Power

Luke 4: 38-42

40 As the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to him; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them.

The people close to the historical Jesus were divided over Him. Some thought He was a fraud others that He threatened their privileged oppressive position and the power that brought them. Jesus had to be stopped.  The writers of the New Testament believed Jesus was the Messiah: the person God would provide to set us free from all that oppressed us. We have listed these things as poverty, illness, accumulation of personal wealth through exploitation of others and the experience of imprisonment in all its forms. As we have seen, Jesus was portrayed by these early gospel writers as the liberation King, Suffering Servant, Authentic Human and as God in a human form. This is the implication of the Nazareth sermon that causes Jesus to be rejected. His Geography changed but the message did not. He remained known as ‘Jesus of Nazareth’. This is not just a reference to where He lived and earned His living. I am suggesting that news about Jesus travelled and gave people hope and that He was known as the Jesus that claimed in the synagogue at Nazareth to be the Messiah.  In the story of the healing of Peter’s mother in-law Jesus again demonstrates who He is to the writer and early gathered community of disciples. He is a man and clearly recognised as such but He is also clearly portrayed as having power over the created order; Jesus is the Creator. He is seen as being the person who can not only heal diseases; all good physicians can do that but as the person who can dispense and destroy the powers that rage against God and manifest itself in disease. Disease was eliminated by Jesus as a symptom on many occasions. However, it is the powers that rage against God who in the story are the root cause of our oppression and illness. It’s their system, their kingdom and their strongholds that Jesus has come to overthrow. This is the Jesus that we must recognise; a personal Saviour and destroyer of oppressive regimes of power. One day soon Jesus has promised to complete the story of liberation and as 1 Corinthians 15:6 states: ‘²⁶The last enemy to be destroyed is death.’ Do we know this Jesus? Jesus is clearly portrayed as the ‘God-Man’ who has become and still wants to become our liberation King through the overthrow of all oppressive regimes. Poverty, illness, death and so on are the weapons of domination of the kingdom Jesus came to destroy.