[The] Spirit of [the] Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach glad tidings to [the] poor; he has sent me to preach to captives deliverance, and to [the] blind sight, to send forth [the] crushed delivered,
In the synagogue of His home town, Jesus reads aloud words Isaiah wrote centuries earlier, and applies them to Himself. Three questions follow: who is speaking, why the poor come first, and why He stopped reading where He did.
One who is God speaks these words. Yet the anointing He describes belongs to Him as man.
It is the man Christ Jesus. The Spirit of the Lord was not upon Him as God, but as man, and so anointed Him to preach the gospel to the poor.
The timing mattered. He had already received that anointing in public before He came home.
In Judea the Spirit of God had come upon Him in public, anointing Him for the marvelous service of grace. Now that He had returned, it was the perfect time to read this Scripture. He was first to preach the gospel to the poor, and "the common people heard Him gladly." He clearly came for the help of those in need, not to seek the backing of the rich.
Of all the things He could have named, He names preaching first. One writer explains what that preaching is, and how it works.
The great business of Christ was to preach, that is to present God. The Holy Spirit gives the right word at the right time, and in the right way. "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." The Lord does not reason; He says, Here it is. The way of God is to present what we want. You want salvation, there it is; you want mercy, and there it is. God alone can come like this, by grace, into the place of a sinner.
The order here is not accidental. Being poor means being in the place of need, and that is where a person can receive what God gives.
The preaching of glad tidings to the poor comes first, and gives character to all the rest. When man is in the place of need he can receive the gospel. When he knows he is a sinner, held captive by sin he cannot give up even when he wants to, the gospel brings him release. The blind receive their sight. Those bruised in chains receive liberty.
The captivity in view runs deeper than any political one. His own hearers showed it when they denied being in bondage at all.
The Lord Jesus preached a Gospel of "great salvation," a Gospel that delivered men from the power of sin, the bondage of Satan, and the fear of death... Their reply, "We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone," showed how blind they were to their condition. Because of their sins, the Assyrians and Nebuchadnezzar had led the nation away captive. Even at that time, though they lived in the land God had given them, they were under the yoke of Rome. But they were under a more grievous bondage.
"Bruised" describes those crushed under weight — and the writer illustrates it with the man of the tombs, beyond all help until Jesus came.
The Son of God in Manhood was a great Deliverer, setting at liberty those who were crushed under the yoke of the law, the dominion of sin and the bondage of Satan... A man may be respectable and religious, yet under Satan's power... If he is to be set at liberty, he must come under the power of the Lord Jesus.
He read on into the next line, then stopped in the middle of it and left the rest unread.
The prophecy declared that His mission was twofold: "to proclaim the acceptable year of Jehovah and the day of vengeance of our God." In the prophecy the announcement of the "acceptable year" and of the gloomy "day" forms a single service of Christ. But the Lord, by His own words, showed that the second half of the clause is still waiting to be fulfilled. In His coming to this world, a wide stretch of time separates the "acceptable year" from the "day of vengeance."
He was speaking to a crowd of Jews. But the blessing He announced was never meant to stop with them.
It is just as certain that the great blessings of His mission were to run in no narrow channel. He spoke to a crowd of Jews, yet He showed them how the grace that was in Him would work: it would flow out and on to sinners of the Gentiles... His mission was to the world; He came for the blessing of men, to seek and save the lost, to preach the gospel to the poor.
- Anointed — The Spirit rests on Him as man, and that anointing is the credential for everything He then does.
- Sent — His first work is not a miracle but a message. He presents God, and puts before each person what they need.
- To the poor — Need is the qualification. The gospel comes first to those with nothing, and that sets the tone for the whole list.
- For the captive — The chains are sin, Satan and the fear of death. The freedom He gives reaches further than His hearers imagined.
- The open year — He closed the book before the day of vengeance. That unread half is why the year of grace is still running today.
to preach [the] acceptable year of [the] Lord.
Commentary for this verse has not been generated yet.
And having rolled up the book, when he had delivered it up to the attendant, he sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed upon him.
The reading is over, the scroll is back in the attendant's hands, and the whole room is silent and staring. Luke holds the scene still. Every eye is on the Man who has just read Isaiah's words about the Anointed One and then sat down as though they described Himself.
The "attendant" held a recognised office in the synagogue. He is named just once in that role:
The chazzan, or hyperetes, is translated "servant, minister, officer" in the Authorized Version. He is mentioned only once in connection with the synagogue: as the "attendant" to whom the Lord gave the book when He had finished reading. Luke 4:20.
Something in the way He read had already tied Him to the passage in their minds:
How very strongly Luke gives us the whole scene before our eyes! There was something in our Lord's manner that struck their minds as out of the ordinary. It tied Him, in their attention and questioning, to the passage He was reading. The power of the Spirit was on Him.
He had not even read the portion set for that day:
He had read, it seems, not the appointed portion according to the Jewish reading schedule, but a passage He selected Himself. That may have fixed attention on Him all the more. And now, having gained it, He opened His mouth and announced the fulfilment of the prophetic word in His own person... Never before, we may be sure, had anyone there stood up to read and then declared that the prophetic word was written of Himself. It was language the walls of that synagogue had never heard before.
What held them was the size of the claim made by an ordinary local man.
His hearers were astonished at the boldness of His assertion and at the claim He made to this dignity. And yet as they listened they could only bear witness to the gracious words that came out of His mouth... The acceptable year of the Lord had come, and with it the Anointed One — its blessed Inaugurator and Herald! His words were words of grace, and fell sweetly on ears wholly unprepared for such a sound.
Until that day, that building had heard something else:
Before this it was the law which had been ministered in the synagogues; now they were listening to words of grace.
