A sermon by the late Rev. Thurlow B. Weed III, of Trinity Presbyterian Church, Key West, Florida. Preached on 9 February 1969 and again 18 August 1974.
Revised & reworked by Rt. Rev. Thurlow B. Weed IV.
Jesus had rather extraordinary qualifications for preaching in the synagogue..,
This reading follows right after the story of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. You will recall that great section of Luke 4 where the scene is described, along with the three temptations themselves: 1) If you are the son of God, command the stone to be made into bread; 2) I will give you all of these kingdoms of you worship me; and 3) cast yourself from the pinnacle, because the angels will keep you from being hurt.
After Jesus overcame the evil spirit with his masterful replies, he let it appear how he was under the influence of the good spirit, the Holy Spirit. He returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee and taught in the synagogue.
He had been tempted by the evil spirit, but was sustained by the good spirit, and went on to reveal himself as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy If we hope to overcome the evil spirit that tempts us, here we find the way – in the power of the Holy Spirit.
So Jesus returned from the desert of temptation into the power of the Holy Spirit, and began to teach the Jews in the synagogue. We find it stated quite clearly that he went into the synagogue as his custom was. In other words, Jesus was a church-goer. He did not sit around under the shade of a tree, on the grass, telling everyone what was wrong with the world, as so many young people do today, and quite properly. He went, instead, into the synagogue to read and teach the word of God. Furthermore, Jesus was the word of God, he was in himself the key to the human situation. Today many groups of people identify rather closely with Jesus, and these groups are indeed the key to the present situation, but those who identify with Jesus of Nazareth must also FOLLOW him and obey his commandments.
On this particular day, Jesus was in the synagogue in Nazareth, and he was accepted by the people, because he read the scripture for all to hear. This also tells us that Jesus was popular with the elders of the synagogue, since no one could read the scriptures without their permission.
He stood up to read; he unrolled the scroll and found the proper place to begin reading. But there is another sense of book-opening that we can find here. The New Testament must be read in the light of the Old Testament. Jesus opened the Old Testament, bringing light and life into its pages. Christ opens for us the book of life; but unless the Holy Spirit moves in us as we read the Bible, it is an empty book with no special merit. Jesus opens our understanding, and he can open our souls.
And then he reads the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me and sent me.” Jesus had rather extraordinary qualifications for preaching in the synagogue, although the elders didn’t know it. The people who knew him thought they knew him pretty well, who he was, but they were quite mistaken. It sometimes can happen that we hear the voice of God coming from someone that we think we know pretty well, and someone we would not expect it from.
After Jesus overcame the evil spirit with his masterful replies, he let it appear how he was under the influence of the good spirit, the Holy Spirit. He returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee and taught in the synagogue.
He had been tempted by the evil spirit, but was sustained by the good spirit, and went on to reveal himself as the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy If we hope to overcome the evil spirit that tempts us, here we find the way – in the power of the Holy Spirit.
So Jesus returned from the desert of temptation into the power of the Holy Spirit, and began to teach the Jews in the synagogue. We find it stated quite clearly that he went into the synagogue as his custom was. In other words, Jesus was a church-goer. He did not sit around under the shade of a tree, on the grass, telling everyone what was wrong with the world, as so many young people do today, and quite properly. He went, instead, into the synagogue to read and teach the word of God. Furthermore, Jesus was the word of God, he was in himself the key to the human situation. Today many groups of people identify rather closely with Jesus, and these groups are indeed the key to the present situation, but those who identify with Jesus of Nazareth must also FOLLOW him and obey his commandments.
On this particular day, Jesus was in the synagogue in Nazareth, and he was accepted by the people, because he read the scripture for all to hear. This also tells us that Jesus was popular with the elders of the synagogue, since no one could read the scriptures without their permission.
He stood up to read; he unrolled the scroll and found the proper place to begin reading. But there is another sense of book-opening that we can find here. The New Testament must be read in the light of the Old Testament. Jesus opened the Old Testament, bringing light and life into its pages. Christ opens for us the book of life; but unless the Holy Spirit moves in us as we read the Bible, it is an empty book with no special merit. Jesus opens our understanding, and he can open our souls.
