Question: Why did Jesus come to earth on that first Christmas Day?
Answer: In order to preach – Part 3
For, as we’re told in Luke 4:19, Jesus came to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.
It was on August 1st 1991, twelve days after our wedding and with the honeymoon over, that I began work as a junior doctor. My first job was as the House Surgeon to a Urologist in Bristol’s Southmead Hospital. It was the beginning of what was, at times, a stressful year, but one that was made considerably easier as the result of the leniency shown me by the consultant I was working for.
This was not, however, because of anything in me. Rather it was because a world renowned surgeon who was a distant relative of mine, had written the textbook of surgery that my consultant had himself studied from. And though, having died some years before I was even born, I never met Professor Ian Aird, my boss liked the idea that he might be nurturing another Aird – one who, under his tutelage might eventually become similarly famous. And it was this wishful thought that made him more accepting of my all too obvious surgical incompetence than he might otherwise have been.
So then, despite my no doubt being a huge disappointment to him, I still enjoyed, if not a year, several months of that consultant’s favour.
But his kindness towards me pales into insignificance when compared to the kindness that, similarly undeserved, we are all offered during the year of the Lord’s favour – a period of time which, contrary to how it sounds, extends longer than a mere twelve months.
The year of the Lord’s favour refers to a period of time promised in the Old Testament when God would look favourably on those that had been exiled and held in Babylonian captivity – those for whom he would cancel their debt and act to bring them safely back home.
Astonishingly though, Jesus claimed that this prophecy, found in Isaiah 61 and previously fulfilled in the pages of the Old Testament, fully referred to his life in first century Palestine.
For at the start of his earthly ministry we find Jesus standing up in the synagogue and saying:
‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to 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.’
And then, having read these words from Isaiah prophecy, he then sits down and, with everyone looking at him, adds, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ [Luke 4:18-21]
Jesus then was claiming to be the one who will free us from the slavery of sin, pay the debt we owe because of all our wrongdoing, and welcome us into the family of God as his adopted sons and daughters.
And the good news is that today we are still in the Year of the Lord’s favour – because, as the apostle Paul writes, ‘now is the favourable time and…now is the day of salvation.’ [2 Corinthians 6:2]
And that is the gospel that Jesus came to preach when he came to earth on that first Christmas Day.
To reveal the secrets concealed behind door 12 of last year’s Christmas Countdown, click here.
Some musings 