When he came to the village of Nazareth, his boyhood home, he went as usual to the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read the Scriptures. The scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where this was written:
“The Spirit of the LORD is upon me,
for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
that the blind will see,
that the oppressed will be set free,
and that the time of the LORD’s favor has come.”He rolled up the scroll, handed it back to the attendant, and sat down. All eyes in the synagogue looked at him intently. Then he began to speak to them. “The Scripture you’ve just heard has been fulfilled this very day!” (Luke 4:16–21 NLT)
The entire purpose of Jesus becoming human and making his home among us is summarized in the passage from Isaiah read by Jesus in the synagogue of his hometown. Of course, the chief piece of that purpose was, as Hebrews 5:10 says, “for us to be made holy by the sacrifice of the body of Jesus Christ, once for all time.” But the Good News known as the Gospel is not just for the hereafter.
Before he sent out seventy-two of his disciples as the vanguard to his arrival in towns and villages across Israel, Jesus said to them, “Heal the sick, and tell them, ‘The Kingdom of God is near you now’” (Luke 10:9). From the beginning, attending to the physical nature of our bodies – healing the sick, giving sight to the blind, feeding the hungry – was part of the message of the Gospel as taught by Jesus.
In When the Church Harms God’s People, Diane Langberg writes, “If it is true that our God came in the flesh to the brokenhearted, the small, the afflicted, the ruined, and the vulnerable, then that truth needs to be lived out in our flesh and blood – yours and mine – so that the world might know that he, full of love and justice and truth, is real.”
Jesus came to our world in flesh and blood, and he lived out the Gospel through love, justice, and truth. We are called to do the same.
What this looks like for each of us is different, for the Church is a mosaic of individuals come together to form a beautiful picture of the united Kingdom of God alive and at work in our world. We each have our own strengths, primed to be used to proclaim the Gospel in our communities, cities, and world; we also have our own weaknesses and frailties, also primed to be beacons of the Gospel. “We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves” (2 Corinthians 4:7).
We are broken and vulnerable people, empowered by a God who became broken and vulnerable for us, so we might display his great power in attending to the broken and vulnerable in our world.
Michael Benson is the communications director for the North American Baptist Conference.