Today This Is Fulfilled

The scroll is rolled up. The attendant takes it back. Jesus sits down. And every eye in the room is fixed on him. Nobody moves. Nobody breathes. What will he say?

It is the Sabbath in Nazareth. The little hill village where Jesus grew up, where people remember him as the carpenter, Joseph's son. But word has spread across Galilee: he has been teaching in synagogues and people are amazed. Now he is home. As he always did, Luke says, he goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath day. The same plain room. The same benches. The same neighbours, the same old men who watched him grow up. And he stands up to read.

The attendant hands him a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. Jesus unrolls it, and finds the place. Isaiah wrote these words for God's people at a time of ruin and exile, when they felt poor, broken and captive. Jesus reads them aloud. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then he rolls up the scroll, gives it back to the attendant, and sits down. In those synagogues, the teacher sat to teach. So everyone waits. Every eye in the synagogue is fastened on him. And Jesus says: “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Not one day. Not some time in the future. Today. The one Isaiah spoke about, the one anointed with God's Spirit to bring good news to the poor and freedom to the captives, is sitting in front of them. He is the boy they watched grow up.

At first the people speak well of him, and wonder at his gracious words. Isn't this Joseph's son? they ask. But as Jesus goes on, the mood changes, and before the day is over they turn against him. Their own hometown boy, claiming to be the promised one, was too much for them. And yet the promise stands. Thirty years before, angels had told shepherds of good news of great joy. Now the baby has grown, and he explains what that good news is: for the poor, the broken-hearted, the captive, the blind and the crushed.

We have an inscription from a synagogue in Jerusalem from around Jesus' time. It was found in 1913 and is known as the Theodotus inscription. It says the synagogue was built for the reading of the Law and the teaching of the commandments. That is exactly what Jesus was doing in Nazareth: reading Scripture aloud, and then teaching.

Today This Is Fulfilled. You'll find it in Luke chapter four, verses sixteen to twenty-one. At Christmas we often celebrate a baby. Here, the grown-up Jesus tells us what that baby came to do. So here is a question to carry with you. Who around you is poor, broken-hearted or stuck, and how could you bring them some of Jesus' good news today?