Telling the prophetic truth: Advent--Epiphany according to St. Luke.

A narrative of the things that have been fulfilled among us

Beginning in the first Sunday of Advent of Year C, Christian communities and their preachers will dwell deeply in their weekly worship within the Third Gospel through the months of Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany, until the Transfiguration of our Lord. The Gospel readings are all from Luke, except on the Second Sunday after Christmas and Epiphany, and the Second Sunday after the Epiphany. What authorization does Christian preaching receive from this immersion in Luke's narrative?

In an era when various Gnosticizing "gospels" are eagerly marketed, it is important to note the profound coherence of the four canonical gospels from the first century in comparison with the pieties, spiritualities, and politics of second- and third-century "gospels." Yes, those later accounts reflect diverse traditions that are partially disclosed in the canonical gospels. And yes, the canonical gospels themselves display a remarkable range of stories, oral and literary styles, and convictions. But Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all bring their readers into Israel's story of God's engagement with the world in Jesus, and they all conclude with the Messiah's crucifixion and resurrection. Luke's stories of Jesus' birth, epiphany, and transfiguration are carried in the deep stream of faith that flows from Israel into the Roman world of many cultures and religions.

In a technical sense, only Mark identifies itself as a "gospel" (Greek euaggelion: Mk 1:1). Its clipped episodes announce secret news of Jesus in sharp contrast to the Caesar's imperial gospel. Matthew's first word mentions a "book" (biblios) or "account of the genealogy of the Messiah" (Matt 1:1 NRSV). Luke's formal introduction (Lk 1:1-4; see also Acts 1:1-2) invites close reading of the whole "narrative" (diegesis) or "orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us" (NRSV) in order that the reader might "know the truth" (asphaleia).

What is the character of this "truth?" Taken together, the narrative of Luke-Acts comprises about 30 percent of the New Testament. What is the bold testimony to the "truth" that preachers and communities are invited to declare in Advent--Epiphany? How can Luke's distinctive literary project authorize and inform Christian interpretation, proclamation, and life?

Telling the truth of history

To begin with, Luke-Acts is an historical narrative. Luke's preface (1:1-4) emulates the formal claims of the Greek and Roman historians to the reliability that derives from "eyewitnesses" and reputable sources ("servants of the word"). The texts for the first three Sundays in Advent include links to such events of public consequence as the Roman destruction of the temple (Advent 1:Lk 19:28-40, 21:21-25), and the beginning of John's preaching is synchronized with the reigns of Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, the Herods, and the High Priest Caiaphas (Advent 2: Lk 3:1-6), stopping just short of Luke's account of the palace intrigue that caused John's imprisonment (Advent 3: Lk 3:7-18, 19-20). Jesus' birth is also coordinated with the registration of the empire by Caesar Augustus (Christmas: Luke 2:1-20), and events in Acts are linked with the reign of the Emperor Claudius (11:28; 18:02).

Scholars delight in exploring comparisons with the historical writings of Luke's age, discovering rich formal similarities but little shared content with Josephus or the Roman historians. Debates continue, for example, about the accuracy or verifiability of Luke's report of Augustus' census. But the theological and prophetic integrity of Luke's "historical narrative" is about more than corroborating facts with Roman annals. Nor is this simply a mythic story in support of a sectarian cultus. The third evangelist is testifying to the engagement of Israel's God in the events of the Messiah's reign. Luke's Advent, Epiphany, and Transfiguration stories are embedded in Israel's social, political, and religious world in the constant presence of the Roman order. As the Apostle Paul on trial before the Jewish King Agrippa II and the Roman procurator Festus declared, "this was not done in a corner" (Acts 26:26).

Telling the truth of Jesus' Advent, Birth, Epiphany, and Transfiguration reaches beyond the sacred canopy of worship into the world. Advent cannot be limited to ritual penance and private preparation. "Proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins" (Lk 3:3; Advent 2) is a public event as much as it was in the days of John the Baptist or Luke the evangelist. Repentance (metanoia) is the "change of mind" or "turning" toward God that disrupts schemes of self-interest.

