AS IT IS WRITTEN . . .
The Gospel of Isaiah
When the Evangelist Luke began his account of Jesus' public ministry with the reading of Isaiah (4:18–19), he also used that prophetic text to provide a literary synopsis of the Gospel story.
The passage begins, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me." Here Luke conveys Jesus' sense of the significance of his baptism in the Jordan, when "the heaven was opened, and the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon him" (3:21–22). To indicate the change wrought by the baptism, Luke afterwards wrote, "Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee" (4:14).
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Patrick Henry Reardon is pastor emeritus of All Saints Antiochian Orthodox Church in Chicago, Illinois, and the author of numerous books, including, most recently, Out of Step with God: Orthodox Christian Reflections on the Book of Numbers (Ancient Faith Publishing, 2019).
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