Jesus stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord. Rolling up the scroll, he handed it back to the attendant and sat down, and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him. He said to them, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4.17-21)
Hope, like a houseplant, dies unless it is watered.
Which is why a Galilean called the son of Joseph walked into his village synagogue on a Sabbath and stunned the worshippers seated inside when he, quoting the ancient scriptures, said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.”
With those words, he revived hope, withered and wasted away as it had been for a very long time in the chests of the poor, the captives, the blind, and the oppressed. Chained to hardships like dogs in the backyard, they could only lament and languish, any hope for a better way of life long gone, their cries to the heavens scarcely audible anymore, answers from the heavens scarcely believed in anymore.
Until that day, when the Galilean teacher unrolled the dusty scroll and repeated words of promise first spoken by a prophet of old, the words coming alive again, slowly penetrating through the walls that imprisoned the sick, the blind, and the lame, breaking through the dank and dark jail cells of their miserable existence, fluttering through the rank air like a beautiful butterfly in the wrong place.
“Today,” he said, looking into their eyes, “this scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing,” saying what had never been said to them before, that their hopes have not been fruitless, their wants have not been pointless, their prayers have not been useless. Just the words alone lifted their downtrodden spirits, the first miracle the Man of Galilee performed, restoring hope to the hopeless.
As we learned last week, this was the first stop for the Galilean rabbi as he began his public ministry, at least in Luke’s retelling of the story, a purposeful placement that sets the stage for what will soon follow, when his words become action, and the blind see and the hungry eat and the lame walk on two legs again. Standing in the synagogue, reading the prophet’s words from the scroll, promising their fulfillment was the kickoff of his campaign for compassion for the least, the last, and the lost.
For the ancient Greeks, hope generally was viewed as something negative, as we see in the myth of Pandora, the first human woman created by the gods, who opened a jar containing all the evils that torment humanity, allowing them to escape, and who closed it again, with only hope still inside the jar. One reading of the myth suggests that hope is just another evil, the expectation of a better life that we can never have, extending our tribulation.
But this was not the Hebrew view of hope, a people whose identity was founded on hope. As we read in the Book of Exodus, the Hebrews were the slaves and the playthings of the Egyptians, until the Hebrews cried aloud to the Most High God, who told Moses, their leader, that he had heard their cries and that Moses was to go to the Egyptian Pharaoh to demand the release of the slaves.
With their eventual release and their return to the land of their fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Hebrews held tightly to their hope in the God who had delivered them from bondage. The Psalmist, for one, often expresses their hope in verse, writing, “For you, O Lord, are my hope, my trust, O Lord, from my youth” (Ps 71.5), or again, “Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God” (Ps 146.5).
It is this same tradition that prompts the prophet Isaiah, speaking on behalf of the God of Israel, to promise glad tidings to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed, words reiterated and reinterpreted by the Galilean in that synagogue in Nazareth on a Sabbath when he assured them that their hopes were not in vain, but were fulfilled that very day in his person.
As he had done once before, the Most High God was doing that day, visiting his people, hearing their cries, and releasing them from their bondage. But, whereas before he told them he would not show them his face, speaking instead from a burning bush, or in a cloud, or in the fog atop Mount Sinai, now he breaks his rule, showing them his face, his spirit radiating in the man of Galilee. “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,” the Galilean would tell his followers soon enough, leaving no doubt that God was acting in human history again.
And, true to his word, the Galilean did all that he had promised on that day in Nazareth, thereafter making his way through Galilee, healing the sick, freeing the oppressed, and offering good news to the poor. Wherever he went, often in the most hopeless corners of the province, hope was replenished and restored as the sick were healed and the lost were found and demons of every sort were destroyed, proving that trust in the Lord is not misplaced.
Yes, even at the end, when everything looked hopeless, the Galilean teacher struggling as he drew his last breath on the cross, and his followers hiding or running away, telling others that they had put their hopes in him, but in vain, the Most High God came through, removing the rock from the tomb, and allowing the one imprisoned inside to walk alive into the rising sunlight.
As we make this journey from the synagogue to the cemetery alongside the Galilean Teacher in the weeks ahead, we will see time and again how he resurrects hope in situations where hope has died, refusing to allow hopelessness a place to stay, offering instead a world where hope is still found in a cup of water, in a shared meal, in a warm embrace.
The lesson for us is the same as it was for the townsfolk in Nazareth as they listened to their hometown boy promise good news in a world very used to bad news. For one, we must allow his words to rekindle our capacity to hope, beaten, bruised, and battered as it has been by the wrongs of the world. Let his words be a lifeline for us as we feel weariness in our bones and find foolishness in thinking things will get better. We cannot allow evil to steal the last thing we hold in our hearts, hope.
But it is not enough that we are warriors for hope, fighting for it, believing in it; we also must be dispensers of hope, allowing hope to flow from us, filling other people’s lives with hope. Like the Galilean Teacher, whom we imitate and follow, we bring glad tidings to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom to the oppressed.
We live in a world where hope is crushed every single day, a world where the poor see no tomorrow, where the blind see no light, and where the oppressed see no escape. For too many, hope, the expectation that there is something better, has been deemed childish and fanciful, best left in fairytales and lunatic asylums. They live in a world without hope, a painful world deprived of air to breathe, sunlight to see, ground to stand on.
Our responsibility, as imitators of the Galilean who returned hope to the world, is to do as he did, bringing good news–another word for hope–to people who spent their last dollar of hope a long time ago, now penniless and pitiful in a prison of hopelessness. If we fail in our duty as agents of hope, our world becomes even darker and deadlier than it is.
In her heart-breaking and heart-warming book, Hope Will Find You, the writer Naomi Levy, an ordained Jewish rabbi, tells of her hopelessness as she blindly navigated through the early days of her young daughter, Noa’s, disease, days without answers, days without direction, struggling to find a way through the darkness and through her doubts.
After several years of feeling lost and alone, she finds her way again, telling us, “Hope will find you. That’s a pretty bold promise. It’s not something I believed. I thought it was our job to find hope or to hold onto hope. Because if you lose hope, how will you ever get it back again?” She continues, “But Noa taught me to see that hope was looking for me, that hope will track us all down.”
“It’s even okay to lose hope sometimes, not the end of the world, because hope won’t lose you. Hope’s got your number and your address. It’s personal.” She ends her book with these words, “I’m no longer one of the skeptics. Once I started believing it, I started seeing it. Hope comes in the form of helping hands. It comes when someone offers the words you need to hear, just at the moment when you need to hear them most. Hope arrives in all sorts of disguises. When hope comes,” she wrote, “offer it a chair.”
Hope, as we have seen, came to Nazareth one day, disguised as an ordinary man, but anything but ordinary, spoke ordinary words, but anything but ordinary, and reminded ordinary people, but anything but ordinary, that theirs was a God who had heard their cries, had found them in their darkness, and had anointed him to bring them good news.
Those who heard him also felt the first flutter of something inside them and felt the first clatter of chains outside them. And those who believed could say, as did a bold, black preacher many centuries later who also knew a thing or two about hopes and dreams, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty we’re free at last!”
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 