Sermon Tone Analysis

Introduction

Its relieving that Ps Nick asked me to preach again.

Its an absolute privilege.

Although it is a year since the last time I preached, so I guess that tells you how much of me he can cope with.

Our text today is Luke 4:14-21.

We’ll be looking at a fair few passages today, so don’t feel like you need to turn to each one in your Bible.

I’ll put each passage up on the screen so you can see it.

Our text today is in Luke 4, but let’s just start a little earlier in Luke 3:21-22.

This is Jesus’ anointing.

Let’s skip down to 4:14.

The Spirit has come upon Jesus at his baptism powerfully and publicly, and he has been endowed with power.

This has happened for a particular purpose.

Jesus has a mission to do, and he is laser-focussed on completing it.

There is an interesting quirk with this passage:

Mathew and Mark place this story in the middle of Jesus’ ministry.

In fact that’s probably when it happened chronologically.

Jesus didn’t start his ministry in Nazareth.

He has already been preaching and working miracles elsewhere.

But Luke places this story out of its chronological order, right at the start of Jesus’ ministry.

Luke is a very careful writer, and pretty much everything he does is deliberate and purposeful.

Nearly all commentators agree – Luke privileges this story.

Luke wants the reader to interpret everything Jesus does through the lens of this story.

It is the programmatic cornerstone of his ministry.

You can’t understand Jesus’ purpose, his mission, his miracles, and his teaching without understanding what Jesus is saying in this synagogue.

So we’re going to look at this carefully and understand Jesus’ anointing, understand his mission, and understand what that means for us.

The Spirit has Anointed Me…

In our text Jesus is quoting the Old Testament prophet Isaiah, mainly Isaiah 61.

This is a prophecy written hundreds of years before Jesus came along.

Isaiah 61

There are some interesting aspects about this prophecy:

The chapter immediately beforehand, Isaiah 60, speaks of Israel’s restoration and the eschatological future of God’s people.

In fact, Revelation 21 borrows heavily from it.

Just look at Isaiah 60:19-21:

So Isaiah 60 shows WHAT God intends for the future of his people - paradise and fellowship with him.

Then you come to the first few verses of Isaiah 61 - this is the part that Jesus quotes, and it shows that there is a person, a WHO, behind the WHAT.

There is an anointed one who brings about this future for God’s people.

These verses show that there is a WHO, an “anointed one” who will bring about the restoration of God’s people.

Both the Hebrew AND Greek words for Messiah are both literally “anointed one”.

Then, in Luke 4, Jesus explicitly says that he is the one who fulfils this passage.

He is the one the Spirit has anointed to usher in paradise, the eschatological hope of God’s people, and restored fellowship with God.

So what kind of anointing are we talking about here?

In the Old Testament, there were three primary types of anointing.

Priestly Anointing

The first one we see is the anointing of the priests who would minister in God’s Tabernacle:

This anointing oil used on the priests was holy, and it couldn’t be used for anyone or anything else.

The priests were consecrated to minister on behalf of God’s people; they would explain and teach God’s law to the people, and make sacrifices on behalf of the people to God.

They were mediators, and there could be no more fulfilling role than to reconcile, than to make peace between, a holy God and his precious people.

And what physical anointing oil could be as holy and as precious as the Spirit that anointed Jesus?

The book of Hebrews shows us that Jesus’ anointing was priestly as well.

Jesus has been anointed as our high priest, our mediator.

He is the one that saves us from the anger of God to come.

He implores God on our behalf and reassures God’s people on his father’s behalf.

Prophetic Anointing

The second type of anointing we see in Scripture is the anointing of prophets.

In 1 Kings 19:6, God commands Elijah to “anoint” Elisha as a prophet in his place.

So, we see that Elisha was to be “anointed” as a prophet.

What was the role of a prophet?

It is easy to think that a prophet is someone who can do miracles and tell us the future, or at least find out things they wouldn’t otherwise be able to know.

In Scripture, though, this isn’t the biggest part of a prophet’s role.

When you look at prophets like Samuel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Elijah, the biggest part of their role was to act as God’s spokesperson.

Prophets represented God before his people.

They were responsible for explaining what God is like, reminding the people what God expected of them, and warning them when they fell short of his standard - judgement would follow if they didn’t follow God’s covenantal laws.

And Jesus does the same, does he not?

Read through his teaching, and you will see that he is the greatest prophet that ever lived.

Doesn’t the Sermon on the Mount remind us of God’s standard, his holy law that must be obeyed?

And in the Olivet discourse Jesus warns Israel that judgement is coming - not one stone of the temple will be left on another, and Jerusalem will be destroyed - why?

Because Israel is rejecting God’s messiah, Jesus himself.

And Jesus’ death on the cross shows us the love and humility of God.

Royal Anointing

The third way the Spirit anointed Jesus is with a royal, or kingly anointing.

This is the anointing I want to focus on today.

Israelite kings were often referred to as “God’s anointed”.

Long before Jesus was born to Mary, the prophet Samuel anointed the boy David as king over Israel.

During David’s reign he wanted to build a house for God, a temple.

Let’s see what happened - let’s read 2 Samuel 7:1-2

Nathan then comes back and delivers God’s message to David.

We won’t read all of it - let’s skip to halfway through verse 11:

Instead of David building a house for Yahweh, Yahweh promised to build a “house” for David.

This “house” was a royal dynasty.

An eternal dynasty.

He promised that David would always have his descendants reigning on the throne of Israel.

The promise was fulfilled for a while - David’s descendants reigned after his death, starting with Solomon.

His line continued through the kings of Judah after him.

They reigned all the way up to Judah’s exile to Babylon in 587 BC.

When the Jews returned from Babylon to their homeland decades later, Zerubbabel became their governor, and he came from David’s line.

But we don’t hear much about an real Davidic king after that.

However, after Judah returned to their homeland, for centuries after, there was an undercurrent of hope that one day, God’s “anointed one”, his Messiah, a descendant of David, would save Israel from her enemies.

He would come and make everything right again.

Then along comes Jesus.

If you look at the start of Matthew’s gospel and Luke’s gospel, they trace Jesus’ ancestry back through David, showing that Jesus is a descendant of David.

Did other people see Jesus as the anointed messianic king?

Let’s look in Mark 11:7-10:

Here Jesus enters Jerusalem as the Davidic king!

He makes no apology for it, and his disciples are happy to proclaim it - even in a city occupied by Rome, where disloyalty to Caesar was a heinous crime.

…To Preach the Good News to the Poor...

So Jesus has been anointed as priest, prophet, and king.

What has he been anointed to do?

What is his mission, his reason for being on this earth?

Let’s read Luke 4:18-19 again:

He has come to preach the good news to the poor.