The Anointed Herald

Isaiah 61:1–3 (with Luke 4:16–21)

Before this session, read Isaiah 61:1–3, and Luke 4:16–21, where the Lord Jesus reads these words in the synagogue and claims them as fulfilled in Himself. Hear the Anointed One announce His mission: the Spirit of the Lord God upon Him, sent to bring good news to the poor and to bind up the brokenhearted (61:1); to announce the year of the Lord’s favor and to console all who mourn (61:2); to give a turban instead of ashes, oil symbolizing joy instead of mourning, a garment symbolizing praise instead of discouragement (61:3).

The Spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me, because the LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound.

Isaiah 61:1 (ESV)

Today This Scripture Has Been Fulfilled

Few passages in Isaiah point to the Lord Jesus more certainly than this one, because He told us so Himself. The scene is one of the most striking in all the Gospels. The Lord Jesus came to Nazareth, the town where He had been brought up, and on the Sabbath He went into the synagogue, as His custom was, and stood up to read. The attendant handed Him the scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled it, found this place, and read aloud: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and the regaining of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:18–19). Then He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. Every eye in the synagogue was fixed on Him. And He said: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read” (Luke 4:21).

Let the weight of that settle. He had just read a seven-hundred-year-old prophecy describing an Anointed One upon whom the Spirit rests, sent to preach to the poor and heal the broken, and He said, in effect, “That is Me. Today. You are looking at the fulfillment of these words.” Few claims the Lord Jesus ever made from the Old Testament are more direct: not “this will be fulfilled someday,” but “today this scripture has been fulfilled.” Here, then, is our warrant, surer than any argument we could ever construct, for reading Isaiah 61 as a portrait of Christ. We do not have to wonder whether we are permitted to see Him here. He read it of Himself; we are only taking Him at His word.

And notice the very first thing the passage says of Him: He is anointed. The LORD has anointed me (Isaiah 61:1, ESV). (We quote the ESV here because the Hebrew verb is the verb of anointing, as Luke 4:18 confirms.) To be anointed was to be set apart for an office: prophets, priests, and kings were anointed with oil, marked out and consecrated for their work. The “Anointed One,” in Hebrew, is the Mashiach, the Messiah; in Greek, the Christos, the Christ. So when this passage opens with the Anointed speaking, it is the Messiah who is speaking; and every time we call Him “Christ,” we are confessing what this verse says of Him, naming Him the Anointed One of Isaiah 61. The title we use for Him most often of all echoes this very chapter.

And He was anointed not with oil but with the Spirit. The Spirit and the anointing belong together. We saw it happen. When the Lord Jesus was baptized in the Jordan, the heavens were opened and the Spirit of God descended upon Him like a dove and rested on Him; that was His anointing, the Spirit coming upon Him for His public work. Peter would later sum up His whole ministry in a phrase that reaches straight back to this verse: that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power, and that He went about doing good (Acts 10:38). The Anointed of Isaiah 61 is the One anointed at the Jordan: the Christ on whom the Spirit came to rest.

And there is a thread here that runs straight down to us. From His title, the Christ, comes our own name: we are called Christians, the people who belong to the Christ, the Anointed One. And in Him we share His anointing. It is God, Paul writes, who establishes us together with you in Christ and who anointed us (2 Corinthians 1:21); and John tells believers, you have an anointing from the Holy One (1 John 2:20; see 2:27). The Spirit who came upon Him at the Jordan He pours out upon all who are His, so that the anointing which rested on the Head runs down, as the old psalm pictured it, over the whole of the body. We are not anointed to His unique office, of course; there is one Christ, and we are not He. But the Spirit that rested on Him as the Anointed is the very same Spirit given to every believer, and the name we wear, Christian, is taken straight from His. To belong to the Anointed is to share, by grace, in His anointing; the Spirit who was given without measure to Him is not withheld from those who are joined to Him.

