The One They Were Waiting For
Luke 4:20-21 "And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, 'Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.'"
Sabbath morning, around AD 28. The synagogue at Nazareth, a small Galilean village of perhaps 400 people. The local boy, the carpenter's son, the one whose family everyone knew, had returned from a few months traveling and was visiting the synagogue of His hometown. As the worship moved through its ordered liturgy of psalms and Torah reading, He stood up to read from the Prophets. The synagogue attendant handed Him the scroll of Isaiah.
He unrolled it. He found the place He was looking for. He read.
"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor" (Luke 4:18-19, quoting Isaiah 61:1-2).
Then He rolled the scroll back up. He handed it to the attendant. He sat down. (In the first-century synagogue, you stood to read and you sat to teach. Every eye in the room was on Him, waiting for whatever sermon was about to come.)
He said one sentence.
"Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21).
Nine words. Nine words that ended 700 years of waiting.
Notice that He didn’t say, this Scripture is beginning to be fulfilled. He didn’t say, this Scripture is partly about Me. He said, today this Scripture has been fulfilled. In your hearing. The Old Testament's centuries of longing met their consummation in a single sentence in a small-town synagogue, on a single Sabbath morning, from the lips of a Jewish carpenter who had grown up running through the streets the synagogue sat on.
The room responded by trying to throw Him off a cliff.
This is the heart of why we have walked through this week. The hardest people to convince that the Old Testament is about Jesus are sometimes the people who know the Old Testament best. We can have head knowledge of every chapter and verse and miss the One the chapters are about. We can sit through years of preaching and never recognize the face on the page. The synagogue at Nazareth knew their Bibles. They had memorized Isaiah. They had heard the Spirit of the Lord is upon me recited during their childhood. And when the One the verse was about stood up and read it in front of them, they couldn’t see Him.
We’ve spent six days this week looking. Hunt's painting of the boy in the temple. Michelangelo's serpent and the protoevangelium. The Passover lamb who became the Lamb. The Rock in the wilderness. Isaiah's Suffering Servant on the chariot road. Daniel's seventy weeks counted by a Hungarian rabbi. Six different windows. One Christ. He has been hidden in plain sight on every page of the Old Testament we have ever read.
And this morning we gather as a church to hear this same Book spoken to us. This is the wonder of the body of Christ. We are wild branches, drinking from the same Jewish root that is Christ Himself (Rom 11:17-24).
Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 3:18 that "we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another." The Christ we behold on every page of the Old Testament is the Christ we are becoming as we look. He is making a people, Jew and Gentile together, who live, love, and give like the Jesus the Hebrew Scriptures have been describing all along.
Today: Arrive today as someone who has been beholding Him all week. Sing like a person who has heard from God in Genesis and Exodus and Isaiah and Daniel. Receive today’s preaching like someone who has been searching the Scriptures with new eyes for six days.
Prayer: "Father, I worship You for the wonder of a Christ hidden in plain sight on every page of Your Word. Thank You that the Old Testament we have walked through this week is alive with the face of Your Son. Gather us today as a people who have been beholding Him all week, and send me out still looking. In Jesus' name, Amen."
-PK