Welcome to Bible Fiber, where we are encountering the textures and shades of the biblical tapestry. I am Shelley Neese, president of The Jerusalem Connection, a Christian organization devoted to sharing the story of the people of Israel, both ancient and modern.
This week we were going to go over Ezekiel 10, the next chapter in our Ezekiel study. Ezekiel 10 is one of the lowest lows in the entire book because it records when God’s glory exited the Jerusalem temple. But that did not seem like the right message two days before Resurrection Sunday. I still regret doing a podcast on the Philistines five days before Christmas. So, we are going to pause Ezekiel this week and instead focus on a prophetic passage that Jesus himself used to introduce his ministry on earth. We are looking at Isaiah 61 and its connection to Luke 4.
There are lots of different Bible reading programs out there for Christians. In the Anglican tradition, we have the Daily Office in the Book of Common Prayer. I got my middle schoolers the Bibles that are organized by calendar date to read through the whole Bible in a year with a little Old Testament, New Testament, Psalms, and Proverbs every day. Or if you are listening to this podcast, maybe you are like me and you like to spend months studying every nook and cranny of one book until you move to the next.
Jewish people also have their own yearly Bible reading challenge. Jewish tradition credits Ezra, the postexilic reformer, with dividing the Torah into 54 sections for public reading. To this day, synagogues publicly read the weekly portions on each Sabbath to get through all five books in one year.
When Jewish communities reach the end of the 54-week cycle every year, they have a joyous day of celebration called Simcha Torah (which means Happy Torah). I remember one time I was sitting in the train station in Israel when a group of orthodox Jewish boys came through singing and dancing, holding up a Torah scroll and passing out candies. That’s when I learned that Bible reading goals were a celebration meant to be shared! This year, Simcha Torah fell on October 7th. Hamas terrorists attacked Israelis on the very day that they mark as the celebration of their yearlong reading calendar. What was supposed to be joyous and celebratory turned into a day of horror and nightmare that we are still trying to process.
Every weekly Torah portion is paired with a reading from the prophetic books. That way, the synagogue service includes reading the prophets in their yearly cycle as well, but instead of reading through the prophets in order, the passages match the theme of that day’s Torah reading.
So, let us imagine for a second that we are in a Jewish synagogue, and the time has come in our yearly reading plan for Isaiah 61:1-2.
Isaiah 61 begins:
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 and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn. (Isa. 61:1-2).
This passage in Isaiah is one of the most remarkable prophecies in the book. It throbs with messianic hope. On one particular Sabbath service in Nazareth, sometime around 27 AD, Jesus was the special congregant called up to the pulpit to read Isaiah 61.
As the gospel of Luke tells the story, in chapter 4, the synagogue leader called on Jesus to read and handed the Isaiah scroll over to him. Apparently, this was Jesus’s childhood synagogue because Luke says he went there “as was his custom” (Luke 4:16).
Jesus unfurled the scroll and stood up and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Luke says that Jesus handed the scroll back to the attendant, sat down in the crowd, and with all eyes still on him, announced, “today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” I get Holy Spirit goosebumps every time I read this passage. Jesus literally drops the mic!
Jesus was defining the purpose of his earthly ministry. When Jesus quotes the prophets and when Jesus reveals his identity and defines his mission, we must lean forward and listen close.
In the timeline of Jesus’s life on earth, the Nazareth synagogue reading came after Jesus’s baptism and the wilderness temptation. There were many eyewitnesses at Jesus’s baptism who saw the Holy Spirit descend as a dove and the voice of God announce, “You are my beloved Son; with you I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22). So, word was spreading that something was happening. Following his baptism, Jesus entered the wilderness for forty days to have solitude with his heavenly Father. In the wilderness, even a hungry and tired Jesus overcame the temptation of the devil and his tricks.
It is interesting that those two events happened in Luke before Jesus read in the synagogue that day. Someone greater than John the Baptist had arrived; John said he was unworthy of tying his sandal straps (Luke 3:16). Someone greater than Adam was here! Adam’s inability to resist the devil brought on the consequences of sin which was death. Jesus’s defeat of the devil in the wilderness started a new reign of life and freedom. And through Jesus’s healing ministry on earth he was going to give everyone a taste of the kingdom.
The Isaiah reading was the preamble for the reality-defying and earth-shaking miracles that makeup the gospel’s next chapters. In the months after the synagogue reading, Jesus proceeded to fulfill everything he had promised in the Isaiah prophecy. He brought sight to the blind. He set free the oppressed and imprisoned. And he brought good news to the poor!
In addition to the miracles he was prepped to perform on earth, Jesus was announcing something even grander. The Isaiah prophecy was an announcement of the arrival of the Messianic Age, the era of salvation. Although Jesus gave sight to the blind and released the captives during his short time on earth, his death and resurrection also launched something much bigger, both in heaven and on earth.
The gospel of Luke does not mention what else was read in the Nazareth synagogue from the pulpit that day. However, there is a good chance that Isaiah 61 was selected as the prophetic passage because the Torah passage for the service included Leviticus 25. Remember the prophet reading always matches the Torah reading in theme.
