Love With Skin on It: A Street Psalms Advent DevotionalНамуна

In the third week of Advent, we again hear the voice of the prophet Isaiah:

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 oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the LORD’S favor. ISAIAH 61:1-2

We pray this text as a benediction in our daily prayer. It is a central reminder of who we are and why we exist as a community. It sits at the center. It is in our bones. It burns in our hearts.

Jesus reaches for these words in his first sermon (Luke 4). It was a sermon that ignited his public ministry in dramatic fashion—a sermon that called forth the deepest desires of his people. It was also a sermon that exposed the greatest fears of people, particularly those in power. The combination was explosive. In the end, those who heard his first sermon ran him out of the synagogue and tried to kill him. Jesus’ anointing not only announced liberation and signaled the slow but sure end of oppression, it also surfaced the hidden violence that perpetuated oppression among the congregation that day. 

Simeon must have seen such a day coming when he blessed the infant Jesus and his parents in the temple:

And Simeon blessed them and said to Mary His mother, “Behold, this Child is appointed for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and for a sign to be opposed and a sword will pierce even your own soul—to the end that thoughts from many hearts may be revealed.” LUKE 2 :34-35

Liberation has always been costly, especially to those who usher it in. Liberation runs in two directions at once—it looses the chains of injustice, but it also provokes the hidden mechanisms that inflict injustice. Good News awakens the angels as well as the demons. That’s how it works. That’s why if we do not have a gospel powerful enough to expose violence and absorb the violence it awakens, then liberation is just one more way of perpetuating injustice and violence. If liberators do not have the capacity to absorb and transform violence, they will in turn transmit it to new victims.

The anointing to preach Good News to the poor frees both the oppressed and the oppressor by courageously and mercifully surfacing the thing that binds them together; that is, the mutually defeating relationship constituted in violence. A liberated soul is a pierced soul, one that has experienced the piercing of its own violence, and one that has experienced the piercing of grace. The liberated soul is secure and at peace, held in mercy by the graceful One—Jesus, the Prince of Peace.This is our anointing.