No one changes unless they must, and who is the preacher to call the community into a profound return to God when things are officially jolly in the midst of the pre-Christmas bustle? And what is the content of repentance? What "turning" is required now to "prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight"? For whom is this call to "turn" the gift of a new future? And who will reject the kingdom Jesus brings?

Addressing the congregation as a "brood of vipers" wasn't an obvious church-growth strategy in John's day, either, but John's prescriptions in Lk 3:10-14 (Advent 3) are eminently practical, laying bare the people's participation in the crooked ways of a corrupt system: to the crowds: "Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none; and whoever has food must do the same"; to the tax collectors: "Collect no more than the amount prescribed to you"; to the soldiers: "Do not extort money from anyone by threats or false accusation, and be satisfied with your wages."

The Advent lessons call for particular, gritty truth telling. What concrete steps are the faithful now called to take to extricate themselves from the commercial enslavement of "the holiday season" to welcome the Messiah, the Savior of the world? (Luke 2:1-20: Christmas) Luke's story is not a scolding from a social critic but the revelation of hope in the God who is gathering strength. It's time to get with the program, God's reign.

The truth of history that Luke is telling is about the living God. Israel's God is engaged, but not for a nationalistic triumph. Compared to the official histories of the empire, Luke's narrative is an alternative version of world history, resisting cooption by political myths of the "divine right" or "manifest destiny" of empires, ancient and modern. Luke's confidence in the reign and power of the God of the Jews would have seemed odd to the Romans, or even dangerous in the era following the conquest of Jerusalem. The formal similarities with the Greek and Roman historians are important to the civil order within which Luke is writing (e.g., 1:1-4). But if the Roman world is the foreground of the story, the background, indeed the plot, is Jewish and scriptural.

In order to tell God's truth of history, Luke adopts the mode of the scriptural narrator. Beginning in 1:5, Luke writes in an antiquated style reminiscent of Israel's scriptural histories. The archaic King James Version captures this "biblish" tone well in the familiar first words of the Christmas story, "And it came to pass in those days ..." (Lk 2:1). Luke 1-2 is particularly full of this linguistic affect, woven deeply into parallels with John and Jesus in the stories of the births and childhoods of Samuel and David, the king and the one God sent to anointhim (see 1 Samuel 1-2 and Acts 10:37).

In the alternative readings for Advent 1 (Lk 21:21-25 and 19:28-40) God's truth of history stands in sharp, even fearful, focus. Which is more difficult?--for Jesus to get Jerusalem's attention on his arrival? or for the preacher to break into the last days before Christmas with Jesus' ominous oracles? The passages from both Luke 19 and 21 are filled with prophetic speech, echoing Jeremiah's lament for Jerusalem's dire fate in the hands of the neo-Babylonian empire. In 19:41-44, just beyond the assigned reading, Jesus indicates that the testimony of the stones will be the crushing collapse of the city, "because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God" (19:44). All of this is profoundly relevant for Advent. Jesus, whom the angel announces on Christmas as "a Savior who is the Messiah" (2:11), brings God's reign with him. Jesus' advent is a visitation from God. As Simeon declares in his prescient oracles, this child is God's salvation, "a light for revelation to the nations and for the glory to your people Israel." He is also "destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed" (2:28-35).

In The Prophetic Imagination, Walter Brueggemann describes "the Alternative Community of Moses" in terms of a vision of God's salvation from the tyranny of the Egyptians and their gods. Brueggemann describes those gods as "creatures of the imperial consciousness," justifying the "eternal" rights of the mighty Pharaoh. (1)

Luke's Gospel also disrupts the paganism of privilege and its hijacking of the Christmas story to legitimate the affluence of the powerful. According to prophetic truth, history is the arena where God's reign is enacted, even as God's will is defied. (2) The truth of history is the narrative of God's entering into the suffering of the world, bringing healing and forgiveness, even to the unworthy. This is the script for the visitors coming from prison fellowship on Christmas Day to impoverished children of felons. In dingy hallways, they say, "We have a gift from your father!" Along with a present bearing the imprisoned father's name, they read the story of the child born in a stable. "Know what?" one small boy announced. "God came to our house today!" This Gospel brings light and hope to those who live in the deep darkness beyond the garish glare of the secular season.

