The Gospel according to Isaiah

Preached at St. Luke’s Anglican - Georgetown, PA for the 7th Sunday of Epiphany

Isaiah 61:1-4

Psalm 96

Romans 10:9-17

John 20:19-31

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

  because the Lord has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor;

  he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

  and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor…

I hope this passage from Isaiah is familiar to you. It is the mission statement of Jesus of Nazareth. Not long after Jesus ceremonially bathed in the Jordan River – his cousin John looking on – Jesus went to Nazareth for a sabbath at home with mom (at least as it was depicted in The Chosen).

On Saturday morning, Jesus was invited not only to read from the Scriptures but to offer an interpretation. He takes the scroll of Isaiah and reads these words: “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me….”

When Jesus was baptized, the Spirit of God descended like a dove. And God the Father spoke from heaven, affirming Jesus’ divine sonship.

When Jesus got up to read these words from Isaiah – “The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me…” then said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” he referenced his Holy Spirit baptism and he set the outline of his ministry:

• give hope to the poor,
• heal the brokenhearted,
• free prisoners,
• call back the exiles,
• proclaim God’s favor and justice to an oppressed people.

Before we look at Jesus’ ministry and what that means for us, we’re going to look closer at these opening verses of Isaiah 61, their original context, and what Isaiah’s word choices as well as some translation choices – under the direction of the Holy Spirit – communicate to us.

Who is Isaiah writing to?

Much of the book of Isaiah is a prophetic warning to a wayward people. The Kingdom of Judah was devolving into idolatry and social injustice.

In chapter 1, God opens with “your sins are like scarlet… red like crimson” because Israel had not ceased doing evil nor sought justice for the orphan and the widow. The leaders loved bribes and hung out with thieves. Later, God indicted them for fasting from food but oppressing their workers, thereby negating their act of worship (Isa 58:3).

The consequences of sin are on their way to the Kingdom of Judah: exile (Isaiah 5:13) and destruction (10:22).

Yet, when God announces the wages of sin to Israel (and to us), he also announces consolation. The latter chapters of Isaiah are largely words of comfort:

• Exile will end
• The Land will be restored
• God himself will be King and rule justly

God ruling Israel was the promise at Sinai. Israel, in accepting the Torah, accepts God as their king. But then Israel demanded a human king like their neighbors (1 Sam 8). They got their kings, and most were corrupt and led the nation into idolatry, violence, social injustice, and eventually exile.

Isaiah 61 is part of the prophetic consolation and speaks of when God is visibly King.¹ The vision of Isaiah 61 looks past the return from Babylonian exile, past the return of Jews to the Holy Land from the 1880s, past the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948. It speaks of a world to come, the messianic age where even wolves and lambs sit together in peace (Isa 11:6, 65:26) the lion with a fatted calf “and a little child shall lead them.”

The ancient places of Israel and Jerusalem will be rebuilt, the poor will be cared for, the brokenhearted will be comforted, and the prisoner will be freed.

This is a hope that the Jewish people still hold on to. In Jerusalem, there is a hopeful sculpture overlooking the Old City walls. It is based on Isaiah 2:4: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.” Except in this sculpture, it is guns and bombs converted into farm implements. The verse is inscribed on the sculpture in Hebrew and Arabic. There it still stands now, amid another Israel-Palestinian war. The sculpture continues looking forward to the day that God’s rule and reign are manifest and all the nations are under his loving authority.

Back to Isaiah 61:1.

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,

because the Lord has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor;

The two words I’d like us to meditate on are ‘anointed’ and ‘bring good news.’

Anointed

The Hebrew word for anoint is the root of the title Messiah. In ancient Israel, prophets, kings, and priests were anointed, physically anointed with oil, a picture of God’s Holy Spirit spiritually equipping the person for their role. So the prophet, king, or priest were messiahs, with a little m, because they were anointed ones.

