Day 21: A Little Less Vengeance, Please

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me... he has sent me to proclaim good news to the poor, to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor. —Luke 4:18–19

The Hometown Scroll

Jesus walks into the synagogue in Nazareth and opens his public ministry with a sermon. His parents are somewhere in the room. The neighbors who watched him grow up are watching. The attendant hands him the scroll of Isaiah. He unrolls it to what we now call chapter 61 and reads:

Then he rolls up the scroll, hands it back, and sits down.

But...that's not where Isaiah 61 ends. The next line in Isaiah reads, and the day of vengeance of our God. Jesus read up to the comma and stopped. He edited the scroll in real time and cut the vengeance out.

Cutting the Cherished Line

The "day of vengeance of our God" was no throwaway phrase. For centuries, Jewish people had been occupied by Babylon, Persia, Greece, and now Rome. The hope that God would one day settle the score was not a footnote. It was load-bearing. The people in that synagogue were waiting to hear it. Jesus read right up to it and declined.

Then he looked up and said, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing" (Luke 4:21). He was announcing his mission. Good news, release, favor, freedom. Those made the cut. The vengeance did not.

At first the hometown crowd is proud of him. Then Jesus starts naming who God's favor includes, a Gentile widow in Sidon and a Syrian general with leprosy, and the mood turns. They haul him to the edge of a cliff and try to throw him off. Jesus said too little about vengeance and too much about outsiders, and Nazareth decided he had to go.

The Vengeance That Never Came

Cutting the line from Isaiah is one thing. Refusing to enact it for an entire ministry is another.

Jesus's own cousin had been expecting a different sort of Messiah. John the Baptist, out in the wilderness, told everyone who waded into the Jordan, "The ax is already at the root of the trees. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be chopped down and thrown into the fire... his winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and gather the wheat into his granary, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire" (Matthew 3:10, 12). John was a Messiah-is-coming-with-an-ax preacher. He was not the only one.

Jesus shows up and throws nobody into a fire. He heals people, feeds people, forgives people, and confronts religious oppressors with a bluntness that makes middle-class Christians nervous. He does not lift a hand in violence against a single human being. When the hour comes to call down legions of angels from heaven (Matthew 26:53), he does not. He dies the most humiliating death the Roman Empire can invent. And after the resurrection, with every ground for vindication a person could imagine, he never picks up so much as a butter knife against his enemies.

Forty days of post-resurrection appearances, and not one of them is a retribution tour.

The Son Has the Scissors

The writer of Hebrews writes, "Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son" (Hebrews 1:1–2). The Son gets the final word on who God is and what God is up to.

That makes Jesus the interpretive key. When Isaiah and Jesus do not line up, Jesus wins. When Moses and Jesus do not line up, Jesus wins. When John the Baptist and Jesus do not line up, John loses. The Son speaks, and everything earlier submits to him. The Son also gets the scissors.

Your Turn With the Scroll

The Chronicler revised Samuel. Hosea contradicted Kings. Jeremiah denied the sacrificial system. Ezekiel overruled the divine name. Jesus took the scroll of Isaiah and decided, on his own authority, which line of it belonged to the gospel. The pattern inside Scripture is not static recitation. It is revision in light of what each generation has come to understand about God.

The gospel invitation is to read the Bible the way Jesus did. We read through the lens of Christ. Anything that does not fit him does not get the last word. "The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it" is one of the least biblical ways of reading Scripture a person could come up with, because Scripture itself keeps revising Scripture in light of what it keeps learning about God.

When you pick up the Bible, you are picking up something a prophet handed you. You decide where to stop. You decide what to preach. You decide what the gospel is and what it is not. You already do that every time you choose a passage for a sermon, a funeral, or a bedtime prayer. The question is whether you are doing it the way Jesus did, or the way Nazareth wanted him to.

A little less vengeance, please. A little more favor. That was the choice in the synagogue. It is still the choice for anyone holding a Bible today.

Questions for Reflection

1. What "day of vengeance" have you been waiting for? Who do you want God to finally settle accounts with, and what would it mean to let that hope go?
2. John the Baptist expected a Messiah with an ax. He got a Messiah with a basin and a towel. Where have you been hoping for an ax, and what would it mean to trade it for a basin?
3. When you preach, teach, pray, or parent, where do you stop reading? What line are you tempted to finish that Jesus already decided to cut?

A Practice: Roll the Scroll

Pick a passage of Scripture you love. Read it aloud. Then read the verse immediately before it and the verse immediately after it. Notice what is there. Notice what you usually skip.

Ask yourself why whoever chose this reading stopped where they did. What was being protected? What was being left behind?

Then try it Jesus's way. Read the passage aloud again, this time stopping where you believe the gospel stops. Roll up the scroll. Hand it back. Let the silence do some of the work.

You do not have to explain yourself. Jesus did not.

Forward to the Conclusion