And yet (this is the strange and sobering turn of the Nazareth scene) His own townsfolk would not have Him. They had watched Him grow up among them; they knew Him as the carpenter’s son. “Isn’t this Joseph’s son?” they said (Luke 4:22); and their first amazement curdled quickly into offense, until before the hour was out they had risen up and were trying to throw Him down the cliff. The Anointed of God stood among them, announced the fulfillment of their own Scriptures in their own hearing, and they were offended that someone so ordinary, so familiar, so local, should dare to make such a claim. It is the same offense we met back in chapter 53: he had no stately form or majesty that might catch our attention (53:2); He looked like nothing special at all. The glory was hidden, and the hometown could not see past the carpenter’s shop.

Good News to the Poor

Having told us who He is (the Anointed, the Spirit upon Him), the passage tells us what He came to do; and the first thing it names is striking. The LORD has anointed me to bring good news to the poor (Isaiah 61:1, ESV). Before any miracle, before any healing, the first-named work of the Anointed is to proclaim. He is, first of all, a Herald: One sent to announce good news. The Greek Old Testament renders this verb with the one behind our word “evangelize”; the Anointed is anointed to gospel, to proclaim the good news aloud. We sometimes think of the Lord Jesus’s preaching as the framework around His miracles, the talk that accompanied the real work. The passage puts it exactly the other way around. The preaching is the work. He came, first and foremost, to herald good news.

It is worth pausing on the word “news,” for it tells us a great deal about what kind of thing the gospel is. News is not advice. Advice tells you what to do; news tells you what has happened. A herald does not run into the town square with helpful suggestions for how the citizens might better themselves; he runs in with a report of something that has been done: a battle won, a king crowned, an heir born. And the gospel is news of exactly that sort: not first a set of instructions for how we might climb our way up to God, but the announcement of what God has done to come all the way down to us. This is the very nerve of the matter, and the place where the gospel parts company with every mere religion of self-improvement. The Anointed was sent to preach, and what He preaches is good news: the report of a finished work, a victory already won, a door already standing open. Our part is not first to do, but to hear, and to believe the report.

This is worth dwelling on, for it sets the pattern for everything that would follow in His church. The Lord Jesus did not come merely to do things to people and leave them to puzzle out what it all meant; He came to speak, to announce, to put the good news into words that could be heard and believed. And He left His church not first a program or a power but a word: a gospel to preach. The healing of the brokenhearted, as we will see, comes through that word; the liberty of the captives is proclaimed in words; the comfort is spoken aloud. The Anointed is a Preacher, and the means by which He does His saving work, then and now, is the heralding of good news. Wherever that good news is truly preached, the Anointed is still at His anointed work.

There is something quietly astonishing in that. When the gospel is preached today (from a pulpit, across a hospital bed, between two friends on a porch), it is not merely that someone is passing along information about a Christ who once preached, long ago, in Galilee. It is that the same Anointed is still doing His anointed work, through the mouths of those He sends. The voice is a man’s; the word is the Lord’s. This is why the apostle could tell his hearers that when they received the message he had preached, they received it not as the word of men, but, as it truly is, the word of God (1 Thessalonians 2:13). The Herald has not fallen silent in the centuries since Nazareth. He preaches still, wherever His good news is faithfully spoken; and the same Spirit who anointed Him at the Jordan goes on making that preached word alive and powerful in the ears that hear it.

And to whom is the good news to be preached? To the poor. The word takes in the poor, the humble, the afflicted: the lowly ones, those bent down under the weight of life and of sin. Not the proud, not the self-satisfied, not those who reckon that they are doing just fine. The good news is for the poor. This is the very lesson we learned only a few chapters back, where God said that He dwells with the crushed and lowly in spirit; it is the lesson of the Beatitudes, where the kingdom is promised to the poor in spirit and the earth to the meek. The gospel is addressed, by its own nature, to people who know their need: to the poor who have nothing, the humbled who have stopped boasting, the afflicted who have come to the end of their own resources. If you have come to the end of yourself, you are exactly the person to whom the Anointed was sent to preach. The good news is for the poor; and the first step toward receiving it is simply to be one of them.

