‘To send out the oppressed in freedom’

Fr David Howell• January 26, 2025

In Sunday’s Gospel, as Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah (61:1-2) in his hometown synagogue, he strikingly adds a verse (58:6) from an earlier chapter of this prophet: “To send out the oppressed in freedom” (our freer lectionary translation is “to set at liberty those who are oppressed”).

Why might this be significant? Jesus speaks as the anointed one who has been “sent” by God to those in need: “He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives” (Luke 4:18, citing Isaiah 61:1). The extra verse Jesus includes (from Isaiah 58:6) adds that those in need are also themselves “sent out” by God. 

“Being sent” means receiving a mission from God, so the novelty of Jesus’ quotation is that those in need are not simply passive beneficiaries: they become active agents in God’s plan. 

By his own cross and resurrection, Jesus showed that God’s power works through weakness and the same holds for us his disciples: we do not need to fear our weakness but when abandon it to God he makes us active instruments in his hands.

This addition also gives an ambiguity to the following verse. Instead of “the anointed one” being he who ‘proclaims the year of the Lord’s favour’, we equally could read Jesus’ words in this way: “To send out the oppressed in freedom so that they themselves proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.” Not only are the oppressed sent by God in a generic way, they are sent to proclaim his “year of favour”.

The “year of favour” for the Jews was the jubilee celebrated every 50 years when debts were cancelled, slaves released and ancestral land returned (Leviticus 25:8-55). Jesus however spiritualises these jubilee blessings: he pays the debt of sin, frees from death and grants heaven as a home. 

He states, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’ (Luke 4:21), which means his listeners’ hoped-for political liberation from the Romans is elevated to supernatural freedom, and the poverty, captivity, blindness and oppression of the needy is applied to them in a spiritual sense. Neither spiritualising their political goal, nor applying to their souls the bodily weaknesses Isaiah described, would have been pleasant for those in the Nazareth synagogue, and nor for us.

Let’s ask Jesus to make us acknowledge and embrace our spiritual weakness and, not despite but through our neediness, preach his supernatural freedom to all we meet.