Daily Manna · Day 233 · August 21
Good Tidings to the Meek
“The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me; because the LORD hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the meek; he hath sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound; To proclaim the acceptable year of the LORD, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all that mourn;”
Maybe you keep the hard part of your life in a box nobody is allowed to open. At work you are capable, and at church you tell people you are fine. The grief, the debt and the trouble in your marriage are all filed away under not now.
In 1813 a Quaker woman named Elizabeth Fry walked into the women's side of Newgate prison in London. Nearly three hundred women and their children were crowded into two wards and two cells. Some had not yet been tried, some were waiting to be shipped overseas, and some were waiting to be hanged. She was warned not to go in, and she went in anyway. The first thing she did was bring clothes for the babies, before she preached a word. Later she started a school inside the prison, taught by one of the prisoners, and she read the Bible to women nobody had read to in years. When she gave evidence to a committee of Parliament, she told them how well those women responded once they were treated as people.
Her work reads like this passage acted out. Look at the people Isaiah's anointed one is sent to: "the meek," "the brokenhearted," "the captives," "them that are bound," and "all that mourn." There is not one respectable group among them. Centuries later Jesus read this passage aloud in the synagogue at Nazareth. He stopped just before the line about "the day of vengeance of our God," closed the book, sat down, and said, "This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears."
So the promise is more specific than general kindness. He did not come for the version of you that has it all together, a version that has never existed. "The opening of the prison" in Isaiah's sentence was never just a picture of feeling better, as Fry's women found out in a real building. The box you have filed under not now is the very place He named when He said where He was sent, and you can open it to Him today.
Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 233 is If Thou Shouldest Mark (Psalm 130:3).