Luke 4.16–30
A sermon preached at St Margarets Anglican Church Nedlands 16 February 2025
Invitation
Six Sunday afternoon studies on The Gospel of the Kingdom
At St Margarets Church Hall, 52 Tyrell St Nedlands 4.30pm
Beginning 23 February
What is the gospel? This is a question that tugged at me for the first twenty years of my life as a Christian, and culminated finally in the writing of The Gospel of the Kingdom: Jesus’ Revolutionary Message. Tony has kindly invited me to do six Sunday afternoon studies on the subject, and to introduce things this morning. So let me take you through some of my own journey, and then look at a key passage in Luke’s Gospel. My quest falls roughly into answering four questions: what is the gospel of salvation, what was Jesus’ gospel of the kingdom, how is it good news for the poor, and why “gospel?”
What is the gospel of salvation?
At the age of eighteen, about Easter time 1965, I surrendered my life to God and started believing in Jesus. Not long after I was invited to join a Beach Mission Team and got my first taste of Christian ministry. About seventy of us would set up camp in a coastal camping ground and present programs for various age groups. One of my early speaking attempts was to a group of teenagers in a big tent. I explained how we were all sinners deserving punishment, but that God had sent his Son who lived a perfect life and died in our place so we would not have to be punished for our sins. All God asks of us is that we should believe. “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should have eternal life” says it all. Good works are of no avail; there are never enough of them to deserve salvation. This was good news. This was the gospel, as I understood it then. The gospel is the good news that we can be saved because of Jesus’ death on the cross, and we receive salvation by faith—by believing. Incidentally, it was the rediscovery that salvation comes by faith that triggered and drove the Reformation of the sixteenth century.
But I remember being uneasy that time in the tent. Is the good news that Jesus dies for our sins, or that salvation is by faith, or both? And if salvation is not by works, why was I telling them what they had to do—not just believing, but how to live a Christian life? These questions troubled me for a long time.
What also troubled me was the four Gospels. John was my favourite, because it told me over and over that all I had to do was come to Jesus and believe: Jesus said: “Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgement but has passed from death to life.”[1] Those words became very precious to me, and still are. But what about Matthew, Mark, and Luke: why are they called Gospels when they are so full of what we have to do? Some of what Jesus asks of his disciples filled me with fear; how was that good news? Where was salvation by faith?
In 1969, with these questions in my mind, I started studying theology. At the same time, an argument broke out between John Stott and some others about salvation. Many, including myself, were saying you were saved by believing Jesus died for your sins. According to Stott, this was not correct; to be saved you needed to accept Jesus as Lord. Listen to Paul: “If you confess with your lips, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart God raised him from the dead, and you will be saved.” (Romans 10) “But that sounded like salvation by works. I was confused, though I could see from the New Testament that Stott was right, and I was wrong. It took a while to figure it out. You accept Jesus as your Lord—Lord is who he is—and he saves you—by his sin-bearing death, not because of how good you are. You are not saved by having the right belief about the cross, though it is true the cross saves you, and it is good to have a true understanding. Also, accepting Jesus as Lord doesn’t make you a good person who deserves to be saved; you come to him full of sin, and empty of goodness, pleading for mercy. And, although you begin to struggle against sin, you go on doing it. God forgives us because of the cross.
What was Jesus’ Gospel?
Studying the Gospel of Mark put a new question in my mind: “What was Jesus’ gospel?” Mark says Jesus came into Galilee “proclaiming the gospel of God.” So Jesus preached the gospel, but what was it? He couldn’t preach the cross; it hadn’t happened. And where was salvation by faith?
Mark calls Jesus’ gospel “the gospel of God,” and sums up what he was saying: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand, repent and believe the gospel.” Jesus’ gospel, then, was about the arrival of the kingdom of God. But what was the kingdom of God? I counted eight different opinions of this, each of them leading to a different kind of Christianity. It is clearly an important question. The answer is to be found in the Old Testament and in what Jews were believing after the Old Testament. The kingdom of God is a new age, or a new world, in which there is no more evil or suffering—not even death.
How is the gospel good new for the poor?