To Bind Up the Brokenhearted

The Anointed’s mission goes on, and it bends, tenderly, toward the wounded. He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted (Isaiah 61:1, ESV). “To bind up” is the language of the physician: to bandage a wound, to dress an injury, to wrap what is broken so that it can mend. The Anointed comes to the brokenhearted not as a judge to sentence them, nor as a drill sergeant to harden them up, but as a physician to bind their wounds. There is a tenderness in the Messiah’s mission that we must never lose sight of. He has a particular care for the crushed in heart: the grieving, the wounded, the ones whose hearts have been broken by loss, or by sin, or by the sheer accumulated hardness of life. To them He comes with bandages, and not with blame. The psalm had long since said it of God: He heals the brokenhearted and bandages their wounds (Psalm 147:3). The Anointed comes to do exactly that, in person.

We have met this gentleness before in the book, in the first of the Servant Songs, where it was said of Him: A crushed reed he will not break, a dim wick he will not extinguish (42:3). The crushed reed (the stalk already cracked and bent over, fit, you would think, only to be snapped off and thrown away) He will not break. The dim wick (burned down to a feeble red ember, more smoke now than flame) He will not snuff out. He handles the barely-surviving with the gentlest of hands. And this is just exactly what we need to hear, for we are forever imagining that God has patience only for the strong believer, the steady soul, the one whose faith burns up bright and clear; and that the cracked and the smoldering had better hide their weakness away or be cast aside. The Anointed comes precisely to the crushed and the smoldering: not to finish the breaking, but to bind, and to tend, and to fan the dying ember patiently back into flame.

And then a great announcement of release: to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound (Isaiah 61:1, ESV). The word for “liberty” here is a special one: it is the word for the freedom proclaimed in the Year of Jubilee (Leviticus 25:10), that great fiftieth year in Israel’s law when debts were canceled, slaves were set free, and every man returned to his own inheritance. Once in a generation the trumpet sounded, and the captives went free, and the burdened began again. The Anointed comes proclaiming that Jubilee, not for a single year now, but for good. He announces liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to all those who are bound.

And the bondage He comes to break is deeper than any iron chain. There is a captivity worse than any prison of stone and bars: the captivity of sin, the bondage of a will curved in upon itself, the imprisonment of a guilt that locks a person up tighter than any cell ever could. From that prison no man can free himself; we cannot file through the bars of our own guilt, nor talk our way past the bolted door of our own sin. But the Anointed proclaims liberty. “If the son sets you free,” He would later say, “you will be really free” (John 8:36). The freedom He brings is not first political or social, though in the end it touches every corner of life; it is the freedom of forgiven sinners: the prison door of guilt swung wide, the chains of bondage to sin struck clean off. The Jubilee trumpet has sounded, this time for good, and the captives may walk out free.

The Year of the LORD’s Favor

The Anointed comes to announce the year when the LORD will show his favor (61:2). The year of the Lord’s favor is again the Jubilee picture, the year of grace and release. The Anointed proclaims that the time of God’s favor has now arrived; the long-awaited era of grace stands open. This is the “today” the Lord Jesus spoke of in the synagogue: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled.” The year of favor is not some far-off date marked on a prophetic calendar; it is now, the present time of grace in which the gospel goes out and the doors stand open. Paul would catch the urgency of it exactly: Look, now is the acceptable time; look, now is the day of salvation! (2 Corinthians 6:2). We are living in the year of the Lord’s favor.

And now we must notice something the Lord Jesus did in the synagogue at Nazareth, something so deliberate that it preaches a whole sermon by itself. The verse He was reading runs on, without a break: to announce the year when the LORD will show his favor, the day when our God will seek vengeance (61:2). Two things, joined by a single comma: the year of favor, and the day of vengeance. But the Lord Jesus, Luke tells us, read only as far as “the year of the Lord’s favor,” and there He rolled up the scroll (Luke 4:19–20). He stopped at the comma. He read out the year of favor, and He left the day of vengeance unread.

This was no accident, no merely convenient place to pause for breath. The Lord Jesus stopped there because, at His first coming, that is exactly where the fulfillment stopped. He came the first time to proclaim the year of favor: grace, release, the open door. The day of vengeance (the settled judgment of God upon all unrepented evil) He did not come, that first time, to bring. It waits for His second coming. Between the two clauses that Isaiah had joined with a comma, the Lord Jesus set the whole of the present age: this long, patient year of favor in which we are still living, in which the gospel is preached and sinners are still being gathered in. The day of vengeance is real, and it will surely come; but it has not come yet.