And then he reads the words of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me and sent me.” Jesus had rather extraordinary qualifications for preaching in the synagogue, although the elders didn’t know it. The people who knew him thought they knew him pretty well, who he was, but they were quite mistaken. It sometimes can happen that we hear the voice of God coming from someone that we think we know pretty well, and someone we would not expect it from.
There is an old saying – quite true – that bad money drives out good.
He was to preach to the poor. And that does not necessarily mean those with very tiny pocketbooks. Primarily it means those who are spiritually poor, who have tiny souls, who have no richness in their spirit, those who live across the surface of life without getting their feet wet. A great many people are like a hydrofoil, the bot that gets up on stilts and zooms across the water with the entire hull suspended above the water. Never touching, never having any concept of the depths and richness under the surface. Does the preaching of Jesus have nothing to say to us if we ourselves are like that? Of course it does! In Christ is the richness of the kingdom of heaven.
He was to preach the deliverance of the captives. The Gospel of Christ is the Gospel of Liberty. The liberty of giving to God all the worship he wants us to. The liberty of being at peace with other people, and that is a precious liberty indeed; the liberty of driving out evil with good.
There is an old saying – quite true – that bad money drives out good. Just try to find a coin made out of silver these days! But in the realm of the spirit, the opposite is true: the good drives out the bad. Where there is good, bad or evil cannot exist. When you light a candle in a dark room, the darkness ceases to exist. The liberty of Christ is the liberty to drive out evil with good in our little place in the world.
According to the prophecy, Jesus was to recover sight to the blind, which is another way of saying the same thing. Thought Jesus quite literally restored sight to the blind in some of his miracles, there is a more profound meaning to this – that of restoring spiritual sight, the ability to see and interpret and understand everything that is and that happens in the light of eternity.
When we cannot see the evil that is around us, and cannot see the evil that woks in us and through us, then we are really blind. When we cannot see the good that we are capable of doing to drive out the evil, we are blind. Too many people think of the church as a handy place to come to on Sunday, a nice place, a place that we feel we should come. But why should we come? We can find God anywhere in the world, and He can find us wherever we go. It is in the church that the Gospel of Jesus is preached, and where we can begin to find the restoration of our spiritual sight – if we are willing.
He was to preach the deliverance of the captives. The Gospel of Christ is the Gospel of Liberty. The liberty of giving to God all the worship he wants us to. The liberty of being at peace with other people, and that is a precious liberty indeed; the liberty of driving out evil with good.
There is an old saying – quite true – that bad money drives out good. Just try to find a coin made out of silver these days! But in the realm of the spirit, the opposite is true: the good drives out the bad. Where there is good, bad or evil cannot exist. When you light a candle in a dark room, the darkness ceases to exist. The liberty of Christ is the liberty to drive out evil with good in our little place in the world.
According to the prophecy, Jesus was to recover sight to the blind, which is another way of saying the same thing. Thought Jesus quite literally restored sight to the blind in some of his miracles, there is a more profound meaning to this – that of restoring spiritual sight, the ability to see and interpret and understand everything that is and that happens in the light of eternity.
When we cannot see the evil that is around us, and cannot see the evil that woks in us and through us, then we are really blind. When we cannot see the good that we are capable of doing to drive out the evil, we are blind. Too many people think of the church as a handy place to come to on Sunday, a nice place, a place that we feel we should come. But why should we come? We can find God anywhere in the world, and He can find us wherever we go. It is in the church that the Gospel of Jesus is preached, and where we can begin to find the restoration of our spiritual sight – if we are willing.
So how then do we live this Gospel?
