Allen Jackson - Jesus In The Synagogue - Part 1
We've been working through this study in the Gospel of Luke. I'm just about to, I'm gonna take a break. I wanna come back and do something similar I think with the book of Acts, but I think this is the 12th session with Luke. We've lived with Luke for several weeks. I hope you've read it. I'll extend you that invitation one more time if you've ignored me up to this point. It's only 24 chapters and the chapters are not 10 to 12 pages long. Most of the chapters are not more than a page or two at the most. So while it sounds intimidating and in terms of reading biblical passages maybe it seems long, but truthfully you can read the entire Gospel of Luke in less time than it takes to watch a ball game or a movie.
So if you haven't yet read Luke with us, join us. There's a session or two left before we take a bit of a break. You'll find that it changes the Scripture, the text, dramatically when you read it with a bit more frequency. And you read it more trying to understand what's being presented rather than just reading a chapter peeled out for the day. Well, I know it has been transformational for me. I put that thought in your notes just to kind of... these are my perspectives. If I keep doing this they'll change a bit, but some are the big ideas that Luke presents to us. In this session, we're gonna look at Jesus in the synagogues. But before we do that, just as a brief recapitulation, some of the big ideas that we've been gleaning from Luke as he's telling us his Jesus story is it's very clear that it is a supernatural story. Or the language I've been using for this study is it's about a dimensional life, a dimension beyond time.
We tend very much to be creatures of time grounded in this material world, not wrong, not evil, not inappropriate, but Luke is telling us very clearly, repetitively, that there is another dimension to our lives and our existence that made the Jesus story possible. And unless we're awakened to that and we engage that other dimension, that spiritual dimension, that we live a very diminished life, a life far beyond what God has called us to, Jesus could not have completed his assignment. It's a farce to imagine that Jesus could have completed what he was given to do without his interdependence upon something beyond time and Luke makes that so clear to us in so many ways. Luke also reminds us that God's plan is in place long before it's visible to us in any way.
There's a faith component to our God lives. Before John the Baptist was born, God sent an angel to his father Zechariah with a message about John's life, John's purpose, John's objective, the value John would play in the unfolding purposes of God. Before Jesus was ever conceived, God sent the same angel to Nazareth to visit with a teenage girl by the name of Mary. You know that story a bit better, perhaps. With a plan for Jesus that would change the destiny of all humanity. The theme goes right through the the Gospel of Luke, that God's purposes and plans reach beyond time, they reach beyond our strength, our ability, our resources, our wisdom, our understanding. We're invited into the narrative, but they are beyond us.
The greatest opportunity of our lives is to serve the Lord. It's not some burdensome, loathsome, it's not restrictive, constraining, diminishing. It just isn't. And then Luke reminds us that there are people who will believe. Not everybody believed, but everybody believed John the Baptist's message. Not everybody believed Mary when she said that what was conceived in her was of the Holy Spirit. Certainly not everyone believed Jesus. Not everyone responded to his invitations. Some did, and very interesting to me is as I have read Luke and spent a bit of time with it is that it's often the ordinary people, people with no special training, they didn't have advanced degrees, they weren't people of tremendous achievement perhaps, but they were people who chose to believe in God. They chose to accept his invitations and it transformed their existence. It wrote a new ending for them.
You see, I cannot accept the ideal that is so prevalent in contemporary Christendom that our faith is intended to impact our eternity but we would like to minimize its impact on the rest of our existence. I think if we could have a candid off-the-record interview, most of us would very much like to go to heaven and we would like God to leave us alone for now. I think there's a country song, something to that effect that everybody wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to go now. It's because for now we want it on our own terms. And there are those who will believe, I would encourage you to become one of those people.
One of the benefits of reading a book or a portion of Scripture with frequency and with a little bit more of investment is the characters begin to become more real to you. I've walked back and forth through Luke enough that, you know, I felt like I've been in the boat when Jesus stood up and spoke to the wind and the waves or I was in the crowd when he addressed that demonized man. I want to learn to say yes to him with more frequency. I want to trust him more fully. I understand when Peter says, "You need to go away from me, you're different than me and I don't need to be around you". It isn't that complicated folks, it really isn't.
You know, we hide behind theology and big words. I've learned some of those words and so we think if we can make it sound confusing or torturous in the decision, it excuses our lack of belief in obedience, our lack of faithfulness, and I would submit to you it really doesn't. Decide that you want to please the Lord. Just decide you wanna please the Lord every day in the simplicity of the decisions that are before you. What will it look like to please the Lord and begin to chart your course that way? Recalibrate and begin to tell him, you know, honestly, the degree to which that has been true for you. Not the answer you give in church if you're being interviewed for a video on the big screen, but the real answer.
