Where He Stopped Reading

In the synagogue at Nazareth they handed Jesus the scroll of Isaiah, and he unrolled it and began to read the opening lines of chapter sixty-one. Then he did something the room would have felt: he stopped in the middle of a sentence. He read as far as "the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:19), and there he rolled up the scroll and sat down. One clause further on, Isaiah had written "and the day of vengeance of our God" (Isaiah 61:2). Jesus did not read it. "And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him" (Luke 4:20).

What Isaiah had announced was jubilee — the buried year when debts were cancelled, slaves walked free, and each family came home to the land it had lost (Leviticus 25). The prophet lets the images pile up: good news to the poor, the brokenhearted bound up, "liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound" (Isaiah 61:1). This is not a ladder lowered so we might climb out of our own pits; it is a herald come to say the debt is settled and the doors stand open — the word that turns prisoners of hope into free men. And to those sitting in ashes — the old posture of grief, dust on the head — he promises a trade: beauty for ashes, the oil of gladness for mourning, a garment of praise for a fainting spirit (Isaiah 61:3).

But listen to who is speaking. "The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me" (Isaiah 61:1). To anoint was to pour oil over a man and set him apart for an office — prophet, priest, or king. So when Jesus closed the scroll and said, "Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21), he was not merely quoting a favorite prophet; he was naming himself as the Anointed One Israel had waited for — the Christ, for that is what the word means. The jubilee had a face now, and it had just sat down in front of them.

And that is why he stopped where he stopped. Favor and vengeance sit a comma apart in Isaiah's sentence, but they did not fall on the same day. Jesus came the first time to proclaim the year of favor; the day of vengeance he carried away into himself. Preaching this very passage, Tim Keller draws the two Isaiahs together: the conquering King of chapter 11 and the suffering Servant of chapter 53 are one Person — the King who took our ashes to give us his beauty.¹ At the cross he was stripped of the garment of praise and wrapped in our shame, seated among our ashes so the trade could run the other way. He wore our mourning that ours might become the oil of gladness, and became a man of sorrows to "comfort all who mourn" (Isaiah 61:2) — to hand the grieving the day when the tears are wiped from every face.

So the scroll is still open at the year of the Lord's favor, and the reading has not moved on. The prison stands unlocked, the ashes are being swept up, and the One who announced it all is no distant herald — he is the Reader who paused mid-verse because the favor was for us and the vengeance he kept for himself. The year of favor is now. Come, and be given beauty for ashes.