Let the Oppressed Go Free // Why Jesus Came for Me, Part 4

We tend to think of oppression in global geo-political terms. But normal, everyday people experience all sorts of oppression – sometimes, in the most unexpected of ways.

Oppression is just a fact of life in this world, we tend to think of it in political and in social terms, on a national or international scale, and it is huge. But oppression happens right at home too, oppression isn’t about nations, it’s about individuals like you and me. To be oppressed means to be down trodden. A husband can oppress his wife, a mother can oppress her child, a boss can oppress their employees, and ideas about how we should and shouldn’t live our lives can oppress us without us even knowing.

Oppression shatters who we are. It’s like being broken into pieces and it happens whether the oppression is political, social, economic, or personal. We all experience it sometimes, even without really putting a name to it, all we know is that we’re carrying around a heavy burden and it just seems to be crushing us.

This week on A Different Perspective we’re looking at the reasons that Jesus gave for coming to earth as a man. Here we have the Son of God, He could’ve lived in the air-conditioned comfort of heaven for all eternity, yet He chose to lay all his glory and power aside and become a little baby that grew up into a man, and to walk around on this earth in Galilee, and in Judea, and to tell people who God is. And right at the beginning of that public ministry when He was about 30 years old, He stood up in a synagogue in His own town Nazareth, nowheres-ville really, and He read this from the book of Isaiah about himself. He said:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.

Now we’ve looked at the first three of those so far this week – preaching the good news to the poor, to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind.

Today we’re going to look at the fourth out of the five reasons – to release the oppressed. Why did Jesus come for you? Why did Jesus come for me? Well one of the reasons is to release us from oppression.

This is an amazing quotation because by quoting Isaiah chapter 61 verses 1 and 2, (and if you have a bible go and read it later, or we’ll have a look at that particular passage tomorrow as well on the program). But He’s really saying God has anointed Me, God has appointed Me, He is really saying to the people who were there on the day listening, “I am the Messiah”, which is whom they were expecting; they just didn’t expect Him to be a carpenter out of Nazareth.

He said, “God the father has sent me to let the oppressed go free” – literally to send the oppressed away in release. And we might think, “Oh well that’s not really me, I’m not oppressed, you know I have a pretty good life, I go to work every day, earn a bit of money, come home, go watch a movie, I’m not really oppressed.” But the word that’s used there in that quote for oppression the original Greek word that sits behind our English translation means literally, to be shattered into pieces, to be broken-hearted, to be bruised. Now those are things that we can relate to, those are things that we all go through.

The most common complaint of adults in the developed world is stress, we are overstretched, we are stretched to the point of breaking, and lives, and marriages, and families are consistently shattered into pieces. The world is full of broken-hearted people; the world is full of hurting people.

Now when you look at some of those reasons that Jesus gave there, poverty, freedom, oppression, in a sense they sound like macro social justice issues, but Israel in the first century well, it was under Roman occupation, it was under a tyranny from religious leaders. But Jesus didn’t tend to speak into those macro social, political issues. Jesus here was talking into the lives, the inner lives of individuals like you and me, He was wanting to see people set free to have a real relationship with God.

We see that right through the Gospel accounts, I mean in Mark chapter 1 verse 40 a leper comes to Jesus and the leper says:

‘Lord if you are willing you can set me free, you can heal me’ and Jesus is moved with compassion.

This leper was diseased, he was oppressed, he was ostracised from society, he couldn’t go near an able bodied person like you and me, he couldn’t go into the synagogue, or the temple with other people, and this leper comes to Jesus and Jesus is moved with compassion, and reaches out, and touches him, and heals him, and integrates him back into society.

The bleeding woman in Mark chapter 5, Jesus is about to go and heal the very, very sick daughter of the leader of the synagogue, and instead He spends time with a woman who has been bleeding, and again bleeding was a sign of being unclean, she was ostracised from society, and he healed her, not just from her sickness but from being ostracised, from being oppressed.

The Gerasene Demoniac you know this man who’s living like an animal among the tombstones, who’s full of demons, again Mark chapter 5, this man was in isolation and Jesus when and cast the demons out, and the man said:

 ‘Jesus I’m so wrapped I want to come with you in the boat’ and Jesus said, ‘No go back to your family, go back to your society, stop being oppressed you’re now free’ (Mark 5: 18-19)

 Jesus did what He said He was going to do.

Now Israel had what we call messianic expectations, Israel were expecting the Messiah because all through the Old Testament the prophets were all saying, “one day the new Messiah will come.” But here they were in the middle of a Roman occupation of the promised land, they were an occupied territory, they were expecting a King, a Messiah like David, a warrior King, someone who would fight the Romans and get them their freedom. And yet Jesus said ‘no, no that’s not what I was talking about, I didn’t come here to deal with geo-political issues.

He said, “the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to preach the good news to the poor, he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind, and to release the oppressed”.

He said, “I’ve come for the nobody’s” I mean in those three stories; the leper, the bleeding woman, the demoniac, none of their names are recorded, they’re such little people that they don’t even get names, they don’t get billing in the New Testament, you know.

And the affliction wasn’t their fault and they experienced the healing touch of Jesus the Christ but at the same time (I love this), at the same time He raged against the religious leaders who oppressed people with their religious rules and hypocrisy. This Jesus didn’t come to lay rules on us, this Jesus came to set us free, and we go through times in our lives where we’re oppressed, and we’re broken hearted, and when that happens we feel so lonely, and so isolated, and we feel like no one cares, we feel like that leper, or that woman, or that demoniac.

And by and large people don’t care, they walk past us day and night, and day and night, and no one does anything, and no one can do anything, and Jesus is precisely the person we would expect not to do anything because He’s God, ‘God hasn’t got time for me, God’s too busy, I’m too little’ look at who he came for!

The four groups of people in that very first sermon that He talks about that he came for, the reason He came were the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed.

That is awesome! He came for you and me. He came precisely because when we are experiencing oppression, when we’re so stretched, when we’re broken hearted, when we’re shattered, when our lives are falling apart, he came precisely for you and me. Even though it’s dark there, even though we wouldn’t expect that, Jesus came for the poor, the prisoners, the blind and the oppressed

And we’ve got a choice, we can accept him, or we can reject him – it’s our choice.