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Chapter 61

The Anointed Bearer of Glad Tidings

[a]The spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
    because the Lord has anointed me;
He has sent me to bring good news to the afflicted,
    to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to the captives,
    release to the prisoners,(A)

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Footnotes

  1. 61:1–2 The prophet proclaims that he has been anointed by the Lord to bring good news (cf. 40:9) to the afflicted and to comfort Zion. The background to the “year of favor” is the jubilee year of release from debts (Lv 25:10–11; Is 49:8).

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,[a]
    because he has anointed me
        to bring glad tidings to the poor.(A)
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
    and recovery of sight to the blind,
        to let the oppressed go free,

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Footnotes

  1. 4:18 The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me: see note on Lk 3:21–22. As this incident develops, Jesus is portrayed as a prophet whose ministry is compared to that of the prophets Elijah and Elisha. Prophetic anointings are known in first-century Palestinian Judaism from the Qumran literature that speaks of prophets as God’s anointed ones. To bring glad tidings to the poor: more than any other gospel writer Luke is concerned with Jesus’ attitude toward the economically and socially poor (see Lk 6:20, 24; 12:16–21; 14:12–14; 16:19–26; 19:8). At times, the poor in Luke’s gospel are associated with the downtrodden, the oppressed and afflicted, the forgotten and the neglected (Lk 4:18; 6:20–22; 7:22; 14:12–14), and it is they who accept Jesus’ message of salvation.