Day 5
Jesus’
Mission: the poor
Read: Luke 4:14-30
In
his hometown synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus reads a passage from Isaiah 61:16-21 that
summarizes his mission. While reading he
stops the quote part way through verse two, missing out “and the day of vengeance of our God.” There will be a day of judgement, but Jesus
ushered in an era of grace and mercy.
The “year of the Lord’s favour”
alludes to the year of Jubilee, an old Israeli law stating debts were to be
cancelled and land returned to its original owners. It was a time of freedom and restoration.
Jesus’ mission is a time of freedom and restoration.
It
is easy to spiritualize these words (Luke 4:18-19), to see them as only
referring to meeting spiritual needs, and ignore their obvious meaning. While Jesus came for all, a key component of
his focus was to “those who had been
trampled by life and society.” Israel
had ignored the plight of the poor and oppressed the weak (Isaiah 58:6-7) and
this had brought them judgement.
Then
and now Jesus identifies strongly with the weak and struggling of society, seeing
his mission as bringing hope and freedom. Luke continually shows how he worked
this out in action, with healing, deliverance and even protest (see Luke
19:45-46); it was for this purpose Jesus was anointed by the Holy Spirit. (The seventh week of our “Jesus journey” will
look deeply at the Spirit’s missional-links.)
Ponder
Point (reflect)
- The Jesus
who has concern for me has special concern for the poor
Consider
(respond)
- If my being “connected to Jesus” means I am already connected to the poor by implication . . . what could I do engage with the poor?
Though Jesus favours neither rich nor poor; take note he is “clearly focused on the commonly ignored.” With Jesus those on society’s margins are not to be marginalised.”
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