Pondering one of my all-time favorite Jesus “How you like me now!?!” moments:

Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him.

Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him.

He began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:14-21 NIV)

I think perhaps the epic nature of this moment is often passed over in our our haste to get to the angry mob scene that follows. (Love us some pitchforks and torches, don’t we?) But this one really deserves our absolute and undivided attention.

Jesus is doing His traveling teacher thing and garnering some positive word of mouth. (His “influencer” star was very much on the rise.) The hometown hero is home for a spell and so He heads to synagogue ’cause that’s what you do on the Sabbath in Nazareth. This wasn’t His first time teaching in a synagogue, but this was home. This was special.

He stands up to read, and the attendant (aka scroll dude) hands him Isaiah. Scroll dude was probably like, “I could totally hammer this guy and give him Numbers or Leviticus but… he seems nice enough. I’ll throw him a bone. Isaiah. Yeah, that’ll be a soft pitch. Easy to hit. All kinds of good stuff in there.”

Then Jesus, with all of that good stuff to choose from, finds these specific verses. He reads. Then He stops in mid-sentence, rolls up the book, hands it back to scroll dude and takes His seat.

They’re all gobsmacked. Everyone is staring at Jesus like, “Bro! What’s up with that!?! You didn’t finish the reading. You left us hanging here, man. Not cool.” The room is frozen, on edge.

Then Jesus is like, “That guy that Isaiah was talking about all those years ago, you know, that messianic guy I just read to you about? Yeah. I’m that guy.”

MIC DROP.

Wow. Are you kidding me? This is flat out one of the most epic mic drop moments in human history. It is no wonder that everyone freaked out. I mean. “What did he just say? Did I hear that right?” This is total mind-bending stuff.

Allow me to illustrate with a contemporary corollary. It’s like that nerdy kid you went to school with who’s a super-rich, big-shot, tech-mogul now holding a press conference to address some strange goings on at one of his facilities and then, in the middle of the press conference, blurts out, “I am IRON-MAN.”

“Wait. What?… WHAT?!?”

Yeah. This is that… times infinity.

Because, unlike your school mate who thinks he’s a superhero (I’m looking at you, Tony), Jesus is actually That Guy. He IS the guy Isaiah talked about. He came to do all that stuff and, what’s more, He did it! He. Did. It. All.

I wonder, would I have recognized The One sent from God in a guy I had known since he was a little boy? Would I have been able to see past the familiarity to the divine? Or would I have been so enraged by his impertinence and arrogance toward my God that I wanted to wring his neck?

Looking back from our vantage point, it’s easy to pass judgement on “the villains” in the gospels. Perhaps it’s not as cut and dry as we would like to think. Would I have recognized Jesus for who He truly was in that room that day? Do I recognize Him today?