Telling the prophetic truth

Every year the season of Epiphany begins with Matthew's account of the Magi. When it is Matthew's year, the First Gospel's rich stories of scriptural fulfillment follow. Mark is called the "Book of the Secret Epiphanies," because Jesus is revealed as Messiah and Son of God at the same time his identity is hidden. All of the gospels are broadly "prophetic" in this season because Jesus is enacting the promises God made through Israel's long history of the law and the prophets.

Luke draws the preacher into the prophetic mode in at least three specific dimensions in the Epiphany readings:

1. Jesus surpasses John as the Spirit-empowered prophet of the new age.

2. Jesus' interpretation of the promises to Israel is prophetic.

3. Jesus' mission reveals that God is gathering strength for a promising future.

Luke consistently schematizes the succession between John and Jesus. The parallels between their conceptions, births, and childhoods not only reflect the scriptural prototypes of Samuel who anointed David, but Jesus surpasses John within each phase. The Gospel lesson for the first Sunday after the Epiphany (The Baptism of Jesus: Lk 3:15-17, 21-22) is full of John's disclaimers that he is not the Messiah. His baptism by water anticipates Jesus' baptism "with the Holy Spirit and fire," which is explicitly fulfilled at Pentecost (Acts 2:1-4).

In Lk 16:16, the theme of succession is sounded in sweeping historical terms: "The law and the prophets were in effect until John came; since then the good news of the kingdom of God is proclaimed." The schema is extended to the point that neither Luke nor Acts directly credits John with Jesus' baptism. The observation is easily missed because all the rest of the canonical tradition testifies that John baptized Jesus, and Luke does not deny it. The preacher may notice, however, that the verses that are omitted from the reading (3:18-20) report John's imprisonment before Jesus' baptism. Luke's emphasis is articulated in Peter's speech in Acts 10:37-38: "That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power." (3)

Luke does not relegate "the law and the prophets" to a dead past, but they are now marshaled as witnesses to what God has done in Jesus. As the risen Messiah declares: "Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them the things about himself in all of the scriptures" (Lk 24:27; see also v. 44). So also, Jesus identifies John as "a prophet ... and more than a prophet" (Lk 7:26-27) because John fulfills the role from Malachi (3:1) of God's messenger preparing the Messiah's way. Jesus' next words frame John's role in God's drama: "I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he" (Lk 7:28).

Luke knows well that Jesus himself was born of a woman, but his inauguration as Messiah, therefore, is the story of "how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power" (Acts 10:38; Lk 3:21-23)--that is, he was authorized with the Holy Spirit's presence, power, and royal agency as God's Beloved Son. The voice from heaven echoes the royal acclamations of the enthronement of David, even in the direct address "You are my Son" (Ps 2:7; see also Isaiah 42).

The Gospel text for the First Sunday after the Epiphany reveals how, in the midst of the political intrigues of Rome, the High Priests, and the Herods, God was empowering an alternative king through a strange prophet in the wilderness around the Jordan. Luke's narrative tells the prophetic truth, identifying where God was decisively at work in the events of human history, even events that seemed inconsequential to the ruling powers. Although Luke's account of his birth and childhood provided glimpses of what was to come, Jesus' public obscurity was still intact in the story. Then, "anointed with the Holy Spirit and with power," Jesus "began his work" (3:23).

Jesus' public inaugural as Messiah in Lk 4:14-32 (Third and Fourth Sundays after the Epiphany) manifests the presence and power of the Holy Spirit. "Jesus, filled with the power of the Spirit, returned to Galilee" (v. 14). "The Spirit of the Lord has anointed me" (v. 18; see Isa 61:1 and also Lk 4:1). This story is historical in the simple sense of being one of the most complete surviving depictions of first-century synagogue practice. It also is theologically historic in Israel's prophetic understandings of God at work in human affairs. This is an epiphany of God's Messiah (anointed one), and the apparent rejection of his rule receives a traditional diagnosis from the Prophet-Messiah: "Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown" (4:24).

The story is carefully crafted, to the fascination of commentators throughout the ages. (4) What is most interesting to this exploration of Luke's telling of the prophetic truth is that (1) Jesus is depicted as identifying himself as a prophet (4:24); (2) the body of his message is almost completely a citation from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61, with links to chapter 58; and (3) Jesus' interpretation of the passage he read is prophetic.

