Jesus returns from the wilderness to Galilee and enters the synagogue in Nazareth, the town where he grew up. He is handed the scroll of Isaiah and opens it to chapter 61. He reads the passage, rolls up the scroll, sits down — the posture of a teacher about to speak — and says: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” The congregation's reaction is astonishment: they know him as the carpenter's son. He is claiming to be the fulfillment of Isaiah's anointed herald.

From the writers we read together

Carmen Joy Imes

Old Testament scholar, author of Bearing God's Name

Imes reads Isaiah 61 as Israel's vocation given its fullest expression and then handed to Jesus as its proper inheritor. Israel was called to be a kingdom of priests — a mediating people who brought God's blessing to the nations. The anointed herald of Isaiah 61 is the one who does that calling perfectly. When Jesus reads this passage in Nazareth, he is not claiming a new job; he is claiming to be the one Israel's whole history was pointing toward — the image-bearer in whom the image is finally undistorted.

Imes would press this outward: the people who bear the name of Jesus inherit the anointing he describes. Not to the same redemptive degree, but in the same direction. The church that reads Luke 4 honestly must ask itself: to whom is it bringing good news? Where are the captives, the blind, the oppressed in my town, in my life, in my reach? The scroll Jesus unrolled in Nazareth has been handed to his body.