Luke gives us that presentation. Luke also reminds us that sometimes patience and perseverance are required. Following the Lord is not always instantaneous or immediate in its gratification or its responses. Sometimes we're asked to do things that are difficult. Seems to me as I read, there are some of the assignments in the Gospel of Luke that I think, "I don't want that job". I mean, I know Jesus said John the Baptist was the greatest born among women, but I'm thinking, whoo, you wouldn't want anybody you cared about to get that assignment. Live in the desert but I think he's about half nuts. Has a hard message to deliver, gonna be executed, shameful death, shunned by most of polite society. He's not the only one.
If we push it into the book of Luke, I mean, the book of Acts, which Luke also authored, most of Jesus's friends are gonna get treated that way. Patience and perseverance are a part of saying yes to the Lord. And for the record, I don't like to be patient. Microwaves annoy me. Why are they so slow, right? You stand and watch the white microwave. You set the timer for 1 minute and 15 and then open it after a minute? I do, maybe that's enough. I mean, I know it needs another 15 seconds but maybe it's okay now. That's not good, is it? What do yellow lights mean? Hurry. It's a weakness.
So, patience and perseverance are a part of serving the Lord. And finally, Luke makes so clear, we've highlighted in a number of instances that resistance and even rejection will fill your life even when you are choosing to honor God. Jesus, as a consistent pattern of his journey through time, meets resistance and he frequently meets just blatant hostile rejection. Not because he's lying and cheating and stealing, not because he's practicing deception, not because he's doing something that's inappropriate. Simply because he is standing on behalf of the purposes of the kingdom of God, he faces persistent resistance and often very real rejection.
Now I would submit to you that he is our Lord and our pattern. We are following him and so we should anticipate that resistance and rejection can be a part of our journey in obedience to following the Lord. And if your faith is so quiet, so subtle, so timid, so dialed down, so innocuous, so camouflaged, the resistance and rejection never touch your existence because of your faith, not because of something you're doing that's ungodly or immoral or carnal or selfish, but because of your advocacy for Jesus led by the Spirit of God. Put all the qualifiers on it. Jesus, filled with the Spirit, anointed by God, led by the Spirit, listening to God, faced resistance and rejection, not because he was belligerent and obnoxious and angry and condemning and culturally awkward. He wasn't those things. He came to represent a kingdom that has not fully yet arrived and because of that, he faced resistance and rejection and so will we.
Now with the time we have left, we're gonna go with Jesus to the synagogue. There were two structures, two institutions of worship that were a part of the first century Jewish community. There were others, but there are two primary ones that are mentioned to us in the gospels. One was the temple in Jerusalem. The first temple was built by Solomon. It was destroyed about 587 BC by the Babylonians. The second temple was built by Zerubbabel. If you can spell that you are a gold-star student. Has lots of B's. It was remodeled, it was redone, it was completely overhauled by Herod the Great, but still considered the second temple.
That temple is what stood in Jerusalem when Jesus was in the city. It was the center of national religious life. It's where the daily sacrifices were offered. It's where the Holy of Holies was so that the high priest once a year on the Day of Atonement would offer the sacrifice as an atonement for the sin of the people. It was the national bank, it was, in Herod's day, it was the greatest single structure of national pride. It was a wonder in the ancient Roman world. They came from all over the empire to see it. It took 40 years to build it and Jesus prophesied that it would be torn down. So the sect that had controlled predominantly the temple were the Sadducees. The wealthiest of the religious leaders, the most political of the religious leaders. They were the power brokers in the city of Jerusalem.
In all the local communities, the local places of worship, were the synagogues. All the communities where there were a dozen or more Jewish men you would find a synagogue. Typically humble structures, usually synagogues you would think of as holding dozens of people. The temple in Jerusalem could hold hundreds of thousands of people gathered in its courtyards. The synagogues were very modest. There would have been a synagogue in Nazareth, a synagogue in Capernaum. The archaeologists have excavated many of them. Jesus ministered both in the temple in Jerusalem and in the synagogues throughout the land of Israel. The responses were very different often, in some ways they were similar. We looked at Jesus in the temple in an earlier session.
I wanna take a moment and invite you to go with me, we're just gonna slip in with Jesus. We'll hide amongst the other disciples. We'll be visible because it's a small crowd and they'll know we're visiting, so they're gonna look at you funny. Just be emotionally prepared. Once upon a time in this church, if you visited I would ask you to stand up and tell us your name and all of us who were here regularly would watch you turn beet red and feel awkward. The reason I did that is I was stupid and I didn't know any better except to embarrass those who were our guests.