Jesus also came to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord. His message is that we can be reconciled to God. The reference here is particularly to the Old Testament Year of Jubilee. This was a ritual time for the ancient Hebrews, when servants were set at liberty, when people being sued for debts in the courts were pardoned, when people who had mortgaged their lands had the mortgage forgiven. This is the sort of situation – spiritually speaking – that Jesus preaches to us. That we are servants who have been set free, that we are released from debt, that our spiritual mortgage is paid off for us. This is the acceptable year of the Lord.
So how then do we live this Gospel? How do we make the blind to see? How do we bring liberty to the captive? Jesus came as the Redeemer, not to save us by means of the Cross, but to redeem us – save us - from ourselves. He came to set us free from the spiritual prisons in which we have placed ourselves. Jesus came to show us, to teach us, that the kingdom of heaven is within each of us, and he taught us how to find that kingdom. And when we discover that kingdom within ourselves and each other, our eyes will be opened, and we who were once blind will now be able to see.
We will be able to see the evil and darkness that is all around us, and drive it away with the Light of Christ within us.
And just how do we accomplish that? There are two answers, one easy, the other a little harder. The easy one is to feed the hungry, visit the sick, and so forth. Look around your community; are there any needs that aren’t being met? Perhaps school lunches for children whose families are financially strapped, but not poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies? If you have the means, donate a hundred dollars to your local school district to make sure that every child received a meal, and that the food is paid for. Or get a group of people together through your church or even a book club and have a fundraiser to raise money for this; a pancake supper, a car wash, a bake sale.
From here we move on to the more challenging things. In the United States today, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia are very much on the rise under the current Administration. Chances are very good that each and every one of us knows someone who is a non-heterosexual and/or non-Caucasian. Almost daily we read or see on the news of a non-heterosexual non-Caucasian being bullied, attacked, or even killed. This is the evil, the darkness, that demands our Light to shine. People today would rather record the attack on their cellphones than come to the aid of the victim; these people are part of that darkness, they are the spiritually blind, the spiritually lame; they are prisoners of themselves and their own darkness.
So how then do we live this Gospel? How do we make the blind to see? How do we bring liberty to the captive? Jesus came as the Redeemer, not to save us by means of the Cross, but to redeem us – save us - from ourselves. He came to set us free from the spiritual prisons in which we have placed ourselves. Jesus came to show us, to teach us, that the kingdom of heaven is within each of us, and he taught us how to find that kingdom. And when we discover that kingdom within ourselves and each other, our eyes will be opened, and we who were once blind will now be able to see.
We will be able to see the evil and darkness that is all around us, and drive it away with the Light of Christ within us.
And just how do we accomplish that? There are two answers, one easy, the other a little harder. The easy one is to feed the hungry, visit the sick, and so forth. Look around your community; are there any needs that aren’t being met? Perhaps school lunches for children whose families are financially strapped, but not poor enough to qualify for school lunch subsidies? If you have the means, donate a hundred dollars to your local school district to make sure that every child received a meal, and that the food is paid for. Or get a group of people together through your church or even a book club and have a fundraiser to raise money for this; a pancake supper, a car wash, a bake sale.
From here we move on to the more challenging things. In the United States today, xenophobia, homophobia, and transphobia are very much on the rise under the current Administration. Chances are very good that each and every one of us knows someone who is a non-heterosexual and/or non-Caucasian. Almost daily we read or see on the news of a non-heterosexual non-Caucasian being bullied, attacked, or even killed. This is the evil, the darkness, that demands our Light to shine. People today would rather record the attack on their cellphones than come to the aid of the victim; these people are part of that darkness, they are the spiritually blind, the spiritually lame; they are prisoners of themselves and their own darkness.
We have the spirit of the Lord upon us..,
There is an excellent video series, available on YouTube, titled “WWYD?” (What Would You Do?). It features actors playing both the victim and the aggressor. Both are placed in a public situation and proceed according to the loosely scripted plan usually to deny service to someone in a restaurant, coffee shop, or other public place of accommodation. Cameras are strategically placed to record the reactions of the public when another human being is being discriminated against because of their skin colour, race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, perceived socio-economic status, or other perceived reasons.
