Isaiah61chapter 61

The vocabulary of this chapter is Jubilee vocabulary, and it points at a specific law. Every fiftieth year, the Law of Moses required a reset: debts released, Hebrew slaves freed, and ancestral land returned to the family that had lost it. It was announced by a ram's horn blown on the Day of Atonement, and its purpose was to prevent exactly the land-grabbing that Isaiah condemned back in chapter 5. So proclaiming liberty to the captives and the acceptable year of the LORD is the announcement of a Jubilee — with no fiftieth-year limit on it.

The mourning reversals are a wardrobe change at a funeral. Instead of ashes, a festal headdress — the words nearly rhyme in Hebrew, ashes and beauty. Instead of mourning, the oil of joy: guests at a feast were anointed with scented oil at the door, and mourners went unanointed. Instead of a spirit of heaviness, a garment of praise. The whole picture is a person walking out of a funeral into a wedding.

The employment arrangement in the middle would have astonished the first hearers. Strangers will feed your flocks, and foreigners will be your plowmen and vinedressers, while you are named the priests of the LORD. The whole nation is described as holding the office that only one tribe had held.

The chapter closes with a bride and groom being dressed. He decked me with ornaments as a bridegroom, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels — the groom wore a garland or turban, the bride her family's jewelry, and both were the most public display of joy their culture had.

One detail matters for how the chapter was later read. When Jesus read this passage aloud in the Nazareth synagogue, he stopped mid-sentence, after the acceptable year of the LORD and before the day of vengeance of our God, and sat down. The gap he left is where the present age sits.