It’s an ordinary Saturday morning in a small, unimportant town. The place is Nazareth, in the north of Israel. A synagogue—where Jewish people gathered each Sabbath to hear the Scriptures read and explained.

Almost everyone in the room knows the young man who stands up. They’ve perhaps watched him grow up, and know his family.

Someone hands him a scroll—a long roll of leather or papyrus, wound around two wooden rods. It is the book of Isaiah. He unrolls it, hunts for one particular place, and reads five lines about a man anointed by God’s Spirit. Then He rolls the scroll back up, hands it to the attendant, and sits down.

Luke tells us “the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him” (Luke 4:20). Then comes one sentence: “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21).

In minutes, the same neighbours are dragging him towards a cliff.

Something enormous has happened in the room. Three questions unlock it.

• Why does Jesus select this passage, out of the whole Old Testament?
• Why does He stop reading mid-sentence?
• And why does He do all of this at the very beginning of His public work, before a single miracle?

The Scroll He Chose—and How We Know He Chose It

Luke writes Jesus “unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written” (Luke 4:17). The word translated “found” means to search for something and locate it. A scroll has no page numbers and no chapter headings. Finding one short passage in a book the length of Isaiah takes deliberate effort. This wasn’t a random opening.

Some readers assume the passage was simply the set reading for that Sabbath. But the evidence for a fixed, published cycle of prophetic readings in the first century is thin, and it comes mostly from later sources. Kenneth Bailey, who spent decades studying the Gospels in their Middle Eastern setting, points out the readings from the Prophets allowed a reader far more freedom than readings from the Law. The reader could select, and even join related passages together.

Two small physical details carry weight in the scene:

• He stood up to read. Standing showed honour to the written Word of God. The text is above the reader.
• He sat down to preach. In that culture, a teacher sat to teach with authority. Before Jesus said a single word of His sermon, his body had already claimed the seat of the authorised teacher.

“The Spirit of the Lord Is upon Me”—What the Anointing Means

To anoint people meant to pour olive oil over their heads as a public sign God was appointing them to office. Prophets, priests and kings were anointed. The Hebrew word for “anointed one” is Messiah. The Greek word is Christos. So “Jesus Christ” isn’t a first name plus a family name. It’s a name plus a claim.

Read the passage He chose with that in mind, and the first line is a self-introduction. Luke has been building towards it for two chapters.

Table 1: How Luke traces the Spirit from the Jordan to the Nazareth synagogue

This is why the choice of Isaiah 61 is so exact. The reading interprets the baptism. What happened at the Jordan river wasn’t a private religious experience. It was ordination to the office of Messiah.

The historic teaching of the church has summarised that office under 3 heads. The Heidelberg Catechism asks why He is called Christ, and answers He was ordained by the Father and anointed by the Holy Spirit to be our chief Prophet, our only High Priest, and our eternal King.

John Calvin quotes Isaiah 61 at exactly this point in his Institutes when he explains the prophetic office. Herman Bavinck later worked the same 3 offices through the whole of Christ’s work. Isaiah 61 is the herald’s commission—but announcing a Jubilee was also a royal act and a priestly one.

The Line That’s Not in Isaiah 61

Now compare what Isaiah wrote with what Luke records Jesus reading. Most readers never do this, and it’s the key to the whole passage.

Table 2: Isaiah 61:1–2 compared with the words Luke records (both ESV)

Three things are happening here, and each is significant.

• One line is passed over. “To bind up the brokenhearted” doesn’t appear in the earliest manuscripts of Luke. Some later copies add it back, which is exactly what we’d expect a well-meaning scribe to do when he noticed the gap.
• One line is imported. “To set at liberty those who are oppressed” comes from Isaiah 58:6, a completely different chapter. In the ESV, Isaiah 58:6 reads “to let the oppressed go free”—the same idea, translated with different English words.
• The wording follows the Greek Old Testament. The Septuagint was the Greek translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, widely used across the ancient world. Where the Hebrew of Isaiah 61 speaks of opening a prison, the Greek speaks of sight for the blind. Luke follows the version his readers would recognise.

So why reach across 3 chapters to pull in a line from Isaiah 58? Because of a single word.