This is one of the places where the Old Testament’s habit of seeing the future foreshortened comes most clearly into view. To Isaiah, looking down the long corridor of the centuries, the year of favor and the day of vengeance stood side by side, like two peaks of a single mountain range glimpsed together from far off, with no hint of the great valley that lay hidden between them. It took the coming of the Anointed Himself (reading, and then deliberately not reading) to show that the two peaks are in fact separated by an entire age; that the Messiah comes not once but twice. The first time He comes in lowliness, to proclaim the year of favor and to be wounded because of our rebellious deeds; the second time He will come in glory, to bring the day of vengeance and to gather home His redeemed. We stand now in the valley between the peaks, in the long year of the Lord’s favor: the first coming behind us, and the second still ahead.

And we ought to see the mercy hidden in that delay. Every single day that the day of vengeance is held back is one more day of the year of favor: one more day in which the good news may be preached to the poor, one more day in which a brokenhearted captive may hear the Jubilee trumpet and walk free, one more day in which someone reading these very words may turn and be saved. The reason the comma has run so long, the reason the day of vengeance still tarries, is that the Lord is patient, because he does not wish for any to perish but for all to come to repentance (2 Peter 3:9). We are living inside that comma. We are living in the year of the Lord’s favor. And while it lasts, the door stands open; but it is wise to remember that the verse does not end at the comma. The day of vengeance is the very next phrase. Seek the Lord while He makes Himself available; come in while it is still the year of His favor.

A Turban Instead of Ashes

The Anointed comes to console all who mourn (61:2). This is the word the whole second half of Isaiah has been building toward: comfort. The book turned, many chapters ago, on the great cry, Comfort, comfort my people (40:1); and here is the very One who brings that comfort, the Anointed sent to console all who mourn. He does not come to the mourners with a brisk word to cheer up, nor with a tidy explanation of why they must suffer. He comes to comfort them: to be, as He would say in the Beatitude, the reason that those who mourn will be comforted (Matthew 5:4). The Messiah has a heart for the grieving.

It is worth noticing what kind of comfort this is, and what kind it is not. The Anointed does not comfort the mourner by explaining the grief away, as though, if we only understood the reasons behind it, the sorrow would simply dissolve; He rarely gives us the reasons, and the reasons would not heal us even if He did. Nor does He comfort with the thin cheer of telling us it is not really so bad as it seems. The comfort He brings is of a far sturdier kind. It is the comfort of a Person: of One who has Himself entered into our grief, carried our pain, gone down into the dark and come up again alive; who stands with the mourner not as a distant adviser calling helpful things from the shore, but as a companion who has waded through the dark valley first. The deepest comfort is never finally an explanation; it is a presence. And the comfort the Anointed brings is His own presence with us, and His own sure word that our mourning is not, after all, the end of our story.

And then the passage breaks into one of the loveliest sets of images in all of Scripture: three exchanges, in which the Anointed takes what grief has done to us and trades it for something better. He comes to strengthen those who mourn in Zion, by giving them a turban, instead of ashes, oil symbolizing joy, instead of mourning, a garment symbolizing praise, instead of discouragement (61:3). A turban instead of ashes; oil symbolizing joy instead of mourning; a garment symbolizing praise instead of discouragement. Three trades, each one taking up the token of grief and giving back, in its place, the token of gladness.

Consider only the first of them. In the ancient world, ashes were the badge of mourning; the grieving sat down in ashes, poured ashes upon the head, wore the gray dust of sorrow openly. And the Anointed comes and gives, in their place, a turban: a garland, a festal headdress, the very ornament the bridegroom wears to his wedding later in this same chapter (61:10). He takes the ashes off the mourner’s head and sets a garland there instead. It is a picture of the great exchange at the very heart of the gospel, brought right down to the level of our grief: He takes our ashes (our losses, our sorrows, the gray ruin of all that sin and death have done to us) and He gives us a crown of gladness. He takes the mourning and gives the oil of joy, the festive oil rubbed on the skin at celebrations. He takes the discouraged spirit, the faint and drooping spirit of despair, and clothes it in a garment of praise. He does not merely sit and sympathize; He exchanges. He gives a wedding garland for ashes.