Isaiah’s prophecy about “proclaiming the year of the Lord’s favor” is language deeply rooted in Leviticus 25 and God’s commands about the Jubilee year. The year of the Lord’s favor, the Jubilee year, was an instruction developed in the Torah for how Israel needed to keep their religious and agricultural calendar. In ancient times, there was no separation between religion and state or religion and the economy.
Before the Jewish people entered the Holy Land, Moses instructed them how to care for the covenant land and build a productive and just society. God introduced the law of sevens in their annual cycle. In Leviticus 25, Moses explained that as soon as they entered the land, they needed to count off years. Every seventh year, the land should observe a sabbatical. The Hebrew word for the land’s Sabbath is Shmitah which means “to release.” During the Sabbath year, the people were not allowed to cultivate their fields, prune their vineyards, or reap their crops. Instead, the produce of the land was to be shared by everyone equally, including foreign residents and servants and even livestock.
According to God’s perfect plan, the people were also to count off seven cycles of sabbatical years, seven years seven times. In the fiftieth year, the people were to hallow the Year of Jubilee. In that year, on the Day of Atonement, a trumpet was blown all across the land. When the trumpet was blown, debt was canceled, family land was redeemed, and slaves were set free. Leviticus commands them to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.”
If you have ever had the chance to see the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, you probably noticed that the bell is not that big or impressive physically. And you may have heard, the bell has a crack in it. The Liberty Bell’s fame stems from its history. The bell was adopted by the abolitionists movement as a symbol of their cause because of the bell’s inscription of Leviticus 25:10: “Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof.” The inscription articulated the divine call to end the institution of slavery and extend liberty to all individuals.
God understood that economic misfortune happened, and, in many cases, people sold their homes, land, or even themselves out of poverty. But God also wanted to create regulations so that the poor and vulnerable could not be exploited. Jubilee ensured that no state of deprivation was permanent or multigenerational. Every fiftieth year, social law provided for a new start at dignity.
There is much debate about the practicality of the Shmitah and Jubilee laws, particularly since Israel is once again a nation state with an agricultural sector and a modern banking system. Are Israeli national banks supposed to cancel debts every fifty years? Are farmers in the Galilee supposed to let their land go fallow?
Ancient Israel certainly struggled to hold to the Jubilee laws. Throughout the prophet Jeremiah’s career, he repeatedly warned the people that punishment was coming if they did not follow God’s commands and honor the Sabbatical year and the Jubilee. But the people kept ignoring the sabbatical years and pushing aside the laws of Jubilee.
When the prophet Isaiah spoke about the year of Jubilee in Chapter 61, he wrapped the ideals of Jubilee in a Messianic frame. God was going to send someone, the “anointed one.” The anointed one would launch the Jubilee that had been impossible for them to achieve on their own. The Messiah would proclaim good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, and proclaim freedom for the captives, and release the prisoners from darkness. Israel would not achieve the year of the Lord’s favor on its own. Israel needed the intervention of the Messiah.
Knowing these expectations from Isaiah, Jesus described his Messianic Mission in the Jubilee language. He was not saying that it was technically the year of Jubilee, the fiftieth year, according to the religious calendar. He was announcing his messiahship, saying “I am the anointed one. I have come to provide a ransom for many.” It was the spiritual Jubilee in its highest ideals and formulations. The calendar Jubilee gave a taste of peace and freedom, but that rest was fully realized in Christ. /Jubilee only had the power to cancel earthly and temporal debt for a year. Christ’s saving work canceled heavenly debt for eternity.
Jubilee is here because Jesus came. Jesus has redeemed all those who believe. He has canceled our spiritual debts. We are no longer slaves to our own sin. The Lord’s favor is upon all of us. What better way for Jesus to paint his plan and purpose for the messianic kingdom than by using those terms already clearly understood by the Jewish people from Leviticus and quoted by the prophet Isaiah?
Every person, deep within their spirit, longs for rest and freedom. The Old Testament built the ideals for human dignity, freedom, and purpose. Jesus died for the whole world so that all who seek him will find him. In the gospels, Jesus gave his eternal call; he rolled out the red carpet to the Jubilee. Jesus promises all people for all time, “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
Why do we have so many programs to read through the Bible in a year? Why do we put so much emphasis on Bible reading as a form of worship and as a necessary Christian discipline? Because the language and ideas of the Bible need to course through our bloodstream. Jesus connected the dots in synagogue from Leviticus to Isaiah and now we connect it from Isaiah to Luke. The theme of redemption is a thread that runs throughout the whole or scripture. But we can only appreciate that that thread when we read, study and know the scripture.
That’s it for this week. Thank you for listening and please continue to take part in this Bible Reading Challenge. Join us next week and I really will discuss Ezekiel 10. I hope everyone has a blessed and beautiful Resurrection Sunday celebration. Go out into this week and proclaim the liberty that you have found because of the life, death, and resurrection of our Messiah.