The actor playing the aggressor is the one who is spiritually blind, a prisoner of himself. Generally, each episode reveals others standing or sitting nearby who are equally blind. Some are noticeably uncomfortable with the oppression they see playing out, yet remain silent.
But there are others, those who have spiritual sight, whose eyes are open, who intervene to make it clear to the aggressor/oppressor that their actions are unacceptable. They are not shy in “preaching” to the oppressor that the one they are oppressing is a human being – no more and no less - just like everyone else in the room; that race, skin colour, sexual orientation, etc. are not things to be used to discriminate; that these are all part of what makes us humans. In some episodes, there are even Christians teaching other Christians about what it means to be made in the image of God! They remind the other Christians of what Paul said – that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, slave nor free; that ALL are one in Christ.
This is how we can bring sight to the spiritually blind, and make the spiritually lame to walk. This is how we set each other free! This is how Jesus redeems us! This is how we bring Light and Healing into the darkness, to dispel the darkness and the evil and bad.
Nearly all of the spiritual darkness in the world around us is centered on one thing, and one thing alone: our inability to recognise or accept the human-ness of every person. Yet this is the central message of the Gospel Jesus the Christ – that we are all images of the same God.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me 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.”
In Christ, once we have been healed of our blindness and freed from our spiritual prisons, we are filled with the Christ spirit, and can then be Christ to others. We have the spirit of the Lord upon us, we are anointed to proclaim to the spiritually poor waiter who refuses to serve a Muslim that the Muslim is a human being and as a human being is worthy of his dignity. Thus do we bring sight to the spiritually blind, and thus do we bring freedom to those who are prisoners of themselves, as well as bring freedom to those who are prisoners of oppression and prejudice.
We are not just called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world – anyone can do that. We are called to BE Jesus Christ to the world, to LIVE the Gospel!
May our actions and words against oppression and discrimination be the Light of the Living Christ that brings healing and reconciliation, that brings sight to the blind and sets the prisoner free! Thanks be to God!
The actor playing the aggressor is the one who is spiritually blind, a prisoner of himself. Generally, each episode reveals others standing or sitting nearby who are equally blind. Some are noticeably uncomfortable with the oppression they see playing out, yet remain silent.
But there are others, those who have spiritual sight, whose eyes are open, who intervene to make it clear to the aggressor/oppressor that their actions are unacceptable. They are not shy in “preaching” to the oppressor that the one they are oppressing is a human being – no more and no less - just like everyone else in the room; that race, skin colour, sexual orientation, etc. are not things to be used to discriminate; that these are all part of what makes us humans. In some episodes, there are even Christians teaching other Christians about what it means to be made in the image of God! They remind the other Christians of what Paul said – that there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither male nor female, slave nor free; that ALL are one in Christ.
This is how we can bring sight to the spiritually blind, and make the spiritually lame to walk. This is how we set each other free! This is how Jesus redeems us! This is how we bring Light and Healing into the darkness, to dispel the darkness and the evil and bad.
Nearly all of the spiritual darkness in the world around us is centered on one thing, and one thing alone: our inability to recognise or accept the human-ness of every person. Yet this is the central message of the Gospel Jesus the Christ – that we are all images of the same God.
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me 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.”
In Christ, once we have been healed of our blindness and freed from our spiritual prisons, we are filled with the Christ spirit, and can then be Christ to others. We have the spirit of the Lord upon us, we are anointed to proclaim to the spiritually poor waiter who refuses to serve a Muslim that the Muslim is a human being and as a human being is worthy of his dignity. Thus do we bring sight to the spiritually blind, and thus do we bring freedom to those who are prisoners of themselves, as well as bring freedom to those who are prisoners of oppression and prejudice.
We are not just called to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ to the world – anyone can do that. We are called to BE Jesus Christ to the world, to LIVE the Gospel!
May our actions and words against oppression and discrimination be the Light of the Living Christ that brings healing and reconciliation, that brings sight to the blind and sets the prisoner free! Thanks be to God!
