The Year of the Lord's Favour

Introduction

In this sermon on Luke 4:14-21, Revd. Mark Fletcher explores the year of jubilee and what it means for us today. As Jesus stands in the Nazareth synagogue and declares scripture fulfilled, he offers freedom in Christ — the forgiveness of sins and a fresh start. This powerful declaration of good news to the poor reminds us that in Christ, the past need not define us and new beginnings are always possible.

I wonder how you feel about winter time. It can be a really beautiful time, can’t it? But it also can be well quite hard too. The long nights and the bitter weather and it can all leave us feeling rather, like the good days will never come again. We can feel constrained or even trapped by this time of year. But new life is stirring. The snow drops are up in our garden. The green shoots of the daffodils are poking through. The first stirrings of spring are there and they bring joy to the heart. Change is coming. But sometimes change does not come easily. And that sense of being trapped by circumstances is very hard to overcome.

Some places can be like that. You might know places like that and Nazareth is one of those places. This wind swept back water of a town on a rocky hillside, far from the gentle lake shores of Galilee or the grandeur of Jerusalem. It is a place which is constrained by geography and history and economics.

It is a small town and it has a small town attitude and hope it seems is in short supply there. They believe that nobody from Nazareth can ever amount to anything. And yet it is from here that Jesus comes. Here he grew up and here he makes this definitive statement about who he is and what his ministry is about.

And if you heard in our reading, it is a beauty. So we’re continuing to work our way through this remarkable, incredibly fresh gospel that is the gospel of St. Luke. And Jesus had left Nazareth. He’d gone into the wilderness, he’d been baptised in the river Jordan, and then rumours were heard that he had been preaching and healing the sick around Lake Galilee.

And he had been widely acclaimed. And people said, isn’t this Jesus from Nazareth? You can almost hear the disdain in the word. And they said, where did he get this wisdom from? And then one day he returns to his hometown. He returns to Nazareth and everybody is talking. And let me just read you again that passage, and I’d love you to just feel the drama of this.

So this is verse 16. On the Sabbath day, he went to the synagogue as was his custom. And he stood up to read, and 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 upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind and to set the oppressed free. To proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. And 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.

Isn’t it a marvellous scene? You can feel the drama of it. It’s brilliant. And if you take nothing else away from this evening but this, hear that promise that with Jesus you need not be trapped by circumstances or the past or your failures. In Christ new beginnings are always possible. But there’s so much going on here and I’d love to just pull out some of the details of what’s happening ‘cause they are fascinating. And I suppose the question is, why does Jesus choose this passage from the Old Testament? Why is this the one that he says is fulfilled in their hearing? What does it all mean? Some of it might seem quite obvious, I think. There is a reference to what’s just happened in Luke’s gospel.

So he’s just been baptised and the Holy Spirit descended on him. And it’s a reference to all of the things that have just taken place. But he chooses one word there, which is particularly significant, and that is the word anointed. And anointed is a messianic word. To anoint someone. That’s what you do to Kings in the Old Testament, and it’s a statement about who he is.

He is the promised, long promised Messiah, and it’s a statement about what his kingdom will be like. He is saying God is on the move and he will bring good news to the poor. He will proclaim freedom for the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, and he will set the oppressed free. But there’s another phrase which is really significant, and it’s in verse 19, and it says that he will proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

It’s fascinating and intriguing and very specific, and the question is what does that mean? What is the year of the Lord’s favour? The Old Testament is full of all of this guidance about how to build a just society that will be a light to the nations that will reflect something of the character of God in this world, and it sets the highest possible standards.

And we would need to recognise that they very rarely came up to those standards, but nevertheless, they are there. And they are very significant. And a big part of that is about fairness, about equality within that nation. And so there’s all sorts of details about how you care for people, how you refrain from exploiting them, and particularly how you lend money fairly.

And as part of that, there is this particular safeguard, and it’s called the Year of Jubilee. So every 50 years, this is in Leviticus 25, every 50 years, all debts are cancelled. That’s right. If you’ve borrowed money, it’s erased. If you’ve had to sell land, it’s returned to you. If you, in the worst case, have been sold into some kind of indentured servitude, you are set free. And there’s some argument as to whether it was ever actually enacted.