The concept of a final Messiah, capital M, begins to develop maybe 200 years before Jesus is born. The line of David hadn’t been restored. Other sovereigns – both foreign and Israelite – had risen to rule the people of Israel, but all of those lines ended in oppression and corruption. So the expectation for prophetic promises of a king of the line of David are deferred to the End Times. Jewish interpreters start to hope for the final Son of David who will set the whole world right. They start to expect a sinless, maybe divine figure.²

So when Jesus gets up at this hometown synagogue and reads Isaiah 61, he is announcing, I am the Anointed One of the LORD. I am the capital M Messiah.

What has he been anointed for? “To bring good news to the poor.” The poor that are oppressed by corrupt leadership, the poor that toil to feed their families, the poor in spirit who are brokenhearted, physically ill, imprisoned. This is for whom the Messiah is sent first.

Sometime 200 years before Jesus was born, the Jewish leadership had the Hebrew Scriptures translated into Greek, including the Scroll of Isaiah. Please bear with me as I read a version of Isaiah 61:1 based on the Greek translation:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, for he has christened me to evangelize the poor…³

What is the point?

First, I want to remind you that Messiah is the same as Christ. They both mean Anointed One, but from different language roots. When we say Christ, we say Messiah in another way.

Second, see how “preach good news” has become “evangelize.”

Bring good news

We think of evangel and evangelize as Christian words. They are not exclusively Christian words. In fact, we get these words from Jewish translations of the Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament.

Evangelize has become a bad word in some circles because of how it's been abused. To evangelize is just to proclaim good news. There is no sense of coercion in it. Sadly, church history records that some Christians did coerce Jews and other subjected peoples into the church. That is wrong. The job of the Christian is to proclaim Jesus and love like he loves.

In Romans 10:9-17, Paul quotes four passages from the Hebrew Scriptures,⁴ three from Isaiah. The one that concerns us is “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Isa 52:7).

Again, the word that the Jewish Greek translators chose for preach good news is evangelize.

Roughly, we could translate Isaiah 52:7 as how beautiful are the feet of one who brings the evangel of peace, as the one who brings the evangel of good things⁵ or how beautiful are the feet of the evangelist of peace, the evangelist of good things.

Who is the evangelist of peace?

Just before, in Isaiah 52:6, it is the LORD speaking: “My people shall know my name. Therefore in that day they shall know that it is I who speak; here I am.”

It is God speaking good news to the captives of Israel. And he says, “Here I am.” This is the God who is present! He is Immanuel, God with us! And it is God who is the evangelist of peace.

And his message, his gospel of peace is not just for Israel! In Psalm 96, which we read today, the nations are called, too:

1 O sing unto the Lᴏʀᴅ a new song; *

sing unto the Lᴏʀᴅ, all the whole earth.

2 Sing unto the Lᴏʀᴅ and praise his Name; *

tell of his salvation from day to day.

3 Declare his honor to the nations, *

and his wonders to all peoples.

7 Ascribe unto the Lᴏʀᴅ, O you families of the peoples, *

ascribe unto the Lᴏʀᴅ worship and power.

8 Ascribe unto the Lᴏʀᴅ the honor due unto his Name; *

bring offerings and come into his courts.

10 Tell it out among the nations, “The Lᴏʀᴅ is King; *

it is he who has made the world so firm that it cannot be moved; he shall judge the peoples righteously.”

(New Coverdale version, Book of Common Prayer 2019)

In Genesis 12, God called Abraham for the sake of the nations. God tells Abraham “in you all the families of the earth will be blessed.” Which families? The peoples who rebelled at the Tower of Babel.

There are other examples throughout the Hebrew Scriptures of the good news of the God of Israel proclaimed to the nations. There are hopeful promises made to Egypt and Assyria, even to Gaza.

There’s an amazing promise in Zechariah 9 concerning Gaza. God is proclaiming judgment on the nations around Israel.

5 Ashkelon shall see [God’s judgment], and be afraid; Gaza too, and shall writhe in anguish; Ekron also, because its hopes are confounded…. I will cut off the pride of Philistia. 7 I will take away its blood from its mouth, and its abominations from between its teeth; it too shall be a remnant for our God; it shall be like a clan in Judah…

This passage lists the Philistine cities. You will recognize that some of those cities still exist in and around the Gaza Strip, where Palestinian people live. And God says, through Zechariah, that the peoples living in the area we call today the Gaza Strip will be redeemed as a remnant. God will cut off their pride but they’ll be folded into God’s people, not by domination but by God’s mercy. And we know that God’s mercy comes through Jesus the Messiah.

