“1 The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me, because the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners, 2 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God, to comfort all who mourn, 3 and provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.”
In a little while we will be turning off the lights for the candlelight service. We will cover ourselves in darkness. There is something quite meaningful about a candlelight service with is lights piercing the darkness. The world is a dark place, dark place. There are broken hearts. There is overwhelming grief. There is injustice and debilitating poverty. There is deep darkness. In the midst of this darkness, there is a light. Christ is the light of the world and that’s what a candlelight service is most appropriate at Christmas. Christ came to bring light into the darkness. That’s the claim of this sermon: Christ came to bring light into the darkness.
We will study this in two points. First: Jesus’ first and second coming. Second: the light of Christ.
First: Jesus’ first and second coming. We’ve been studying the servant songs in Isaiah. This isn’t one of them, but Jesus knew that this Scripture had to do with him. He chose to start his ministry with this passage. When I came here, I chose to open Ephesians 1, “that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of his glorious inheritance in his holy people, and his incomparably great power for us who believe.” I chose that because you don’t need me. You need God’s power. We all do.
Jesus chose to start with a text that was about his power. He can do that because he’s God. He chose to start with this text we are studying tonight. He opened it up to the synagogue in his hometown. He read this passage and then Luke tells us, ‘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. He began by saying to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”’
Jesus thought that his arrival was the beginning of Isaiah 61. He thought his arrival was good news for people who needed help—for the poor, for the brokenhearted, for the grieving, for people in despair. That’s some self-confidence; “don’t worry. I’m here.” Any mere man should be embarrassed to offer himself as the solution to life’s problems. Jesus only spoke those words because he knew himself to be more than a mere man. He knew himself to be up to the task of offering what only God could offer.
Now Jesus didn’t read all our text that day in Nazareth. If you have your Bible open, I can show you where he stopped. He stopped at the word “favor” in verse 2, “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” He stopped for a reason. Notice what comes next—“the day of vengeance of our God.” Jesus stopped reading because his first coming isn’t the about the vengeance of our God. That’s his second coming. Jesus’ first coming is about God’s favor. His second coming is about God’s vengeance. Jesus described this first coming in John 3:17, “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” He described his second coming in John 5:22, “the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son.”
Notice the relative durations of time between the year of the Lord’s favor and the day of vengeance of our God. A year is far greater than a day. The favor of the Lord is much more the focus of this passage than the vengeance of God. Our flesh tends to assume that God is big on vengeance and short on favor. This passage and the difference between a year and day shows us that our flesh is quite wrong. The Ten Commandments show us the same. His anger is to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Him. His love is to a thousand generations of those who love Him. God majors in showing favor and love. His wrath is His “strange work” as the Puritans put it. It isn’t what He enjoys doing.
Jesus announced the year of the Lord’s favor. He announced that sinners like us could be right with God. He showed light to we who live in the darkness. Another way of thinking about this year of the Lord’s favor is as the year of Jubilee. Every fifty years, the Israelites were supposed to cancel all the debts of the past fifty years. It was something like a “restore factory settings” button for society.
A year ago, we bought a smart TV. After adding the smart capabilities, I realized that I didn’t want them. I didn’t like how movies to rent were just there on the home page for kids to see. I disconnected the TV from the internet but everything that had been downloaded was still there. I deleted what I could manually but there was still stuff that I didn’t think appropriate for children on the home page that I couldn’t delete. So, I found the found the “restore factory settings” command, hit it, and never connected it back to the internet. The TV is now just as it was when it came out of the box. That’s kind of what the year of Jubilee was like. It reset society to the way it was when it came out of the box. If you were in debt, your debt was cancelled. If you lost your land, you got your land back. Maybe you want a restart button for your life. Maybe you want a fresh start. Jesus said his first coming—Christmas—is the real Jubilee. This is the fresh start we need. This is the fresh start we celebrate this season.
Now we are going to think about this freshness. We are going to think about this newness Jesus brings to this sad, old world in our second point: the light of Christ. What we are going to do here is take Jesus at his word when he said, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” We are going to work our way through the light in the midst of the darkness in these verses and see how Jesus brought and brings that. When the darkness falls and we light the candles, think about this light in the darkness—good news to the poor, mended hearts, comfort in grief.