You can imagine it didn’t happen very often and certainly as time went on and Israel got more wealthy, they conveniently ignored it. But it’s there. It’s still there in Leviticus 25. And the prophet Isaiah promises that one day Jubilee will be enacted. So then do you see how significant it is that Jesus stands up in the temple in his hard pressed hometown?

And he says to them all today in your hearing, these scriptures are fulfilled. Isn’t that remarkable? Brilliant, amazing statement about who Jesus is and what he is about. Imagine this. Imagine you are struggling financially. Imagine the credit card bills have stacked up. And the overdraft is at its limits, and those student loans won’t pay themselves. And then the mortgage payment comes due and you realise you’re not going be able to pay it. And that morning the phone rings and you look, and the little caller ID says, it’s your bank calling. And of course, your heart sinks because this is going to be really bad. And you pluck up courage to face the situation.

And you answer it and you say hello, and a voice at the other end says so listen, this mortgage of yours and also the credit cards and the student loans and the overdraft. We’ve got some big news for you. They have all been paid. You are free of debt. You owe us nothing. Have a wonderful day.

And then you look out in the street and you see people standing, staring, or dancing down the road and you realise that it’s not just you. That this has happened to everyone. That’s what Jubilee looks like. You are free. You do not owe anything to anyone. How would you feel? What would you do? How would you live differently?

So debt. Debt is one very significant way of understanding what the Bible means when it talks about sin. And in fact, you might know that the literal translation of the Lord’s Prayer is forgive us, our debts as we forgive our debtors. And when we have debts that we can’t pay, they come to define us.

And that’s true financially, but it’s also true in our lives, the legacy of the damage that we’ve done to others. The legacy of our sin and broken relationships, the legacy of the mistakes that we have made, which mar our lives, they can leave us feeling trapped, and we can imagine that nothing can ever change.

Jesus says The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to you. This is the gospel. That’s what gospel means. It means good news. It is that call from the bank manager and if you will have it through Christ in repentance and faith, this is jubilee. Your sins forgiven. The past, no longer needs to define you.

You are free. This is what the New Testament calls the glorious liberty of the children of God. How does it work? Who pays the price? As you can imagine, that’s another sermon for another time and Luke will get to that. But for now, here at the beginning of the story, all that you need to know is that the price is paid in full. If you will have it, jubilee is declared. Will you receive the gift? I must also say that there is a warning in this passage is often the case. These two things go together. They say familiarity breeds contempt. And familiarity and contempt were there in Nazareth. They struggled to believe that the son of Joseph could be the one to change history and to change their town and to change their lives.

They had believed that saying that said, can anything good come from Nazareth? And perhaps you have been around Christianity a really long time. Perhaps you grew up with it and you’ve heard Jesus talked about so many times that it is easy to take this for granted. And fail to see quite how astonishing this is.

Jesus says, no prophet is accepted in his hometown. Do not allow your familiarity with Jesus to become contempt. Or maybe this was you once and you knew the freedom of Christ, but little by little you have slipped back into that indebtedness. Freedom is not freedom if we simply use it for ourselves. That is the mistake of our modern world.

Selfish freedom becomes indulgence and addiction and greed and pride. As Paul writes to the Galatians, it is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm then and do not submit again to the yoke of slavery. Do you need to receive this jubilee once more? And of course, we build these communities to live out Jubilee.

That is what churches are. They are communities of grace and mercy and forgiveness. These places should be exceptional because new beginnings are always possible. Sins can be forgiven. The past need not define us, or as Paul puts it in Romans, let no debt remain outstanding. Accept the continuing debt to love one another.

You owe nothing to anyone except that debt of love. You do not need to be trapped by the past. We can forgive and be forgiven and begin anew. So this is the year of the Lord’s favour. It’s not a future event. It’s not a past event. It is now. Or Jesus says today, this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

This is the good news for you. And for our world, which seems so trapped by its past, so trapped in a cycle of debt and damage. In Christ, you can be set free. You do not need to be defined by your mistakes or by the sins of others. Change is coming. God is doing something new, and you can be set free. And this declaration of Jubilee is for all of us to take hold of us.

The spirit of the Lord is upon us because he has anointed us to bring good news to the poor. He has sent us to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free. And so we proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour. Amen.