When God judges the nations in the prophets, especially Ezekiel, it is so that they will know the name of the LORD. Not a vengeful way like you might see in a shoot-em-up film. God lets Israel and all the nations of the earth suffer the consequences of their sin so that they will cry out to him for mercy. God’s character is always to have mercy. As Paul reminds us, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

How does God do that? Through Jesus’ ministry plan:

• Proclaim the good news of the LORD to the poor
• Bind up the brokenhearted
• Proclaim liberty to exiles and displaced persons
• Open the prison to those who are bound
• Proclaim the LORD’s justice, mercy, and favor.

After Jesus announces in Nazareth that he is the Anointed One, he does just what the verse says. He says that the Kingdom of God is coming. He heals blind men and paralytics. He even raises the dead.

After his death and resurrection, Jesus shares his anointing and his commission with his followers. In our Gospel portion, we read:

19 On the evening of that day, the first day of the week… 21 Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.” 22 And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Jesus sends his disciples. But first, he gives them the Holy Spirit. He anoints them with the power of God.

What do the disciples do? We see in Acts that they preach the good news, and they heal the lame, they cast out demons. They announce to the nations – to Israel and all the world – that God has come among us to heal us, to forgive us of our sins, to bring justice to the oppressed and mercy to the oppressor who will humble himself and receive God’s loving offer.

As a result of their efforts, many people from the nations know the name of the LORD and have called on it, and we have been saved. Praise God!

We have been baptized into the Christian family. We are christened, we are anointed. That’s what christened means. When we say we are Christians, we say we belong to the Anointed One of the LORD and that we also are anointed ones.

The Anointed One anoints his disciples

The Anointed One anoints us! For what?

The Spirit of the Lord God is upon us,

  because the Lord has anointed us

to bring good news to the poor;

  to bind up the brokenhearted,

to proclaim liberty to the captives,

  and the opening of the prison to those who are bound;

2 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor…

The LORD saves us to have relationship with us. The LORD anoints us so that we will tell others the good news.

It doesn’t matter how small your church is. It does not matter how old you are. All of you have neighbors who have not yet engaged with the Good News of God’s Salvation in a meaningful way.

Yes, giving to professional ministers is important. I thank you for your support of CMJ USA.

But you, too, are called to proclaim the Good News of Jesus, to pray for the healing of your neighbors, to encourage the foreigner living next door, to comfort those who mourn, to minister to the imprisoned.

The Spirit of the LORD is upon you.

Let us learn from Jesus how to take up this calling and invite others into the family of God.

Footnotes

1. Adin Steinsaltz, "Isaiah 61:1-63:6, Preface 45,” Steinsaltz Introductions to Tanakh, The Steinsaltz Tanakh-English (2015, KorenPub via Sefaria.org).
2. Mark L. Strauss, “Messiah,” in The Lexham Bible Dictionary, ed. John D. Barry et al. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2016). See also The Jewish Gospels: The Story of the Jewish Christ by Jewish scholar Daniel Boyarin, who shows that some first-century Jews were expecting a divine Anointed One.
   
3. Πνεῦμα κυρίου ἐπʼ ἐμέ, οὗ εἵνεκεν ἔχρισέν με, εὐαγγελίσασθαι πτωχοῖς ἀπέσταλκέν με
   Septuaginta: With Morphology, electronic ed. (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1979), Is 61:1.
4. “Everyone who believes in him [the LORD] will not be put to shame.” (Isa 28:16)
   “Everyone who calls on the name of the LORD will be saved.” (Joel 2:32)
   “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!” (Isa 52:7)
   “Lord, who has believed what he has heard from us?” (Is 53:1)
5. Author’s modifcation of Rick Brannan, Ken M. Penner et al., The Lexham English Septuagint, Second Edition. (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2020), Is 52:7.