interpolates a part of Isaiah 58:6 (“to let the oppressed go free”), before returning to part of Isa 61:2. This textual freedom—whether by accident or Luke’s art, and even if Luke wants to depict Jesus riffing on the text—lets us know that we are not merely in a bible study here.4 The one speaking is the one whose authority and program of liberation is being asserted, and while scripture is shown to be in agreement with him, exegesis is not quite the point. The Spirit Jesus bears is itself the witness to this truth.
The passages quoted are connected with the tradition of the Jubilee, the ideal of a restoration of land and community at the end of a cycle of 50 years, laid out in Lev 25 (cf. also Deut 15), based on the more frequent seven year “sabbatical” cycle of leaving the land fallow. The Isaiah reference to the “year of favor” would have been understood (and likely originally meant) the implementation of some part of that cycle of release from debt and restoration of alienated property.5
The idea of a release from debt and oppression is conveyed in the word aphēsis which is found in both the Greek (LXX) versions of the two Isaiah texts and in Leviticus for the law of Jubilee (Lev 25), and which appears in the NRSV of this Gospel as both “release” and “let go free” in those two phrases in verse 18. Luke otherwise uses this term primarily to refer to forgiveness of/release from sin, but it does not only mean that in this instance.
“Sin” and its consequences are presented here (and elsewhere in the NT) as a form of debt or obligation under which we are placed, to God or one another. The debt/bondage idea is the basic one, and its application to other aspects of life is a metaphor, implying that sin is primarily a form of oppression or bondage, and is inherently relational. To be forgiven is not so much to avoid punishment, but to be liberated. Much modern thinking of sin and forgiveness assumes something quite different, a sort of taint perhaps, or internal flaw; this (so typical of our modern individualism) trivializes sin, and also tends to lose the power of this connection between material and spiritual things.
Jesus’ manifesto is not then a “spiritual” version of the Jubilee, but a radicalized, universal version. This begin to be made clear in his brief sermon. While the set Gospel passage finishes with the initially positive response, even to the remarkable claim that this scripture has been fulfilled (v. 21), Jesus provokes a shift in tone precisely by raising the question of the scope of liberation. Release for whom? The Nazareth community have taken some pride in their homeboy, but he then moves to suggest, simultaneously, that prophets have wider visions than those of their own backyards, and that they (presumably for that reason) are not given honor where they originate.
The examples that follow, of foreigners engaging positively with prophetic messages and actions, will have had some resonance for Luke’s early readers as an implied critique of resistance to the (followers of Jesus from (other) Jews and the movement’s expansion into the Gentile world, but this could easily be misread. Jesus is not engaging in an anti-Jewish polemic, but anticipates that just as in the past, the Israelite God’s chosen agents present expansive or even universal visions, as Elijah and Elisha did, and as the Isaiah of the later chapters we have dipped into certainly does. It is the most faithful and traditional witness to the Law of Moses, with its vision of Jubilee, to remind his people that God calls all to serve and live in freedom.
The release that Jesus announces is a liberation that pervades human existence, but is likely to provoke resistance precisely because of that. Release from debt and bondage, the means of oppression, does not suit those who hold the keys and the debts; more perniciously, many others can be persuaded that they are protected by the oppression of some. Today Christians are likely to be the ones who must work to avoid using a superficial and self-serving reading of a text like this in defense of our own identities and interests, imagining (e.g.) this is a critique of Jewish tradition and belief rather than of nativism and chauvinism. That would be in fact to take up the mantle, not of Elijah, but of the disgruntled ancient Nazareans. The pretenses of Christian nationalism(s) not least are anathema to the vision of Jesus’ mission. A Bible or a Gospel draped in a flag, or treated as one itself, is no longer good news.
See Joseph Blenkinsopp, Isaiah 56-66: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 2003, 220-21
Imagining this as a “service” does not help us much; a regular gathering on the Sabbath that would have included scripture reading and presumably prayers and other elements, but was much more a town meeting than a “liturgy.” Remember that the Temple is the place of worship, strictly speaking, at this point. Bovon’s discussion relies on an order of “service” we only know from much later, and assumes (e.g.) someone had read the Torah before this point in proceedings, etc. See Luke 1: A Commentary on the Gospel of Luke 1:1 - 9:50. Hermeneia. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2002, pp. 152-3.
See Brendan Byrne, The Hospitality of God: A Reading of Luke’s Gospel. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000, p. 46.
This would be even more so if Ben Witherington and A-J. Levine (among the commentators I am aware of) are right to say Isa 42:7 (“to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness”) is also being combined with these; however the similarity of the phrasing and the differences between the Hebrew MT and LXX do not make this claim straightforward; The Gospel of Luke. New Cambridge Bible Commentary. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2018, p. 116.
Thus Blenkinsopp’s commentary Isaiah 56-66, p. 225.