We’ll work our way through this passage. First, is good news to the poor; “the Lord has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” No one who heard Jesus speak those words in Nazareth could imagine the affluence of our society. That’s not to say that our financial difficulties are meaningless or inconsequential. It’s just to say that the grinding hopelessness of being poor in an ancient society is almost unimaginable to us. There was no real financial mobility in the first century. If your dad was dirt poor, you were going to be dirt poor and there was nothing you could do about it. There was no hope of advancement. Jesus brought some genuinely good news to people who had no real good news—the overwhelming majority people alive in his day. There actually was hope for them. There was something beyond their lives which to them seemed almost entirely meaningless. It’s no surprise that the church spread like wildfire among the poor. The fact that church is largely a middle-class affair in this nation should give us real pause.
Jesus was and is good news for the poor. He also repairs broken hearts; “He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted.” This language of being brokenhearted is about being broken hearted before God. It isn’t about Jesus mending the heartbreak of a man who been passed over for a promotion but wants nothing to do with God. Jesus mends the hearts of those who cry out, “how long O Lord!” Jesus fills the hearts who hunger and thirst for righteousness—who hunger and thirst for the way things ought to be. He fills the hearts who know they need filling and who want to be filled by God. As Calvin put it, “Christ is promised to none but those who have been humbled and overwhelmed by a conviction of their distresses, who have no lofty pretensions, but keep themselves in humility…”
Jesus is good news for those who know they need God’s charity. My guess is that you’ve probably seen the Salvation Army folks ringing the bell at stores collecting money for those in need. They do it so those in need can have a Merry Christmas. The only people who receive that the gift of that money are those who are willing to receive charity. The only people who receive Jesus are those who are happy to receive God’s charity. To be properly broken hearted before God is to recognize that you a divine charity case.
Next, we see good news for the captives and prisoners; as verse 1 puts it, “to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners.” This is about justice. This is about individuals and society becoming the way it is supposed to be. If being poor in the first century was a hopeless situation, being in prison was even worse. A fair percentage of the people were in prison simply because they were in debt. Now they could get out of prison if only they could pay off that debt. If you are wondering how a man could earn enough money while he was in prison to pay off a debt that he couldn’t pay off when he was working outside of prison, you are starting to see the bondage of living in such a society. Life is better than that today. It’s better largely due to the influence of people who follow Jesus who came, “to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners,” as verse 1 put it.
We are going to group the next five kindnesses of Jesus together because they all make the same point. Jesus came, as verses 2-3 put it, “to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion—to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair.”
Jesus brings hope to hopeless people. He has been doing it for centuries. Don and Lori Chaffer wrote about what it was like for their hopeless hearts to find hope. Their song says, “I was a hungry child, a dried up river; I was a burned out forest, and no one could do anything for me, but You put food in my body, water in my dry bed, and to my blackened branches You brought the springtime rain of new life, and nothing is impossible for You.”
That is the story of every Christian. Every Christian was a hungry child, a dried up river, a burned out forest for whom no one could do anything, and Jesus came and put food in your body, water in your dry bed, and to your blackened branches he brought the springtime rain of new life. That’s why you know nothing is impossible for him. Jesus came to make you new—to replace your despair with celebration. Jesus loves to do that. As Dane Ortlund puts it, “If you are in Christ, you have a Friend who, in your sorrow, will never lob down a pep talk from heaven. He cannot bear to hold himself at a distance. Nothing can hold him back. His heart is too bound up with yours.”
This passage ends with a return to the beginning—a return to the beginning of Isaiah. The book of Isaiah began by telling the people, because of your sin, “You will be like an oak with fading leaves, like a garden without water.” That’s a withering, dying oak. Jesus makes those dying oaks new; verse 3, “They will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the Lord for the display of his splendor.”
At the beginning of the book, the people were a dying oak because they were poisoning themselves with their sin. Here near the end of the book we see that this coming Christ will make these trees as lively as in the garden of Eden. Jesus saves people from what their own sin has done to them.
In a few moments, we will be turning off the lights. We will make it dark. Do you know who turned off the lights of this world? Do you know who brought on the darkness we live in everyday? Us. Chesterton gets it right. The London Times once sent out an inquiry to famous authors asking them to write an answer to the question, “what’s wrong with the world?” Chesterton’s was by far the shortest. He wrote, “Dear Sir, I am.” What’s wrong with the world? I am. Who plunged us into darkness? We did. Think about that when we turn off the lights in a moment. As you hear Scripture read and the voices around you sing Christmas carols, consider where the only light comes from. The darkness is worse than we understand, but in the midst this darkness, there is a light. Christmas is all about the light of the world. Amen.