Sermon: “A People Whom the Lord Has Blessed”

Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11

3^rd Sunday of Advent (B)

December 14, 2008

Every year at this time we all look forward to the Christmas program presented by the children and youth of our church.  With the help of some very able and dedicated adult leaders, they never fail to warm our hearts and to make the Christmas story fresh and vibrant.  The theme for their presentation this year is the Advent calendar.  You all know how Advent calendars work.  Many of you enjoyed them when you were children, and some of you have them in your homes.  Each day of the Advent season, there is a flap or door on the calendar; and behind it is a part of the Christmas story.  Opening them one day at a time, we naturally slow down and savor the Christmas story piece by piece until finally we arrive at the climax.  (We do the same thing when we use our Advent devotional books.)  Of course our program this morning necessarily must include all the days of the calendar so that the full story is presented.  Even so, the measured pace of the program will help us think about each element of the story.  I’m sure that our anticipation will grow as the calendar reaches nearer and nearer to Christmas day.

As we consider our text from Isaiah this morning, we might even think of this passage as a very early door in the great Advent calendar of God’s gracious plan for the world.  As Robert read the text, you may have noted its structure—how it begins in the first person singular, with the verses “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor . . . .”  Then the middle of the passage continues with a section in which God is the speaker.  Finally, the chapter concludes by going back to the first person.  The identity of this speaker has been debated for years.  We might assume that, since the book is called Isaiah, the person speaking here is none other than the prophet Isaiah, who lived and worked in the 700s, the eighth century before Christ.  Indeed, many of the early chapters of Isaiah are traced directly to that individual prophet.  But chapter 61, which comes near the end of the book, probably was written a century or more after the death of Isaiah of Jerusalem.  Scholars believe it was written by other prophets who followed in the tradition of Isaiah and applied his message to the events of their day.  And so, the first-person speaker of Isaiah 61 might have been a follower of the original Isaiah. 

Yet another possibility—suggested by Brevard Childs[1] and others—is that the person speaking in chapter 61 is the so-called “suffering servant” of earlier chapters of Isaiah.[2]  For the writers of Isaiah, this person was someone who would relieve the people of Israel from their oppression.  But the deliverance would come not with a mighty army, but only through the suffering of the servant.  You probably know these prophecies best through the words of the Easter portion of Handel’s Messiah—words like “He was despised and rejected of men: a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief.  Surely he hath born our sins and carried our sorrows; he was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities;  . . . and with his stripes we are healed.  . . .  All we like sheep have gone astray.”[3]  This is the one who in our reading this morning is comforting those who mourn, giving them flowers instead of ashes and helping them build up the devastation of former generations.  Since we Christians have long connected these prophecies with Jesus, I need to say here that the ancient Israelites probably understood them metaphorically.  In all likelihood, to them the suffering servant was not an individual at all, but rather was the entire nation of Israel, whose sufferings—according to the prophecy—would produce redemption for themselves and for the rest of the world. 

Indeed, were it not for something Jesus did, we might not even connect these verses with him and with the Christmas story.  According to Luke,[4] near the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry Jesus came to his hometown of Nazareth.  It was the Sabbath, and he was the honored guest; so he was given the privilege of reading from the scriptures and teaching from them.  The lectionary passage for the day happened to be Isaiah 61.  He read the same words that we did this morning, saying, “The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed[5] me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, . . . [and] to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”  As Luke tells it,[6] when he finished reading, the “eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him.”  Then he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”  Thus, Jesus identified himself with the first-person speaker in our passage today and, to the extent they were connected in his mind, with the suffering servant passages in Isaiah. 

The earliest Christians, including Luke, remembered this incident at the Nazareth synagogue and began to make strong connections between the life of Jesus and what they read in Isaiah about the coming of the messianic age.  Not only chapter 61 and the suffering servant passages, but also many other prophecies in Isaiah were re-interpreted as foreshadowing the coming of Christ.  Indeed, Christians have found so many connections in Isaiah that this book has sometimes been called the “Fifth Gospel.”[7]  And what is true of Isaiah is also true of the rest of what we call the Old Testament.  Remember that in the earliest years Christians had no New Testament; the Old Testament was their entire Bible.  After decades of co-existence in the local synagogues, first century Christians eventually broke off from the other Jews, who did not share the Christian view of Old Testament prophecy.  We still can learn much from the Jewish interpretations, but for Christians the prophecies remind us of Christ.  The fact that Jesus himself was the first to make this connection adds to our confidence that our interpretations are legitimate, at least for Christians.

And so Isaiah 61 is a very early door in the Advent calendar, promising that God would send a suffering servant who would bring relief to the oppressed, justice to the abused, and food to the hungry.  We now understand that we in the church, Gentiles who have been adopted into God’s family of faith through the sacrifice of Christ, are among the “people whom the Lord has blessed.”  Jesus was the one who first opened this Advent door for us, and we have been walking through it ever since.