We must be honest that this exchange is not always completed in this life all at once. The mourner very often goes on mourning for a long while yet; the ashes are real, and the garland is not always felt. But the exchange is begun the moment the Anointed is received, and it is sure. The down payment of joy is given even now: the comfort of knowing whose we are, the quiet gladness that runs underneath even the grief; and the full exchange is surely coming, on the day when He wipes away every tear from every eye, and there is no more mourning, nor crying, nor ashes any more. The Anointed has set the trade in motion, and He will see it through to the end. Every last ash will, in the end, be exchanged for a garland.

Oaks of Righteousness

And the passage tells us at last what becomes of the comforted mourners, what they grow into, once the Anointed has done His work in them. They will be called oaks of righteousness, trees planted by the LORD to reveal his splendor (61:3). The very ones who sat in ashes become trees: strong, deep-rooted, fruitful; “oaks of righteousness,” sturdy and enduring things. The broken become the strong; the mourners become the flourishing. The gospel does not merely dry the mourner’s tears and leave him standing where he was; it grows him up into something strong, and righteous, and alive.

Hold the two pictures side by side, and feel the distance between them. At the beginning of the verse there is a person sitting down in ashes: bent, gray, grieving, with nothing growing and nothing green about him. At the end of the verse there is an oak: tall, deep-rooted, leafed out, standing firm for generations. And it is the same person in both pictures. That is the measure of what the Anointed does. The very first psalm draws the same contrast: the wicked are like wind-driven chaff, rootless and weightless, here one moment and gone the next; but the blessed man is like a tree planted by flowing streams; it yields its fruit at the proper time, and its leaves never fall off (Psalm 1:3–4). The gospel takes people who were so much blown chaff and makes them rooted trees. It does not merely comfort the mourner in his mourning and leave him a slightly more cheerful version of the same frail thing; it transplants him, roots him down beside the water, and grows him into an oak.

And notice carefully whose work this is: they are “trees planted by the LORD.” They did not plant themselves. The righteousness they come to bear is not grown up out of their own soil by their own effort; it is God’s planting, set into the ground by His own hand, and watered and grown by Him. This is the gospel’s own grammar from first to last: the righteousness is a gift, the strength is given, the very life of the tree is the Lord’s own doing. We are not self-made oaks, hauling ourselves up toward heaven by our own roots; we are the Lord’s planting, and that is the very reason we shall stand, because the One who planted us also tends us, and He is faithful to keep what He has planted.

And the passage ends by telling us the final purpose of the whole of it: the reason the Anointed preaches to the poor, and heals the broken, and frees the captives, and trades a garland for ashes, and grows mourners up into oaks. It is all to reveal his splendor. The end of our salvation is the glory of God. When a soul that once sat in ashes stands up at last a strong oak of righteousness, planted and tended by the Lord, the glory runs where it belongs: to the God who did the whole of it. Our comfort and His glory are not two competing things, to be balanced anxiously against each other; they are one. He is most glorified in the saving of us, and we are most comforted in the glorifying of Him. The Anointed makes mourners into trees, and the trees into a whole forest of praise, and the entire work stands, from first to last, to the glory of the God who sent Him.

Gathering the Threads

We have heard the Anointed describe His own mission, in the very words He stood up and claimed for Himself in the synagogue at Nazareth. The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Him; He is the Anointed, the Messiah, the Christ. He is sent to bring good news to the poor, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to announce the year of the Lord’s favor, stopping, for now, before the day of vengeance. He comes to console all who mourn; to give a turban instead of ashes, and oil symbolizing joy instead of mourning, and a garment symbolizing praise instead of discouragement; and to make the mourners into oaks of righteousness, trees planted by the Lord, to reveal His splendor. It is a portrait of pure grace, drawn by the Anointed’s own hand.

And every clause of it has an address written on it: the poor, the brokenhearted, the captive, the mourner, the one sitting down in ashes. If that is you (and at one time or another it is every one of us), then the Anointed was sent to you. He is still at His anointed work; the year of the Lord’s favor has not yet closed. The good news is still being preached to the poor; the prison doors still swing open; the ashes are still being traded for a garland. Come, then, while it is still the year of His favor, and let the Anointed do for you what He was anointed to do: to heal the broken heart, to strike off the chains, to trade your ashes for a garland. He read this scripture of Himself, and He said it was fulfilled. It is fulfilled still, for everyone who will come to the Anointed and receive what He was sent to give.

