The Spirit of the Lord [is] upon me, because he hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised, to preach the acceptable year of the Lord (Luke 4:18-19).
This passage from Isaiah 61:1-2a is the scripture Jesus used to define his ministry in the book of Luke. Throughout his ministry Jesus returned to it, declaring that he did not come for the healthy but for the sick (Matthew 9:12) and that he didn't come for those who could see, but for those who were blind (John 9:39).
Jesus' ministry was directed to needy people - the poor, those who sorrow, the blind and the slaves. We have already seen these were the people who went to Jesus for healing and deliverance - they were the types of people that Isaiah spoke about and they were the types of people Jesus believed he was called to.
ISAIAH 61 IN CONTEXT
Isaiah 61:1-2 was a celebration of bringing health, rebuilding, and prosperity to the poor and powerless (Israel). Isaiah 60 and 61 promised that the Gentiles and their rulers would give their honor, servitude and finances to Israel. It was the world of politics, economy, power and dominion brought under Israel's feet; and as I have already pointed out, this was the dream of the people that heard Jesus preach - a dream of being free from the dominion of foreigners and money hungry rulers - a dream they hoped to see through Jesus. It was a dream that served the interests and popular beliefs of those who followed Jesus.
According to the book of Mark, Jesus tried to direct the disciples away from the view that the messiah was a political ruler who was to fulfill their dreams of political and economic freedom, but rather Jesus told his disciples that his job was to serve and suffer for others (Matthew 8:33ff). Jesus gave the same job position to his disciples.
During his time in the desert Jesus rejected the tempter's offer for the world and all its glory, yet after his resurrection, the early church believed that Jesus was going to return very quickly to receive the kingdom, the world and all its glory and that he was going to rule the earth much as Isaiah 60 and 61 stated.
So here is the long and short of it all. Jesus quoted a scripture passage about his ministry that ignored the political surroundings of that same passage. This was not unusual for NT writers, who oftentimes quoted scripture with little or no concern for the original context of the OT scripture ("he will be called a Nazarene; out of Egypt I will call my son, a virgin will conceive," and so on), so it is very possible that Jesus' quoted from Isaiah 61, not thinking of the context of the passage.
OT scripture passages that were fulfilled by Jesus according the the NT, were oftentimes fulfilled first of all in their own day, hundreds of years before Jesus was born. The NT church saw in those same scripture passages another fulfillment in Christ.
Let me give an example. During Isaiah's day 2 armies stood outside of Jerusalem waiting to take the city. King Ahaz worried about the future of Jerusalem, but Isaiah told him not to fear because God would deliver Jerusalem from their enemies. Isaiah then told the king to ask the Lord for a sign, which the king refused to do... so Isaiah told him that God would give a sign. A virgin (Hebrew = virgin or young woman) would give birth to a son named Immanuel (meaning "God with us") and before the child would be old enough to know right from wrong, the kings would be gone (Isaiah 7:14). As Isaiah predicted, before the child was old enough to know better, the armies had left.
Taken by itself, without any context, Isaiah 7:14 looks like its only a random prophecy about Jesus and nothing else. But the context clearly reveals that Isaiah was talking about the situation in his own day, 700 years before Jesus was born. His young wife and their child were signs to King Ahaz, that God was the one delivering Jerusalem, because He had not abandoned them... He was still with them. Hundreds of years later the NT Church saw something else in Isaiah 7. They saw a new fulfillment, in their day, that Jesus was born from a virgin, which was a sign that God was with them. But in order for the verse to fit best to Jesus' situation Isaiah's context was left out.
Getting back to the scripture that Jesus used to define his ministry in Luke 4 - Jesus quoted a passage in Isaiah that was loaded with political meaning when it was written by Isaiah, but without its context it was emptied of politics and economics.
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