This is where 2 opposite mistakes are usually made. One flattens the passage into economics and social programmes, as though Jesus came chiefly to reorganise property. The other empties it of any earthly consequence at all, as if “poor” and “captive” were only poetic images. Luke won’t allow either. He uses one word for both the cancelled debt and the cancelled sin, and he means us to see that the second is the greater debt and the deeper prison. Darrell Bock, in his large commentary on Luke, argues this sermon functions as the programme for everything Jesus goes on to do—and everything He goes on to do includes both preaching and mercy, in that order and without separation.

“Today”—Luke’s 4 Great Moments

The first word of the sermon is the loudest. The Greek word is sēmeron, “today”. Luke uses it at 4 hinge points in his Gospel, and together they form a line running from the manger to the cross.

A timeline of Luke’s “today”

• Luke 2:11—the birth: unto you is born this day a Saviour, who is Christ the Lord.
• Luke 4:21—the synagogue: today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.
• Luke 19:9—the tax collector’s house: today salvation has come to this house.
• Luke 23:43—the cross: today you will be with me in paradise.

Promise doesn’t merely get explained in Luke’s Gospel. It gets inhabited. And notice how the book is framed: it opens with Jesus reading the Old Testament and saying it’s about Him, and it closes the same way. After the resurrection, on the Emmaus road, “beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, He interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself” (Luke 24:27). The first sermon and the last lesson make the same point. The Scriptures have a centre, and the centre is Him.

Where He Stopped—and Why It Wasn’t Editing

Now to the moment everyone asks about. Isaiah 61:2 is one sentence: “to proclaim the year of the LORD’s favour, and the day of vengeance of our God”. Jesus reads the first half and stops. He rolls up the scroll before the sentence is finished.

A popular reading online says Jesus was quietly deleting the angry God of the Old Testament, and that we should learn to filter our Bibles the same way. It’s a tidy story. It’s, however, impossible to sustain from Luke’s own text.

4 things make this the only reading that holds:

• Luke keeps the warnings. The same Gospel records Jesus pronouncing woe on unrepentant towns (Luke 10:13–15), warning of a judgement to fear (12:4–5), calling for repentance or perishing (13:3–5), weeping over the coming destruction of Jerusalem (19:41–44), and describing armies surrounding the city (21:20–24).
• This very sermon ends in judgement. 9 verses later, Jesus tells His neighbours God passed over the many needy people of Israel to show mercy to 2 foreigners. That’s a judgement oracle, and it’s why they try to kill Him.
• The mission comes in two visits, not one. Geerhardus Vos taught a generation to see what the prophets saw as a single horizon, the New Testament divides into two comings—a present age in which the kingdom is truly here, and an age to come in which it is here completely. Herman Ridderbos called this the kingdom that has arrived and is still arriving. What we now call the “already and not yet” is visible in miniature at Isaiah 61:2, in the gap between a clause read aloud and a clause left in silence.
• He didn’t remove the words. The scroll still said them. Jesus simply didn’t read them, because the day they describe hadn’t come. The scroll He rolled up that morning, He will one day unroll again.

An Acceptable Year, an Unacceptable Prophet

There’s wordplay in this passage that rarely survives translation. But it’s worth recovering because it’s the sharpest thing in the chapter.

The phrase in verse 19 is, literally, “the acceptable year of the Lord”. The Greek word for “acceptable” is dektos—welcome, received, warmly accepted. 5 verses later Jesus uses the identical word: “no prophet is acceptable in his hometown” (Luke 4:24).

The acceptable year walks into Nazareth, and Nazareth finds the herald unacceptable. That’s the tragedy of the scene stated in one repeated adjective. God’s welcome arrives; the welcome isn’t returned.

It begins politely enough. “All spoke well of him and marvelled at the gracious words that were coming from His mouth” (Luke 4:22). And then comes the sentence that sours everything: “Is not this Joseph’s son?” They can’t get past the ordinariness of him. Isaiah had said of the Servant He had no form or majesty that we should look at Him.

The prophecy was being fulfilled in the room. By the very people complaining about it.

Elijah, Elisha, and a Grace That Chooses

What turns admiration into murderous rage isn’t the claim to be the Messiah. It’s what Jesus says next.

