Isnt it funny how you can read and hear something a gazillion times and then suddenly understand something you have never quite understood before? I heard this scripture read again in church on Sunday and it connected in my mind with the blog I posted a few days ago about the temptations Jesus faced in the wilderness. These are the words He spoke immediately after that and I'm pretty sure the baptism-temptation-mission declaration are strongly inter dependent. Without the affirmation of God at the baptism Jesus might not have been able to face down His enemy in the desert. And without resisting the temptations Jesus would not have shown that a man could carry the mission of God's heart whole-heartedly.
But what really struck me today as I read the Isaiah scripture again was that Jesus states that He has come to the poor, brokenhearted, captive, blind and oppressed.
There are many people I've tried to talk to about Jesus in the past. The ones who have responded have been poor, brokenhearted and captive. The ones who haven't have been materially comfortable, emotionally pretty stable and healthy, reasonably powerful - they haven't needed Jesus ( or at least they havent perceived that they have any need of Him) and therefore when I have presented Him He has seemed an irrelevance.
I know that we are commissioned to preach the gospel to everyone and that God doesn't want any single person on earth to perish. But today as I re-read Luke 4 I do wonder if we will always get better response from the same sort of people Jesus spent time with when He was here.
We tend to spiritualise things and read metaphor into words like captive and oppressed. But what if the anointing of God is actually in prisons? What if Jesus is most powerfully at work in bereavement counselling sessions and foodbanks? I think He is. And where He is, that's where we should be also.
It also strikes me that only part of Jesus's mission statement involved preaching and speaking. Some of it involves healing and some involves setting free, which seem to me to be intensely practical and active things. So perhaps the anointing of the Holy Spirit is on our doctors and nurses and dentists and therapists. And perhaps He is also pouring Himself out over lawyers and barristers and judges and parole officers. Maybe, whether they know it or not, anyone who is working on behalf of the oppressed and the downtrodden is carrying the yoke-breaking, curse shattering, life giving promise of God with them.
I'd like to think so.
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