So the synagogues we're going to visit are led better than we were at that time. You won't have to stand and introduce yourself, but you'll have that anxiety. You don't know these people, you're simply there because we know something of Jesus and we would like to go with him to synagogue. In some of the synagogues, he'll read a Scripture portion. In Nazareth, his hometown, he's gonna read from the prophet Isaiah, chapter 61. We're not always gonna be given the Scripture portion he read, but I assure you in each of those synagogue gatherings on Shabbat, on Sabbath, that the Scripture portion will be read. In some instances, Jesus will be invited to say something. In other instances, he will simply minister to someone where there's a need that's presented. We won't read all the passages you have in their entirety, but we'll get a sampling.
In Luke chapter 4, the benefit of staying with a single author like Luke through his gospel is the vocabulary doesn't change, the definitions of words don't change, the tone of what he's saying doesn't change. There's a consistent presentation of thought. He's relating to us not just a string of miracles or a bundle of parables, he's telling us something. It's a narrative. He's leading us on a journey. He would like us to become familiar with Jesus's pattern of behavior in synagogues because he takes us to multiple synagogues with Jesus. He could have told the Jesus story in another way.
In Luke 4, Jesus returned to Galilee. This is immediately upon his baptism and his time of temptation in the wilderness. "He returns to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread throughout the whole countryside. He taught in their synagogues, and everyone praised him". So Luke tells us that Jesus's ministry in these more remote rural parts of Israel and these small villages where the people lived, Jesus's habit was to visit the synagogue. Jerusalem is a different animal altogether, that massive temple structure with its architectural beauty, that's a different story. But for now, he's in the synagogues.
Same chapter, verse 16, "He went to Nazareth, where he'd been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom," nothing unusual, nothing extraordinary, "and he stood up to read. The scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. He unrolled it, he found the place where it was written: and he said, 'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he's anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.' Then he rolled up the scroll and he gave it back to the attendant and he sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him, and he began by saying, 'Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.'"
And that's when the wheels began to come off the wagon. Not immediately, the people know him. This was Joe's kid, our kids went to school with him, he's played with our kids, he wasn't a particularly good soccer player. And so now he's back, he has something of a reputation that's growing. They're a bit curious. He's read from Isaiah. The change in tone emerges when Jesus said what Isaiah wrote more than 500 years ago, or about 500 years ago, is being lived out in front of you. If you look around the room, we've slipped into the synagogue, they begin to get a bit uncomfortable because now we're not just reviewing history, we're not just reciting ancient texts, we're not remembering what the prophet said long ago.
There's an implication for us. I find we are very comfortable talking about first century ideas. We're completely at home talking about the political circumstances in the first century that resulted in Jesus's execution. We are much less comfortable talking about the political circumstances or the cultural circumstances of the 21st century and what the implications of the gospel are for us. And that's precisely what happened in Nazareth and Jesus begins to prod them a bit. He reminds them that there were points in their history when God wanted to move but there weren't people amongst the Jewish community who were cooperative and that God used outsiders. It's very provocative language.
I can tell you how provocative it is because in verse 28, Luke says to us, "All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard it". These are his neighbors, childhood friends. "They got up and drove him out of the town and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him down the cliff". I've preached lots of sermons in churches. Some of them have been okay, Some of them have been not so good. Occasionally, I've gotten an amen. I'm grateful to say, I think, I've never had a response that was as unanimously angry as the one Jesus got. And it's the first message Luke gives us in a synagogue. That's noteworthy, folks.
The previous verse, I read it to you in verse 15, he said, "He taught in their synagogues and everybody praised him". And then he said, "Then he went to Nazareth to the synagogue, as was his custom, and they wanted to kill him". So again, Luke is telling us a story. He's inviting us into the middle of something, we should pay attention. Same chapter, chapter 4 verse 31: "Then Jesus went down to Capernaum, a town in Galilee, and on the Sabbath, he began to teach the people. They were amazed at his teaching, because his message had authority. In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an evil spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice. 'What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God!'"
We talked a moment ago about a dimensional life. There's a demonized man in the synagogue, do you have room for that in your theological construct? One of the covenant people of God, not drunk on Shabbat, not engaged in some immorality on Shabbat, in the synagogue tormented by an unclean spirit. And the unclean spirit has an awareness that nobody else in the gospel has yet. No disciple, no religious leader. "The demon says, 'I know who you are,' and Jesus said, 'Be quiet.' The people were amazed and they said, 'What is this teaching? With authority and power he gives orders to evil spirits and they come out!' And the news about him spread throughout the surrounding area". A little more friendly in Capernaum maybe, but there's still resistance, there's demonic resistance.
Father, I thank you that you love us. I thank that in your great mercy and compassion, you have made a way for us to be at peace with the Creator of all things. That you're not angry with us, that you are not resentful of us, that you have welcomed us into your kingdom and made peace with us through Jesus Christ. I thank you for that today. Nothing is hidden from you. No part of our past, no thought within us, and yet you love us. May that love grow in us every day and bring a boldness and a courage within us to face the challenges before us. In Jesus's name, amen.