He gives them two stories from their own Scriptures. In the days of Elijah, when famine gripped the land, there were many widows in Israel—and God sent His prophet to none of them, but to a foreign widow in Zarephath, in the territory of Sidon. In the days of Elisha, there were many lepers in Israel—and not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman, a commander in the Syrian army (Luke 4:25–27).

Read the 2 sentences slowly. The emphasis doesn’t fall on the foreigners. It falls on the word “many”. Many widows. Many lepers. And God, who owed mercy to none of them, freely gave it to 2 outsiders instead—rather than to Jews.

There’s a second thing in these two examples. A widow of Sidon and a soldier of Syria are both Gentiles—non-Jews. At the very opening of his Gospel, Luke has planted the seed of the book he will write next. In Acts, the pattern of this morning repeats city after city: the good news is proclaimed, many of the covenant people refuse it, and the messengers turn to the nations (Acts 13:46–47). Nazareth is the first instance when we see a pattern that will fill a second volume. David Pao has shown in detail how the language of Isaiah runs like a spine through the whole of Acts; it actually starts here.

From the Brow of the Hill to Golgotha

The congregation rises. They drive Him out of town and bring him “to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff” (Luke 4:29). And then Luke writes one of the quietest, strangest sentences in the Gospel: “But passing through their midst, He went away” (Luke 4:30).

No struggle is described. No miracle is announced. He simply walks out through a crowd that wants him dead. The point isn’t that He escaped, but that His death was never theirs to schedule. He will die on a hill, driven out of a city, by the will of God and at the hour of God. But not this hill. And not this morning.

Everything about the shape of the cross is already here in Chapter four: the rejection by His own people, the expulsion outside the town, the hill, the sovereign control of the timing. Luke’s readers are being taught how to read the rest of the book before the book has properly begun.

Why This Sermon Had to Come First

This brings us back to the timing. Why open a public ministry this way?

• Because appointment comes before announcement. The Spirit descends, the Son is tested in the wilderness and proved faithful where the first Adam and the nation of Israel both failed, and only then does He speak. The order is deliberate.
• Because the word comes before the works. The healings and exorcisms of Luke 4:31 onwards follow the sermon; they don’t replace it. Jesus begins His ministry not with a sign but with a text and an exposition. That order has shaped Christian worship ever since.
• Because Luke is arranging his material to teach. Luke tells Theophilus he is writing an orderly account (Luke 1:3). Orderly doesn’t have to mean strictly chronological; it means arranged so as to be understood. The Nazareth sermon is placed at the front because it’s the keynote for everything that follows.
• Because the rest of the Gospel keeps pointing back to it. When John the Baptist sends messengers to ask whether Jesus is the one, the answer is a list drawn straight from Isaiah, ending with “the poor have good news preached to them” (Luke 7:22). Years later, Peter summarises the whole ministry of Jesus in a single sentence built from the same passage: God “anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power” (Acts 10:38).

Everything Jesus does for the next 3 years is a footnote to 5 lines read aloud in a village synagogue.

Those Who Share His Anointing

This passage isn’t merely interesting history.

The Heidelberg Catechism, having explained why Jesus is called the Anointed One, immediately asks a second question: why are you called a Christian? The answer is that by faith you’re a member of Christ and so share in His anointing. The Spirit who rested on the Head without limit is poured out on the body. Luke 4 flows into Acts 2. Sinclair Ferguson has written movingly about this: the Spirit given to Christ for His work is the same Spirit given to Christ’s people for theirs. The church’s life isn’t an imitation of Jesus from a distance but a participation in what He has already received.

Which is why the church can never be embarrassed about preaching, and can never be indifferent to poverty or rejection. Both belong to the anointing. Both were in the scroll.

And it’s why the passage searches every reader. The categories Jesus read out that morning aren’t a description of an unfortunate minority somewhere else. Poor, captive, blind, oppressed—this is the human condition as God diagnoses it, and none of us can announce our own release. Someone has to come and proclaim it over us.

Someone did. He stood up in a small town, in front of people who’d known Him since He was a boy, and He told them the wait was over.

Related Reads

• Did Jesus Preach the Gospel?
• Jesus and the Sabbath: Did He Break It or Fulfil It?
• Why Was a Man Stoned for Gathering Sticks on Sabbath?
• Did Jesus Preach Works? Examining the Hardest Passages