Isaiah's sentence runs on. His reading did not.
He stopped reading in the middle of a sentence and put a full stop where in our Old Testament we have only a comma, and He closed the book. Why did He do that? The rest of the sentence is this: "and the day of vengeance of our God." There and then He was to open the acceptable year of the Lord — the year of grace, the year of blessing. And He was to postpone the day of vengeance until that year had run its course. That year has lasted until now.
Writers read the closed scroll as a deliberate gesture rather than a stopping point:
And when He read this scripture He closed the book, just before it goes on to speak of the day of vengeance of our God, pushing back, as it were, that day, lengthening out the acceptable year of the Lord to this present time... The day will come when His hand will open the book again, but meanwhile grace flows on its blessed worldwide course, and men are offered salvation.
Three things came together in front of that congregation, and one writer sees the same combination available now:
The blessed Lord standing before the audience was holding the written word in His hand, and He Himself was filled with the Spirit of God. Depend on it, there is no power in this world that can withstand such a combination as that.
The One they stared at has not changed:
What a privilege to know the Lord Jesus, who is still the same! What a privilege to gather around Him at times and receive fresh impressions of His blessed Person. At such times it is not difficult for us to have the eyes of our hearts fastened on Him.
- Handed back. The scroll went back to the chazzan, the synagogue attendant — a role named just once in connection with the synagogue.
- Held. Something in His manner tied Him to the passage before He said a word. The Spirit's power was on Him, and the reading was His own choice.
- Halted. He stopped mid-sentence and closed the book. He put a full stop where Isaiah has a comma, leaving the day of vengeance unread.
- Held open. The closed book stretches the acceptable year out to today. Grace still runs its course, and salvation is still offered.
- Held on. The same Lord, the same word, the same Spirit are ours. The response is still to fasten the eyes of the heart on Him.
And he began to say to them, To-day this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.
The reading has ended. Jesus hands the scroll back, and every eye in the Nazareth synagogue turns to the man who grew up among them. His first words are not an explanation of Isaiah. They are a claim about Himself: what the prophet promised has come true today, in front of the people listening.
He does not say the prophet's words are about to come true. He says they have come true — in a room, on a Sabbath, in a man the listeners can see. And that man is God acting among men:
They handed Him the book of the prophet Isaiah. What a moment! He who is God had become man, and stoops to act as such among men… It is the man Christ Jesus. The Spirit of the Lord was not upon Him as God, but as man, and so anointed Him to preach the gospel to the poor… There and then a real man was the vessel of the grace of God on earth.
Isaiah's sentence did not end where Jesus ended it. He read to "the year of the Lord's favor" and closed the book, leaving "and the day of vengeance of our God" unread. That break is deliberate, and it defines what "fulfilled" covers:
He stopped reading in the middle of a sentence. Where our Old Testament has only a comma, He put a full stop, and He closed the book. Why did He do that? The rest of the sentence is this: "And the day of vengeance of our God." There and then He was to open the acceptable year of the Lord — the year of grace, the year of blessing. The day of vengeance He would postpone until that year had run its course. That year has extended until now.
(Where the ESV says "the year of the Lord's favor," older translations say "the acceptable year of the Lord.")
The prophecy names the people before it names the gifts — the poor, the captive, the blind, the bruised. That order decides who can receive what Jesus announced:
The preaching of good news to the poor comes first, and gives character to all the rest. When a person is in the place of need he can receive the gospel. When he is consciously a sinner, captive to the sin which he cannot renounce even when he wants to, the gospel brings him release. The blind receive their sight. Those bruised in chains receive liberty. It is in fact "the acceptable year of the Lord"; the jubilee of God; fuller and more blessed than the law ever proclaimed in Israel.
The claim was personal, so no one could stay neutral. The crowd bore witness to what they heard and still refused the One who said it. They knew the family, so they did not know the voice:
What a word this was! Not a general explanation of the meaning. It demanded instant faith, or it produced the anger of unbelief. They all bore Him witness, and they saw the power of grace shining out in Him. Yet they were unchanged, and they did not know the voice — He was the son of Joseph, one of them.
The words "this Scripture" put His own authority behind the scroll in His hands. That includes the later chapters of Isaiah, which some claim Isaiah never wrote:
He read a portion of Isaiah 61 — one of the so-called false chapters. When He finished He said, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Was Christ reading, applying to the consciences of His hearers, and fulfilling something that falsely claimed to be written by Isaiah?… The full verbal inspiration of the Scriptures is the ground of all authority. Hold fast, then, the written word of God.
The day of vengeance is still unread. So the announcement made at Nazareth still stands, and it puts a question to the reader:
He declared that this prophecy was fulfilled in their hearing that day. He stopped short in the middle of our verse 2… When He had read that far, He shut the book and sat down, with words of grace to all. Did He speak the truth? A great deal turns on this for your souls. Was He really the One the Spirit of the Lord foretold, the One God the Father had sealed? If so, your salvation turns on Him. Do not say that words of grace are hard. What? Hard to be saved by God, according to the fulness of His mercy in Christ! The same Lord that saves now will be the Judge by and by.
- Today. "Today" is the word that changes everything. Prophecy stops being a promise and becomes a Person standing in the room.
- The comma. Jesus closed the book mid-sentence. He opened the year of God's favor that day and postponed the day of vengeance. That half of the verse is still unread.
- The poor first. The jubilee He opened reaches those who know their need — poor, captive, blind, bruised. It is fuller than anything the law ever proclaimed in Israel.
- No neutral seat. A claim like this demands instant faith or produces the anger of unbelief. Nazareth bore Him witness and still rejected the speaker as Joseph's son.
- Still open. The same year of grace has run from that Sabbath until now — the One who saves today is the One who will judge later.