Luke 4:13-32

I mostly want to post something today, because I like the numbers in today's date. Maybe I can get good numbers on the time stamp too.

We've started a scripture study group in my dorm.
Some of us kept discussing the topic after other people had to go off to jobs and such, people seemed interested in hearing how the conversation went, so I hastily typed a sort of discussion summary from some notes to send to them.

Please don't judge my writing or coherency by this.
This is what I sent:

I typed this really fast.
I hope it's coherent:

hey guys.
Some of you left on time, but we kept talking. Here's what we talked about.


The passage is Luke 4:13-32

Jesus goes back to Nazareth and pretty much introduces himself and his ministry by reading from Isaiah 61. The people are impressed and then he says some stuff that makes them upset enough to want to throw him off of a cliff. But he escaped with typical Jesus-y mysterious ease and went to go preach somewhere else where he apparently did not make enough inflammatory remarks to make the people want to kill him.

The text from Isaiah 61 is
http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Isa/Isa061.html#top
quoted in Luke
http://www.blueletterbible.org/kjv/Luk/Luk004.html#13
Jesus chooses to quote the top part (It's possible that Isaiah 61 was the Scripture passage for that week, so I'm not sure how much of it was his choice of where to read. There are other important aspects of synagogue services that may be significant, but I don't really know enough about them)

Our questions:
What does it mean to preach the acceptable year of the Lord?
What does it mean that it's been fulfilled?
why does Jesus start up with the 'Doctor, heal thyself' stuff?
Why does everyone get so angry so fast?
How should we interpret the passage from Isaiah?
Why does Jesus present himself in the synagogue in this way?
Verse 13: he escapes. How?

I only really started taking notes after people had to leave, so I might not cover some of our initial discussions here but:

We wondered if perhaps Jesus was using the whole situation to try to clarify that his message.

"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."

was in complete effect for everyone. Not to you and you and you. the TIME for this has begun. For everyone. And perhaps the people of Nazareth thought of it as theirs. That he had come back to his hometown to bring deliverance and healing and sight to them. And Jesus goes and cites times in their own religious history when God has sent healing and provision not to His people the Jews, but to foreigners. The widow that Elijah was sent to was not a Jew, though many Jews starved in the same famine. The Syrian that Elisha was sent to heal was not Jewish. This may have been especially a big deal back then because the people of the time didn't have this concept of the afterlife in which all things would be made right. If God was going to bring justice to someone, they thought it would be brought in the present lifetime.

I don't think Jesus meant to say that his message was NOT for them, but often, messages like this sound noble and good until you see what they actually mean in real life. Example) before the destruction of the 1st temple, Israel at this time (the audience of Isaiah) was an overall prosperous nation, but many of the high-class (financially and religious) had attained their status through a system which became oppressive to the poor. The poor cried out to God for justice and provision. The rich also asked God for justice. But if God was going to equal out the whole scenario that means raising up the poor.... at the expense of the rich. Going to Cairo, or even going to DownTown Portland sometimes reminds me of how ridiculously rich I am in comparison to so many people. How can I ask God for justice unless I am willing to be brought down so that others may be raised up and we can all be restored to an equal footing again?

Anyway, the Jews have an entire religious history built up of what to expect from the Messiah and what they expect from Jesus - Joseph's son. Jesus proclaiming healing to them and then citing times that healing had been specifically for non-Jews must have sounded like blasphemy. This is no way for a Messiah to talk.

So here are some questions...
What if all you knew about Christ was how he presented himself to the synagogue and specifically, what he quoted from Isaiah 61?
How do you respond to this announcement?
If you were introducing Jesus, would you have done it this way?
Does it make you think any further about who he is and what he's trying to do?
What does this mean for us if we claim to be his followers?
If you were introducing yourself to a church, what would you choose to say about yourself?

What if Jesus walked into your church and said a bunch of stuff that sounded like heresy?
We tried to think of things that we wouldn't expect Jesus to say and hit the wall of, "well, if we don't expect him to say it, we assume he wouldn't."

We couldn't really come to an exact conclusion, given that what we were discussing was unexpected things. But I think a general consensus was that it's worth pondering - in what ways do we try to make Jesus fit our expectations, and in what ways is God perhaps trying to call us into an understanding of something different? In what ways do we ignore it because it's not what we expect it to be?

Man, this was a long email.
Good job if you actually made it this far.
I definitely haven't covered everything we talked about. I guess you had to be there.. ;)
I hope I remembered the main points though.

This is one of my favorite passages, and if anyone wants to tell me what they think about it or talk about it sometime, I'd be more than happy to hear your opinion.

Let me reiterate that this is one of my favorite passages.
It's so beautiful.

-Tracy

I hope that I'll remember to come back to these ideas and flesh them out sometime. If this stuff (what Jesus was talking about) is true and real, it's one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard. I'm so glad we have God that wants beautiful things for the world and for us, even when we don't even understand what it would look like for the world to be this way.