Why Is Everyone Talking about Luke 4 Lately?

by John V. Upton, Executive Director

It seems every time I turn around someone else is suggesting Luke 4 as the text of a theme for a conference or meeting.  The Baptist World Alliance International Program Committee suggested it as the text for the BWA Congress in 2010.  Not long after that meeting the New Baptist Covenant steering group selected the text for the NBC event.  Our BGAV Program Committee has looked at this text.  Why all the attention?

Maybe it has to do with the fact that Jesus had two passions for the world beating in his heart.  He had a passion for individuals, to love them and set them free from all the sin that beset them.  He also had a passion for challenging and changing social and institutional structures in his time.  If we don’t have both passions in us as his followers, then we have done some serious reducing of the gospel.

While Jesus challenged a woman to “go and sin no more,” he also told religious leaders to stop abusing widows.  He entered the temple and turned over the tables of oppressive commerce there.  He spoke often of what the rich should do with their property.  He reached out to racially despised Samaritans.  He gazed at a city and fell weeping.  Then he entered that city the next day on the back of a donkey in a symbolic demonstration for all power hungry leaders to see.  And he was hated.

Jesus told us from the very beginning that these two passions were his mission.  Luke 4 tells us he inaugurated his ministry by reading a passage from the prophet Isaiah.  He set the platform for his ministry in that reading.  We can certainly read Luke 4 in spiritual terms.  Jesus will give people freedom from their sins, guilt, fear, and grief.  He lavished those tremendous emancipations on countless people, and he still does.  But the passage he chose to read means more than that.  It’s a text about poor people rising by economic change; it’s about prisoners being remembered and about the oppressed being treated rightly.

There was one more thing Jesus said in Luke 4 that I haven’t heard anyone highlight.  He said, “Today.”  What is interesting is that this is the first word after reading scripture that Jesus publicly said: “Today.  Today, in your hearing, that text comes true.”  For years the people had heard the Isaiah passage read, but freedom and release had never happened for them.  And there stands Jesus saying, “Today.  It comes true now.” 

And he spent his days putting his flesh onto that dream.  He lifted up a great many poor people and changed their lives.  He lifted up women and children.  At least one very rich man, because of Jesus, made huge restitutions.  Jesus built bridges across racial divisions between Samaritans and Jews.  He set a woman free from capital punishment.  He welcomed social outcasts into his group.  His words were sharp, thrilling, and inspiring, and they instilled life-giving, life-changing hope.  And the women and men he touched went out into the world doing the very same things.  After his murder, they said he was alive, and one of their best ways to show he was alive was in saying and doing what he had done.

As we look at the world today, we can’t help but wonder how effective this hope has been.  Who would argue that hatred in the world is at an all time high, that racial prejudice, sectarian violence, war, senseless death on our streets, and obscene abuses of power are everywhere?  How could Jesus stand there 2000 years ago declaring all these liberations, saying, “Today it comes true”?

Should we say he did achieve it, but only in limited ways, in more spiritual ways?  Or maybe it is truer to say that we who wear his name now will help determine how this mission of his succeeds in our time or how it fails in our time.

The most haunting word he said in the synagogue that day was “today.”  Do you think when he said it he meant it only for that Saturday morning?  Or do you think he is alive and speaking it this very moment – “Today”?  Today, find your way to befriend the unfree, do this in the place where you live with the people you love.  Today, do it where you work, where you go to school.  Today, do it as part of a church community.  Do it with how you volunteer and what you give and what you pray for and what you make the passion of your life. Today, do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.  Christ alive in us and among us can make it so. 

The same word is still on his lips.  He speaks it with urgency and with hope – “Today.”  On second thought, maybe a few more conferences should use this text for their theme.