Luke, who recounts Jesus' lengthy Sermon on the Plain (see below) and several extended speeches in Acts, reports Jesus' inaugural address as a one-sentence interpretation of Isaiah: "Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." That speech would be brief for Calvin Coolidge! But every word is weighted.

"Today" is prophetic, not in the sense of prediction or even future promise, but in declaration. The reader has been alerted that Jesus has returned to Galilee "filled with the power of the Holy Spirit" (4:14). "Today" means authority, as when a Prime Minister or a President takes executive action in a state of emergency. "Today, I am giving an order."

"This scripture has been fulfilled" is about the content of the passage, its claim, its promise or threat. In Handel's Messiah, the grand refrains from Isaiah continue to wash over generations of church and public communities. Does anyone listen to the content and claims of these scriptures? Or what do they mean theologically if God enacts them?

"In your hearing" may be translated more directly as "in your ears." This is all the more stunning because the hearer can't stop what has already been said. Whether or not the hearer wants to listen, the ears already got it, like it or not, without being warned. This is the prophetic conviction that God's word may be received either in faith or in hardness of heart. Again quoting Isaiah in another context, Luke's Jesus announces that he teaches in parables "so that 'looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand'" (Lk 8: 10; Isa 6:10). These verses from Isaiah are also cited in Acts as the Holy Spirit's reproof of unbelief. God's promises disclose hardened hearts in a call to repentance (see Acts 28:25; Acts 13:40-41; Rom 11:8).

The ending of the reading for the Third Sunday after the Epiphany with Jesus' declaration in verse 21 is thus loaded with significance. If the preacher has not helped the people measure the gravity of Jesus' very brief words, no one will be prepared for his near assassination on the Fourth Sunday. Jesus presents the Isaiah passage as a word of address. His program is authorized by God. He has been anointed by the Spirit of the Lord (1) "to bring good news to the poor," (2) "to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free," and (3) "to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." None of this was original with the prophet Isaiah, either. The prophet brought forward a recitation of Israel's historic hopes for restoration by God. (5)

For the Messiah Jesus, however, this is his platform, the program of his mission. When John's disciples later ask "Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?" Luke's Jesus responds by echoing the program from Isaiah: "Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news preached to them." Then, almost as a lament for what went wrong in Nazareth, Jesus adds, "And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me" (Lk 7:18-23).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

It starts going wrong quickly in verse 22. All the speaking well of him and wonder at "the gracious words" which came from Isaiah can not disguise the edge in the question: "Is not this Joseph's son?"

That identification is not humanly wrong, but it is inadequate and rejecting. Luke has brought the reader inside the story that is theological at the same time it is ordinary. The annunciation of Jesus' virginal conception is given privately to Mary (1:26-38). Mary and Joseph go to Bethlehem for the census because Joseph came from David's house (2:4). The angels spill the news at Jesus' birth, but apparently only to the shepherds, Mary, and Joseph. And when they bring Jesus to the temple for his circumcision, Mary and Joseph are simply named Jesus' "parents" (2:27, 48) and even his "father and mother" (2:33). In the temple, the child Jesus knew he needed to "be in my Father's house," but apparently with a public disclosure of his true identity. When Jesus' genealogy is traced through David to Adam, "son of God," he is identified humanly (then indirectly theologically) as "the son (as was thought) of Joseph" (3:23). In Luke's telling, the voice from heaven appears to have spoken directly to Jesus (3:22), and his testing by the devil as God's Son (4:3, 9) is evidently not public.

But now, in Nazareth, Jesus' divine identity becomes public. Thus in the context of the Messiah's inaugural, the question about "Joseph's son" is hostile and theologically defiant, rejecting the revelations that readers have been given of Jesus' divine agency. Jesus' declaration "today this scripture is fulfilled" is prophetic and messianic. Soon even the unclean spirits will blurt the truth in another synagogue. "Jesus of Nazareth" is "the Holy One of God" (4:34-35).

