And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
– Luke 4:21
Sometimes you hear something, and while your ears are pretty sure they perceived correctly, your mind tells you they must have been mistaken. In such cases we might query someone close by with the question, “Did he actually say such and such?” To confirm our astonishment the person replies, “Yep, that’s what he said!” I’m thinking such an exchange might have happened long ago in a religious gathering in a small town called Nazareth. People gathered as they regularly would to hear teaching from their holy text. What they heard caught everyone off guard except for the teacher himself.
We are beginning a new journey in which our focus will be on the teaching ministry of Jesus, specifically the section of scripture we know as the Sermon on the Mount. Teaching was a central part of his ministry. It was important enough that Jesus pointed toward it in his final instructions to his apostles. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations…teaching them to observe all that I commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). If we are to teach others what Jesus commanded, it seems we need to have a good understanding of what that is. Before we get to that great section of teaching in Matthew 5-7, we start with what could have been Jesus’ first teaching opportunity: a synagogue gathering in his home town of Nazareth.
On this particular day the people gathered expecting a normal meeting with teaching from the Hebrew Scriptures. I don’t know the method by which the teacher of the day was selected. There seems to have been some disagreement on who exactly was qualified to teach in synagogue. Whatever the local preference in Nazareth may have been, it fell to Jesus to bring the teaching on the day in question. The synagogue manager would have brought him the scroll from which to read, and Jesus would have opened it to the place where the previous reading ended. Jesus would have read the text, returned the scroll to the manager, then sat down to teach. All was going as expected until he reached that point. Then it all fell apart.
The text Jesus read was from Isaiah 61, which begins as follows:
The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me,
Because the Lord has anointed me
To bring good news to the afflicted;
He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim liberty to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord
And the day of vengeance of our God;
I don’t know how much of the passage Jesus read. Luke only tells us of the first two verses. Even if it was no more than that, it was enough. You can imagine what was going through Jesus’ mind as he read each phrase: “That’s me, that’s me, that’s me. The prophet is talking about me.” So what was he supposed to say when he began to teach from the text? Naturally he was eloquent about it. “Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” There are several things the crowd may have expected Jesus to say. Obviously this was one thing they did not expect. Someone in the crowd must have turned to his neighbor and whispered, “Did he just claim that he is fulfilling the scripture?” The response: “Yep, that’s what the man said.”
There are several points that could be made, but let’s stick with two. First, the truth of what Jesus said here in Nazareth would become evident over the next three years. He had already began his ministry in Capernaum, and word of his mighty works was beginning to spread. Still, there was so much more to come, and it was ministry that clearly reflected the prophecy of Isaiah. When Jesus announced to the crowd, by word of the scripture, that the Spirit of God was upon him, he was telling them something they had not yet had time to see with their eyes.
Second, the lesson we might want to take from this has to do with our threshold of faith. The crowd obviously became disturbed that day, but not so much because of what was said. It was because of who said it. If they understood this text to be messianic (which surely they did), they were convinced that someone at some time would come to fulfill it. They just had a hard time believing it was one of their hometown boys, and therefore their ability to believe was hindered. On top of this, the people of Nazareth discovered that Jesus was not compelled to go the extra mile in convincing them. Using the ministries of Elijah and Elisha as examples, Jesus points out that God does not necessarily distribute evidence in a manner we might consider fair (read Luke 4:23-27). These factors together create a scenario in which faith can be difficult to achieve.
Some of the teachings of Jesus are difficult to accept. As it is now, so it was when Jesus was walking the paths of Palestine. One thing is for sure. Jesus stood by what he taught. If we find his teaching hard, he is quite willing to leave us wrestling with his word. So the next time you come across words of Jesus that seem radical, just remind yourself, “That’s what the man said!”
The Winding Path 