In 1975 to 1978 I had the chance to pursue this question further. I applied to Cambridge University to research the question, “What was Jesus’ gospel?” They rejected my application; an American was working on the same question. However, in the seventies, Christians were facing up to the problem of poverty in the world; the university accepted me to study Jesus’ gospel to the poor.
The Bible passage which was the focus of much attention in those days was Luke 4, Jesus’ sermon in the synagogue of his hometown of Nazareth. They gave him the scroll of Isaiah and he began to read: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me to preach the gospel to the poor …” So, there is some connection between the gospel and the poor. Liberation theology was born in South America. It insisted the gospel had to be good news for the poor. The kingdom of God was a new era to be brought about by the overthrow of oppressive structures, violently, if necessary. Actually, in Jesus’ time there was a revolutionary movement among the Jews, committed to overthrowing the Roman oppressors, but Jesus didn’t join it. It was pretty plain to me that the liberation theologians were going down the wrong track. But who were these “poor” whom Jesus came to bring good news?
For three years I immersed myself in books looking for an answer to the question how Jesus saw his mission: who are the poor, and how is the gospel good news for them? The answer I reached was that the poor in the Isaiah passage Jesus read were the nation of Israel, trodden down by foreign oppressors—and in Jesus’ day by Rome. Applying his teaching to us today the poor are those suffering from sickness of body or mind, poverty, oppression and exploitation, persecution, addiction, guilt—one could go on detailing the extent of human need. Rightly understood, we are all poor, along with whichever form of evil and suffering which may afflict us, we all slaves to sin, on the road to death, and after that we face judgement. Jesus’ good news was the arrival of a new age of salvation from all these evils.
As this became clearer to me, I was asked to speak to a group at King’s College. I explained that when Jesus spoke of the kingdom of God he was talking about a new age; his gospel was the proclamation of a new world. It sounded so utopian that I expected a university audience to dismiss it. To my surprise they took it seriously, and when eventually I returned to Perth, I determined to preach the gospel Jesus’ way—and see what happened. What happened was good.
I pause here to make an observation. The gospel as I understood it as a new Christian was about the salvation of disqualified individuals, me being the chief. It was about coming into a personal relationship with God through Christ. I still believe I am saved by Jesus’ dying for me, and that I have received this by believing in him as my Lord and Saviour. This is all individual and personal. Later, I understood that the gospel is more than personal; it is about the transformation of the whole world—starting with me. This is one of the wonderful and unique things about the gospel. Marxism believes in a new world, but the individual doesn’t matter. Buddhism believes in the transformation of the individual, but the world doesn’t matter. But Jesus will be king of a new world, where every individual has been rescued personally by him, knows him, and loves him, and is loved by him.
I now had several things together. I am the poor person Jesus came to save. I am saved by believing in him as my Lord. His death brings me forgiveness. This brings me into his kingdom. In the end he will rule as king over the whole world and all forms of poverty will be eradicated. But what about this word “gospel?” Why use a technical term for something as ordinary as good news?
What do we Mean by the Word Gospel?
In 1985–6 Lorraine and I and our two children spent eight months in the town of Tübingen while I researched for a book on the life of Jesus. I spent a lot of my time in a little attic room in the rafters of the university’s theological library. Among the many stories in the Gospels I was intrigued by Jesus sending out seventy-two disciples to preach the gospel in all the towns on his way to Jerusalem. (Luke 10) He gives them instructions about what to wear, but apart from telling people the kingdom of God was near, he said little about what they were to teach. I saw this as a problem. Back at St Matthews we had done a mission trip to Newdegate and Lake Grace. How helpful it would have been to have had Jesus’ instruction about what to teach when on mission. It weighed me down for some time, until it dawned on me that I was working with a false assumption. I thought the disciples were on a teaching mission—like our mission to Newdegate—but they were not. All my experience of the gospel was about teaching, but the disciples were doing something different; they were simply sent to make an announcement. Something was about to happen and they were to announce it—and they backed it up with a few miracles. I got very excited, as I do when I see a mistake in something I have long assumed, and new insight breaks through. I must have stamped around and made a lot of noise in that little attic room, because the door flew open, and half a dozen worried faces looked in, thinking I must have been having a heart attack. The realization that Jesus’ gospel was a simple announcement—the announcement of the dawning of a new world—brought to light so much of the Gospels which I had not understood before. It was for me revolutionary, and, indeed, it was the announcement of a revolution in the world. I will be better able to explain the importance of this in the Sunday afternoon studies.
