Any faithful Jew had expectations for what the Messiah would be like. Some of those expectations were unrealistic, personally subjective, or for personal gain. Most of those expectations were due to both the hardships they had experienced and what they believed about what God had promised. It is easy for us in retrospective to see who Jesus is and what He said and did and wonder how any could have missed it. However, let’s take a closer look. 

In Luke Chapter 4 we see Jesus beginning His public ministry after His baptism and temptations in the desert. Though he was God in the flesh, He was also a faithful, human, Jew. So, we read that He goes to the synagogue on the Sabbath. Instead of merely listening and interacting with others, He opens the scroll and reads from the Old Testament. Now, there are many amazing scriptures that He could have read from to allude to the fact that He was the promised Messiah. Prophecies about Him being the one who would sit on David’s throne forever. About how He was the conquering king that would crush all other kings and kingdoms. About how He was the Prince of Peace. About how He was the prophet, priest, and king that all others foreshadowed. Instead, this is what we read: 

    18 “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,

   19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

Jesus lays out for us not only a plan for how to get into the kingdom of God, but about what His kingdom looks like. His work on the cross is the definitive, final, and perfect sacrifice to save His people from their sins and buy them a seat at the table in the kingdom. Yet, here Jesus is telling us that He came not only to pay our way into the kingdom, but to teach us and show us what the kingdom looks like. So what does it look like? 

It looks like the poor in Spirit and the marginalized in the world hearing the good news. This means the good news we have to share is not just for the religious, rich, wise, or great. It is for those who the world calls small, unimportant, or weak. 

It looks like liberty. It looks like freedom for the unjustly enslaved. It looks like freedom and deliverance from idolatry and addiction. It looks like values that defy the world's ideologies. 

It looks like taking the yoke off of the oppressed and giving them a yoke that is light and kind. 

It looks like those who have lost favor in the eye of the world, gaining favor from their God. 

This kingdom, this kingdom of God, for God, and made by God, turns man's kingdom and its values upside down. In Luke 4 Jesus is saying, what man has called powerful, wise, important, and worthy, He is going to flip upside down and now the kingdom of God has come, in the flesh. He, His kingdom, and His people will value freedom, weakness, love, charity, understanding, humility, and grace. 

What does it look like to be people of the kingdom? Let’s look to Jesus, the one true king, who sits on a heavenly throne, and find out together. This is what it means to be a Gospel Community that is on a Gospel Mission.  

Jesus fulfills the OT

Jesus and Isaiah

Jesus was seen as blasphemous