of the goel.
In Isaiah, chapters 52 and 53, another idea of goel appears: he is the one who redeems Israel by taking upon himself the chastisement of God. For the Christian, the figure of the “Servant of Yahweh,” who gives his life in ransom for the guilty ones fallen into slavery, now thrusts itself upon Jesus (Mark 10:45). In this way the law of retaliation was transmuted. Its demand for justice, for holiness, could never be abolished. But God’s vengeance would now be borne by God himself, by the God who is the goel of his people in the person of his Son.
Jesus believed he was the goel, that is, the instrument chosen by God to carry out redemption. When Jesus healed a woman with a deformed back in the synagogue, the ruler of the synagogue became indignant because Jesus had healed someone on the Sabbath, and he told the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.” But Jesus answered back, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie his ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?” (Luke 13:14–16).
In all these ways – Israel’s sense of election, humanity’s moral foundation, and the divine requirements of justice and redemption – it is clear that Jesus’ identity and mission were rooted in Hebrew thought. Jesus’ theology was Jewish and he expressed it in the fundamental paradox that generates action. If God is all-powerful, nothing that happens is outside his ultimate will. But if God is good, he cannot be the author of evil and death; on the contrary, he is fighting them until the final victory.
Jesus’ moral monotheism thus leads to a pragmatic dualism. We use the term “pragmatic” because Jesus, who struggled with evil, did not revere evil. However, the reality of evil, the frightening influence it has over the world, and the power it possesses over the children of God posed the problem of violence for Jesus. As he saw it, evil truly was an enemy of God, and a dangerous one, to be fought at any cost. As we shall see, only the bloody struggle of the cross and redemption was to overcome this enemy and submit it to God’s order.
The basis of Jesus’ behavior and thinking is quite different from ours, which is inspired mostly by scientific rationalism. And this should concern us all the more. Is modern Christianity still close enough to Judaism, still asymmetrical enough to get our rationalism-infested Western civilization out of trouble? Are we able to recognize the radical nature of Jesus’ prophetic call? That is the question.
CHAPTER TWO
Jesus Proclaims Jubilee
At the beginning of his public ministry, Jesus the prophet gave an extremely important speech in the synagogue of his hometown, Nazareth. Matthew and Mark offer but a brief summary of this event, but Luke’s account is quite detailed. Here it is in its entirety:
Jesus went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. And he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:
“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to preach good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
(and recovery of sight for the blind,)1
to release the oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they asked. Jesus said to them, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.’”
“I tell you the truth,” he continued, “no prophet is accepted in his hometown. I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah’s time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. And there were many in Israel with leprosy in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed – only Naaman the Syrian.”
All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff. But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.
Then he went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath began to teach the people. They were amazed at his teaching, because his message had authority. (Luke 4:16–32)
This narrative deserves commenting on at length. First, although Matthew and Mark place this incident later in Jesus’ ministry, Luke, who spends more effort in chronological research, places it at the beginning of Jesus’ public activity, following the temptation and a first preaching tour in the synagogues. We will follow Luke’s chronology.2 It was indeed logical and congruent with the Old Testament pattern for the Spirit-filled Jesus to begin his ministry in his hometown and to try to secure the adherence of his own people to the kingdom of God. Moreover, in Matthew 4:12–13 these words follow the account of the temptation: “When Jesus heard that John had been put in prison, he returned to Galilee. Leaving Nazareth, he went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake.” John 2:12 also places the trip to Capernaum at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry, though he does not mention the dramatic events of Nazareth. All this agrees quite well with Luke’s account.
Second, the part of Jesus’ speech beginning with the words, “Surely you will quote this proverb to me: ‘Physician, heal yourself!’” set off a wave of anger that drove Jesus from the synagogue and provoked an attempted assassination. But one cannot immediately see why Jesus would have wanted to offend his fellow kinsmen if they had not already disbelieved the beginning of his speech. Matthew and Mark also present the succession of events in this light.
Third, even under these circumstances, it is hard to understand why some of Jesus’ listeners reacted with such explosive violence while others displayed astonishment and even enthusiasm. It would have taken more than a few comments about the widow of Zarephath or about Naaman the Syrian to initiate the attempt to kill Jesus. According to Jewish law only certain crimes, such as blasphemy against God or violations of the Sabbath, deserved the death penalty. But Jesus had committed none of these offenses. Perhaps he had threatened the life or interests of a part of Nazareth’s population. This is what we must now investigate.
A Revolution
The passage Jesus read from Isaiah 61 gives us the answer. Here the Messiah, the Anointed One, speaks in first person: “The Lord has anointed me.” Jesus chose to read precisely this passage in the synagogue of his youth, before his parents and friends. And he added, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” In other words, to our knowledge, Jesus officially acknowledged for the first time that he was the Messiah whom the prophets had announced.3 It is now easy to understand the amazement of some and the offense of others.
But this messianic proclamation alone could not have aroused such murderous anger. There had been others besides Jesus