There is one more thing I will say about why I wrote the book, before coing back to Luke 4. In 1988 the Archbishop of Canterbury challenged the Anglican world to make the last decade of the twentieth century “a decade of evangelism.” In Australia a conference was organized called “Evangelism, the Australian Way.” I was asked to give the opening address on “What is the Gospel?” The only reason I was asked was because I was in Perth, and not in Sydney or Melbourne. There was tension between Sydney and Melbourne over the extent that social action should figure in the gospel. It was the Luke 4 question again. I prepared hard and long, knowing I was walking into a minefield. Years later, I learned that the paper I had presented was being used to train Christian students on campuses. This inspired me to do a lot more thinking, and write The Gospel of the Kingdom.
Jesus’ Nazareth Announcement
But now come with me to Luke’s Gospel and chapter 4: the story of Jesus in the synagogue of his hometown.
He was invited to read and speak, and chose the passage from Isaiah which reads:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news [to evangelize] 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, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.”
This was a familiar Scripture that had been read in synagogues for hundreds of years. In it a mysterious “servant of the Lord” says he has been appointed by God to announce the arrival of the time of salvation (the Lord’s year of favour). He says he has been sent to “evangelize,” or “gospel” the poor. Gospel was not a religious word; nor did it simply mean “good news.” Gospels were usually important political messages that were carried by long-distance runners, or horsemen, or ships—vital messages of victory or defeat.
For five hundred years, after their kingdom was taken away from them, Jews had lived in expectation and longing that God would one day intervene in world history to rescue them and set them up again as a great kingdom in the world. Many had come to understand that this would be in a supernatural kingdom, because even some of the dead would be raised to share in it. It is of this hope that Isaiah writes, and it was because of this scripture that Jews believed the promised time of salvation would he announced by a special gospel-herald.
I suspect the way Jesus read the passage must have excited some attention. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon … me, because he has anointed me to evangelize the poor …” He finished the reading and everyone was looking at him wondering what he would say. “Today,” he said, “this reading is fulfilled in your hearing.” What had always been heard as a prophecy of what God would one day do, suddenly became the very announcement that the promised kingdom had come, or was about to come. It was an extraordinary moment. People could not believe what they were hearing: a local boy claiming to be the promised Messiah-messenger; announcing a revolution, no less. It is little wonder they turned against him as a blasphemer and led him out to be stoned.
The gospel Jesus announced that day is the same gospel he sent his twelve apostles to announce in Galilee, and later the seventy-two in the towns on his way to Jerusalem. In a different form it is the gospel of the lordship of Christ, and the cross and resurrection, announced by his followers throughout the Roman Mediterranean world. The difference is because his cross and resurrection moved the kingdom to a new stage. It is the same gospel we are commanded to announce today. In Jesus’ own words in Matthew: “All authority has been given to me; go therefore and make disciples of all nations, teaching them everything I have commanded you; and behold I am with you until the end of the age.” (Matthew 28) God has raised Jesus from the dead and established him as the king of the new resurrected world. Indeed, he has appointed him to sit by his side in heaven and superintend the bringing about of that world. Those who will share in it are those who have heard and heeded the gospel and have bowed to Jesus as their Lord and King. The gospel is the instrument Jesus uses to bring about his kingdom. In the words of St Paul, “the gospel is the power of God for the salvation of all who believe.” When you hear and understand it you have two options: either you will disbelieve and opt to remain part of this world which is on its way to destruction, or you believe, and surrender your allegiance to Jesus as your king. And if you do, God will mark you down as one who belongs to his kingdom; he will forgive your sins, remove you from the realm of judgement, give you his Holy Spirit, set you on the path to eternal life, and walk with you in life and through death, and though all that lies beyond.
There are still a lot of questions. We will see how many we can answer in the next six weeks.
[1] John 5.