Imagine: you have been waiting a long time for a surprise.
You know that it is coming, but not what, exactly, it will be. But you have a lot of time to think about it, so you have started to imagine just what it will be. A expensive gift, a lavish vacation, or even a promotion at work. Or maybe just a really great party, thrown in your honor.
But when the day of the surprise comes, it is not any of those things. It is not at all what you expected. Instead of being something special lavished upon you, the surprise is that you are being invited to help give a really great party in honor of a whole bunch of other people: people you don’t know well, or even like much. People who don’t seem deserving at all.
In Luke 4, Jesus shows that he is a prophet by reading from the book of Isaiah, and announcing its fulfillment. The part he reads does, in fact, announce good news, but it is emphatically NOT the good news that his hearers were expecting.
They wanted to hear that Jesus was about to trash their enemies.
Instead, Jesus says that God has sent him to:
“proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
The people listening to Jesus thought they were the ones who were oppressed and who needed to be set free from the Romans who ruled over them.
But Jesus was telling them something different: something that they really didn’t expect.
He was saying that God’s good news was for everyone—not just them in particular.
For everyone.
Even people they didn’t particularly like. Even people whose religions and cultures seemed strange, wrong, or even bad. People who were poor and people who they generally thought were beneath them.
Don’t you realize? Jesus asks. This has always been the way of God’s prophets–to help the forgotten ones, to give gifts and comfort to the unlikely.
And, worst of all, Jesus seemed to be asking them to help–to share what they had with people they weren’t quite sure were deserving of help at all!
The way of Jesus is so different from what we expect.
{I’m delighted and happy to show you the cover of the third book in the Telling God’s Story series–authored by me! It’s called The Unexpected Way. You can read more about the series here. The above is NOT an excerpt, but simply an illustration of why the book is titled as it is.}