For Discussion

These questions are for the group or for your own reflection. They press at the text, at the law and gospel it teaches, and at the Christ it shows forth. Keep your Bible open as you work through them.

1. The Lord Jesus read this passage in the synagogue and said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled even as you heard it being read” (Luke 4:21). Why is this the surest possible warrant for reading Isaiah 61 as a portrait of Christ? What does it mean that every time we call Him “Christ,” we confess Him as the Anointed One of whom this verse speaks?

2. The first-named work of the Anointed is to bring good news to the poor (Isaiah 61:1, ESV): the poor, the humble, the afflicted. Why is the gospel addressed by its very nature to those who know their need rather than to the self-sufficient? Why is preaching, and not first a miracle or a program, named as His central work?

3. The Anointed proclaims liberty to the captives (Isaiah 61:1, ESV), using the language of the Jubilee. What is the deepest captivity He came to break, and how does He break it (John 8:36)? In what sense is the gospel itself a kind of Jubilee?

4. The Lord Jesus stopped reading after the year of the Lord’s favor (Luke 4:19–20) and before the day when our God will seek vengeance (61:2). Why did He stop there? What does it mean that we are living “inside the comma,” in the year of the Lord’s favor, and how is the delay of the day of vengeance itself a mercy?

5. The Anointed gives a turban, instead of ashes, oil symbolizing joy, instead of mourning, a garment symbolizing praise, instead of discouragement (61:3). How is this the great exchange of the gospel brought down to the level of our grief? How do we hold together the truth that the exchange is sure with the fact that mourners often go on mourning for a long while?

6. The comforted mourners become oaks of righteousness, trees planted by the LORD (61:3). Why does it matter that they are the Lord’s planting and not self-made? How is it that our comfort and God’s glory turn out, in the end, to be one and the same thing?

Looking Ahead

The next session takes up a startling and sobering vision, the dark companion to the bright passage we have just studied. A lone figure is seen striding up from the direction of Edom, from the city of Bozrah, and His garments are stained a deep red. A voice cries out: “Who is this who comes from Edom, dressed in bright red, coming from Bozrah?” And the figure answers: “It is I, the one who announces vindication, and who is able to deliver!” (63:1). Why are His garments red? Because, He says, He has been treading the winepress: “I have stomped grapes in the winepress all by myself; no one from the nations joined me” (63:3). Here is the day of vengeance that the Anointed, in our session, did not yet proclaim, now come at last into view; and with it, His year of redemption (63:4). We will meet the lone Warrior who treads the winepress alone, who looked for help and found none, and whose own arm therefore accomplished deliverance: the sober and powerful other side of the gospel, where judgment and redemption are shown at last to be one single work.

Before the next session, read Isaiah 63:1–6, and Revelation 19:11–16, where this same vision returns near the very end of the Bible. See the lone Warrior coming up from Edom in royal attire, the one “who is able to deliver” (63:1); His clothes red like one who has stomped on grapes in a vat (63:2–3); “I have stomped grapes in the winepress all by myself; no one from the nations joined me” (63:3); for “the day of vengeance was in my heart, and my year of redemption had come” (63:4, ESV); and “I looked, but there was no one to help … So my right arm accomplished deliverance” (63:5).

Closing Prayer

O God our Father, we bless You for the Anointed One, on whom Your Spirit rested, whom You sent to bring good news to the poor and to bind up the brokenhearted. We confess that we are the very poor and the broken to whom He was sent; and so we come to Him with our wounds, our captivities, our mourning, and our ashes, and we ask Him to do in us the work for which You anointed Him.

We thank You that we live still in the year of Your favor, that the day of vengeance has not yet come, and that the door of grace stands open even now. Proclaim Your liberty to us who are bound; comfort us who mourn; and trade, we pray, our ashes for a garland, our mourning for the oil of joy, and our discouraged spirit for the garment of praise. Make us oaks of righteousness, planted by Your own hand, that we may stand, and bear fruit, and bring You glory; through Your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, the Anointed Herald who proclaimed the year of Your favor, who lives and reigns with You and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.