Today's Devotion

Monday of Easter 2, April 13, 2026 - Luke 4:16-30

In the name of + Jesus. Amen.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

St. Luke records the beginning of our Lord’s ministry with the Word of God and preaching. Having just been brought into a confrontation with the devil (Luke 4:1-13), “as was His custom,” Jesus goes to the synagogue at Nazareth for Sabbath services. And as usual, Rabbi Jesus is reading Scripture and teaching.

But today is different.

Today, Jesus’ teaching becomes preaching. He reads Isaiah 61:1-2, a prophetic passage concerning the Messiah. The word “anointed” is the source of the Hebrew word “Messiah” and the Greek word “Christ.” From the version recorded by Luke, it seems that our Lord was reading from the Greek text. And it is here where Jesus reveals that He is the Christ. Isaiah wrote this passage seven hundred years prior, writing in the first person as Jesus. And now, Jesus reads it in the synagogue, not teaching, but preaching; not explaining but proclaiming.

Indeed, today is different.

“Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” And at first, His hearers’ hearts were softened by His preaching. “All spoke well of Him and marveled at the gracious words that were coming from His mouth. But then, the devil comes to take the seed away (Matt 13:19), and our Lord’s hearers begin to grumble as their hearts are hardened: “Is this not Joseph’s son?”

Jesus’ preaching goes in a direction that His hearers don’t want to be led: to repentance. For Jesus reminds them of the preaching of Elijah, and the days of the “great famine” when the children of Israel had become faithless. And only the Gentile widow of Zerephath received God’s mercy. Our Lord also preaches about Elisha’s ministry, how “none” of the “lepers in Israel” were cleansed, but only the Gentile “Naaman the Syrian.” Our Lord’s call to the children of Israel to repent, as well as reminders from their own history that the kingdom of God includes Gentiles also, “filled” the hearers of our Lord’s first sermon “with wrath.” And in a preview of what is to come in three years, “they rose up and drove Him out of the town and brought Him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they could throw Him down the cliff.”

But this first day of our Lord’s ministry of preaching was not to be His day to be lynched. For “passing through their midst, He went away.” And our Lord’s “gracious words” that He was sent “to proclaim liberty” and “to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” by giving “sight to the blind” will bring Him into yet another a violent confrontation with the devil, on another day – upon the cross from which He will save “the oppressed.”

Yes, today is different.

Christ is risen! He is risen indeed! Alleluia!

Amen.

In the name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.