Jesus' response in Nazareth to the apparently benign question of Joseph's parentage is fierce, followed by a prophetic diagnosis of what they will say next. At first he seems to be putting words in their mouths, but Jesus is fulfilling Simeon's oracle that "the inner thoughts of many will be revealed" (2:35). Then he comes after them with prophetic truth: "Truly I tell you.... The truth is." His precedents from Elijah and Elisha pull the promises to which Israel felt entitled away from them to the benefit of others.

In a landmark essay, "From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4," James A. Sanders contrasts what he calls a "constitutive hermeneutic," in which the faithful count on God's promises being for them, with a "prophetic hermeneutic," in which those who presume they are the elect are brought to repentance by God's going outside first. (6) In Acts, the Apostle Paul also calls upon this tradition of prophetic reproof so that the growing Gentile mission, which is actually Israel's vocation (Isa 49:6; see Acts 1:6-8), becomes a warning sign (Acts 13:46-47; 18:6; 28:28; see also Romans 9-11).

The "epiphany" of Luke 4, therefore, is the public disclosure of Jesus as the Messiah and protagonist of God's mission. Beginning in his hometown of Nazareth, Israel is being called to her vocation. God is moving beyond the entitlement or pastoral assurance of the elect. Those who do not take offense at the Messiah are truly "blessed" (7:23) because they understand that the inclusion of the outsiders means the fulfillment of their vocation, not their exclusion. But those who have claimed God's promises as their possession are offended, at the point of seeking to stone Jesus as a false prophet. "They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, 'We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not weep'" (7:32).

The epiphany/call story of Peter (5:1-11: Fifth Sunday after the Epiphany) is minimally about the catch of fish. The deeper miracle is that, up to his armpits in fish, Peter sees the reign of God breaking in. Like Isaiah in the temple surrounded by smoke and visions (Isa 6:1-13), Peter is immediately aware of his mortal danger in the presence of God. "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!" But the Lord does not go away. As with Isaiah, God's intent is not to annihilate mere mortals with holiness but to make them into prophets and apostles for the reign of God and the Messiah Jesus. It is Isaiah and Peter who will "go" as agents of God's mission. Whatever else may be said about the apostolic office, at its root it is a prophetic calling, more a missionary and itinerant vocation for the blessing of the world than a position of privileged power. As Brueggemann puts it, "Prophetic consciousness thereby is put on notice against every historical agent that assigns to itself enduring, even ontological, significance." (7)

Luke's account of Jesus' Sermon on the Plain is entirely included in the readings for the Sixth (6:17-26), the Seventh (6:27-38), and the Eighth (6:39-49) Sundays after the Epiphany. Along with Matthew's version of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, this material has inspired great Christian interpreters from Tolstoy to Martin Luther King and was used by Gandhi to develop his nonviolent strategy for change. Apart from Christian mystics, social revolutionaries, and sectarians, however, it has often caused anxiety in much of the Western church. Perhaps its deeply prophetic character has offended the consciousness of Christendom that is so focused on eternal assurance of salvation.

But instead of trying to explain why Jesus didn't really mean to say "Blessed are you who are poor," let us continue to explore how Luke's distinctive literary project of prophetic truth telling authorizes and informs Christian interpretation, proclamation, and life. Verses 17-19 identify the public setting and the audience who "had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases." "Power came out from him and healed them all." The power to heal is a sign of God's Spirit in the receptivity of faith (4:27; 5:12-16, 17), and, while his brief sermon in Nazareth met opposition, this multitude from everywhere and a "great crowd of his disciples" had come to hear him. The presence of persons afflicted with diseases and troubled with unclean spirits is also a sign that these were not the ones whose status or resources could be tallied as signs of their righteousness. It makes a difference to the impact of Jesus' words if his hearers are actually poor, hungry, grieving, excluded, or reviled. Jesus is not giving a lecture on the nobility of poverty. He is addressing people with the promise that God's love and favor will come to them on an entirely different basis than the privileges of the prosperous.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the problem affluent, well-fed, officially optimistic Christians of high standing have with Jesus may be not that we don't understand but that we do. Instead of getting in on God's dramatic action for the outsiders, we are like the Israelites confronted by Elijah and Elisha or the people in Nazareth challenged by Jesus. How is this prophetic priority for outsiders good news for us? The predicament of the prosperous may be less our theological objection that Jesus is teaching the law in his sermon than that the good news of the kingdom he announces is not sufficiently respectful of what we have achieved. What can we make of such extravagance of God's mercy for the "undeserving?"

