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A woman and her young son were waiting in line at the grocery store when a burn victim with skin grafts stepped in line behind them. The little boy saw the man behind him and couldn't help himself. He'd never seen someone like this before. And he stared. Long and hard he fixed his gaze on this poor man who looked so different from anyone else he'd ever seen. And his mother bent down and quietly whispered in his ear, "Don't stare. It's not polite."
We're brought up knowing that it's not polite to stare. Hold your gaze on someone for too long and it makes them feel uncomfortable, like they're being scrutinized or evaluated. But then, there are other times when staring isn't rude, but actually appreciated. When the model goes down the runway she doesn't want people to look away. It's special and meaningful when you stare into the eyes of your significant other. And right now as I preach, I appreciate that you have your gaze fixed on me. It tells me that you're paying attention.
In our gospel lesson for this morning, we read of people staring. They were staring at Jesus eager to hear every word he said as he was about to give his inaugural speech, if you will. With rapt attention they hung on his every word and fasted their eyes on Jesus.
And friends, we do well to do the same. Stare at Jesus. Hang on his every word. Fasten your eyes to him and see who he is: The fulfillment of every prophecy, the fulfillment of your salvation. Listen with rapt attention to Jesus as he speaks to us in Luke 4:14-21...
Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
I. The Fulfillment of Every Prophecy
You know the old Lutheran maxim, "Let Scripture interpret Scripture." In other words, when you're uncertain on the meaning of any given passage, let another passage help shed some light on it. Let God's Word interpret God's Word. This morning it's in a different sense that God's Word interprets God's Word. Jesus, the Word of God made flesh, interprets the written Word of God.
At first read, it might have seemed that Isaiah 61:1-2, the verses Jesus preached on in the synagogue that day, were really all about Old Testament Israel. Seven hundred years before Jesus was born, the prophet Isaiah described how God's people would be set free from their captivity by the Lord's anointed. But most would have seen the fulfillment of these verses in King Cyrus, the king that released the Israelites from their seventy year captivity in Babylon. The king Isaiah earlier (in chapter 45) referred to as the Lord's anointed. And that interpretation seems to be a good one... until we hear Jesus preach on this text.
As the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Jesus, he caught and held their attention with the opening line of his sermon: He began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."
This prophecy didn't find it's fulfillment in Cyrus. It wasn't filled in Old Testament times. It was fulfilled in Jesus. He was the fulfillment of the that prophecy. He would preach good news to the poor, that they could be a part of his kingdom. He would set prisoners free. Think of Peter or Paul locked in prison until their bonds miraculously fell free and the doors the swung open. Jesus restored the sight of the blind in an instant. He was the Anointed one, anointed by the Holy Spirit at his Baptism to carry out his mission.And this wasn't the only prophecy that Jesus fulfilled. The virgin birth was a fulfillment of the prophecy in Isaiah 7:14. His ancestry from the royal line of David was prophesied in Isaiah 11:1. His very presence in Galilee was fulfillment of a prophecy In Isaiah 9:1 where God foretold: "In the past he humbled the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the future he will honor Galilee of the Gentiles, by the way of the sea, along the Jordan." Jesus' baptism in the Jordan river fulfilled the first verse of Isaiah 61 when the Spirit of the Lord came upon him. And in the next 3 years of his ministry Jesus would fulfill many, many more prophecies written hundreds, even thousands of years before his birth.
Fasten your eyes to Jesus and he is clearly revealed by the Scriptures to be the Messiah, the Anointed one of God who came to fulfill every prophecy.
But that alone gives no cause for rejoicing. You see there are other prophecies, like the one in Ezekiel 18:4 that says, "The soul who sins is the one who will die." Or Isaiah 48:22: "'There is no peace,' says the Lord, 'for the wicked.'" Or Isaiah 61:2b, the prophecy found right after the words Jesus read in the synagogue that day that declare that the Spirit anointed Jesus to also proclaim "the day of vengeance of our God."
You see, because of our sin, we need more than a Messiah who just fulfills prophecy. And thank God he didn't just fulfill the prophesies of Scripture, but he also came to fulfill our salvation.
II. The Fulfillment of Your Salvation
A small congregation got a brand new pastor. And after he preached for the first time, they thought he was the best. "Great sermon, pastor!" they told him. "You really hit a homerun this morning." And the next week it was a great sermon again. Though it sounded a bit familiar. After the third week, they all caught on that while it was a great sermon, he hadn't changed a word. It was the exact same sermon three weeks in a row! The elders called the pastor in for a meeting and suggested the pastor get some new material, perhaps preach on a different text. And the pastor replied, "I'll write a new sermon, when you start doing the things God told you to do in the first one."
How true that we don't obey the Word as we ought. We don't fasten our eyes on Jesus as we ought. And poor, then, we are! No, I don't mean we don't have much in our checking accounts. Though that may be true too, what Jesus was talking about was a poverty or righteousness. As we stand before God on our own we are spiritually bankrupt. We can offer nothing good to barter with a holy God. On our own we're blind to any real solution. We're captive to sin, death, and hell with satan as the cruel warden. And there's nothing we can do about it. We deserve that fate. For not fastening our eyes on Jesus, we deserve to be distracted -- and separated -- from him.
But Jesus didn't come to preach Law. Though we only get one sentence of his sermon, what a beautiful sermon it was. "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." He came to fulfill Isaiah 61. And Isaiah 61 is not a prophecy about Cyrus, but about Jesus, and it's not a prophecy about release from the captivity to the Babylonians, but about release from captivity to sin, death, and hell.
You see Jesus didn't come as a self-help guide, to teach you how to lose weight, become more organized, or have a more positive image about yourself. Jesus did not come as a social worker to end world hunger, redistribute the wealth so there would be no more poverty, or just to heal the sick. Jesus didn't come to be a political messiah or an earthly king. No. That's not what the prophesies describe. But Jesus did come to be a Savior from sin -- to be your Savior from sin and to fulfill your salvation.
Jesus came not to preach more law and become a new Moses, but to preach Good News (literally, "preach the gospel") to the spiritually poor and bankrupt. That is, to proclaim the forgiveness of sins to all of us. How is this possible? How can one man bring about the forgiveness of all sins before a perfect and holy God?
Fasten your eyes on Jesus and you'll soon see that he's not just an ordinary man. He is the God-man who lived a perfectly sinless life in our place. Here in these verses we see him keeping the 3rd commandment for us. That phrase, "as was his custom," shows Jesus' attitude toward worship and the Word. He feared and loved God that he did not despise preaching and the Word, but loved it! He gladly heard it! He believed it! He took it to heart! And he obeyed it... for us.
And the, by his sacrifice on the cross, where he took our every sin on himself -- every failure to fasten our eyes on him, every time we've been apathetic toward worship or toward his Word -- and by the hell he endured on that cross in unishment for our sins, Jesus set us free. He set us free from those sins, and thus, free from our captivity to satan and the hell he had us chained to.
And through the Word the Spirit cries out, "Freedom!" to us today! By his work in us through the Word and through Baptism he has opened our eyes to see and to know and to believe these truths of what Jesus has done. The blind can see.
And so, even though these words were spoken almost two thousand years ago, through the forgiveness of sins that you have in Jesus, it's still true that "Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing." So fasten your eyes on Jesus. It's okay. Go ahead. Stare. He wants us to. Then, as we fasten our eyes on him by fastening our eyes in the Word, we will continue to keep our sight, our freedom, and the eternal riches we have in him. In Jesus' name, dear friends, keep staring! amen.
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