As the Apostle Paul said to the Christians in Corinth, "Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God" (1 Cor 1:26-27). Consider the high probability that Luke-Acts was written in the last third of the first century when Judea had been decimated by Rome and Jerusalem burned. As the early Christian movement was swept by the Holy Spirit in irrepressible hope into the Greco-Roman world of many cultures, religions, languages, and peoples, Jesus' Sermon on the Plain was an alternative vision to the official respectability of the empire.

Within the past century the majority of Christians on the earth has shifted from Europe and North America to the two-thirds world. North American congregations with members from those churches or with sister church relationships will do well to listen or at least imagine how eagerly their brothers and sisters from those communities gather at the feet of Jesus to hear the Sermon on the Plain. They also have an abundance of sinners, which is how any of us qualifies to listen, because Jesus "did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance" (5:32). Our Lord knows that the poor, the hungry, and the sorrowful have an advantage, because this sermon is pure balm for those who know their need of God. As an African pastor described the deaths in his church from AIDS, he said, "We have God. We have hope." The repentance (metanoia) to which Jesus calls the prosperous is a "change of mind" or conversion from trusting our gods of mammon to becoming disciples and apostles of Jesus' reign of mercy.

The prophetic truth of Epiphany is that Jesus' mission reveals that God is gathering strength for a promising future. It is not a straight line from one imperial triumph to another. Jesus and the Christian evangelists and prophets with him are caught up in God's love, passion, and compassion for a wayward world. Transfiguration Sunday (9:28-36) thus offers another glimpse of God's future breaking into ordinary time.

Moses and Elijah appear in the sleepy and awake vision of the disciples who also behold the Messiah's transcendent splendor. Jesus' "departure" which they are discussing with him is more than his leaving the earth. The Greek word is exodon. The "departure" of Israel from Egypt was not merely a leaving, either. It was a divine deliverance, an "exodus." And Jesus is "about to fulfill his exodus in Jerusalem." The word can also mean his "death," as when someone is said to be departed.

In the prophetic narrative of history, these heavenly figures, who also had remarkable deaths or translations, appear to be briefing the Messiah on what is to come in Jerusalem. There is no hint of spiritual escape from the gruesome passion ahead. Heaven and earth are preparing to witness how the human systems and powers that are set against the Lord and his anointed will connive to bring him down. Then what will happen to the prophetic vision, the light of Epiphany shining in the darkness?

In Luke 9:51-61, following the Transfiguration, Jesus makes it clear that, like the prophets of old (Isa 50:7; Ezek 21:1-2), the Messiah-Prophet-Son of God will set his face to go to Jerusalem. The "fulfillment" of his "exodus" will be through his death and resurrection. God's reign of mercy and mission of love on earth will not be stopped.

David L. Tiede

Bernhard M. Christensen Professor of Vocation

Augsburg College 

1. Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 2d ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 6.

2. See Abraham J. Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 190-91.

3. This was a key insight in the previously influential analysis of Hans Conzelmann, The Theology of St. Luke, trans. Geoffrey Buswell (New York: Harper and Row, 1961).

4. Without rehearsing the details, some readers may be interested in the challenge and delight this passage has brought to me in other contexts. See David L. Tiede, "No Prophet Is Acceptable in His Own Country," Prophecy and History in Luke-Acts (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1980), 19-63, and Luke: Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1988), 101-11.

5. Two descriptions of the historical cauldron in which Israel's hopes were shaped deserve commendation: Ralph W. Klein, Israel in Exile: A Theological Interpretation, Overtures to Biblical Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979); and Walter Brueggemann, Hopeful Imagination: Prophetic Voices in Exile (Philadelphia, Fortress, 1986).

6. James A. Sanders. "From Isaiah 61 to Luke 4," in Christianity, Judaism, and Other Greco-Roman Cults: Studies for Morton Smith at Sixty. Part One: New Testament, ed. Jacob Neusner (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 75-106.

7. Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination, 34.