Dr Dave Johnson: Jesus' Ministry; Luke 4:16-30

Showing posts with label Jesus' Ministry; Luke 4:16-30. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

The Inauguration of Jesus' Ministry Part VI The Resistance

The Inauguration of Jesus’ Ministry Part VI The Resistance

(Luke 4:16-30)

By Dr. Dave Johnson

Assemblies of God Missionary to the Philippines

http://www.daveanddebbiejohnson.com/

www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com

[To read the previous blogs in this series, please go to www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com.]

“Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing” intoned Jesus in Luke 4:21. A more provocative statement and audacious claim has never been made and, as Jesus well understood, the proof was in the pudding. As Jesus surely expected, his hearers were not receptive to this statement. The question is what was it that so deeply irritated them? Was it that he claimed to be the Christ? Was it the way that he handled the passage from Isaiah?

To understand their response we need to remember that Nazareth in Jesus’ day was a hotbed of Jewish nationalism. They were looking for a Messiah who would lead a revolt against Rome, establish the kingdom of God on earth, and execute justice against their enemies. In their estimation, the son of a local carpenter, whose family they knew well, did not quite fill the bill, but this may not have been the deepest cause of their irritation? Kenneth Bailey (Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, 162ff) takes issue with the translation of Luke 4:22, saying that the people bore witness against Jesus, not for him. While Bailey’s thoughts fit the context well because they did turn against him, his implication that the Bible translators made such an egregious error is a bit difficult to swallow. But even if they were for him in the beginning, they quickly turned against him.

But what was it that rubbed them the wrong way? In Luke 4:19, Jesus quoted Isaiah 61:2 about proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord, but does not go on to complete the parallelism by stating that the day of God’s vengeance had also come. Bailey is excellent on this point. Instead of calling for rebellion against Rome, Jesus advocates compassion and mercy and cites the widow of Zarephath and Naaman, who were both foreigners, one of them being a sworn enemy of the Israelites. He is saying that if they would follow him as the Christ, they would need to love the Romans, not hate the—an announcement that didn’t exactly thrill his audience. This is one of many examples of how countercultural the gospel message really is. But there is more.

According to Bailey, the Jews of Jesus’ day believed that the Isaiah 61 passage from which Jesus quote promised material blessings to those who were believers. Jesus turns this expectation on its head in the verses that follow with the stories of Elijah and the widow at Zarephath and Elisha and Naaman. As Bailey notes, both the widow and Naaman responded in faith and that faith, not ancestry, was the key to following the Messiah. He would not be the Messiah for the Jews alone, but for whosoever believes in him. To the nationalists sitting before him, these statements were outrageous and blasphemous. With their anger at a fever pitch, they rioted and tried to throw him over a nearby cliff, but he eluded them.

But the question as to whether Jesus of Nazareth did in fact fulfill the claims of the Isaiah passage remains to be answered. For this we turn to a story in Matthew 11:1-6. John the Baptist, by now sitting in a Roman jail for labeling Herod as an adulterer, had some doubts about Jesus and sent some of his disciples to verify if Jesus really was the promised Christ or if they should wait for someone else. When John’s disciples asked Jesus about his Messianic claims, he replied in vv. 5-6: Go and tell John the things which you hear and see: The blind see and the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear; the dead are raised up and the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me. Sound familiar? In other words, Jesus was telling John that he had, in both word and deed, fulfilled the claims of the Messiah outlined in Isaiah 61:1-2.

*All Scripture references are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted.

PLEASE NOTE: Permission is hereby given to forward, print, and post this blog as long as it is done as a complete blog, and its authorship is acknowledged. Thank you for your cooperation. For automatic notification of future blogs please visit www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com and click on “follow.”

Saturday, July 30, 2011

The Inauguration of Jesus' Ministry Part III: Proclaiming (Luke 4:16-30)

The Inauguration of Jesus’ Ministry Part III: Proclaiming (Luke 4:16-30)

By Dr. Dave Johnson

http://www.daveanddebbiejohnson.com/

www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com

[This blog is the third in its series. To read the other two blogs, please visit www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com.]

Jesus continued to read Isaiah 61:1-2 while his hearers listened intently, wondering what this carpenter’s son and lay Torah scholar would have to say about this majestic Messianic prophecy set in Hebrew poetry—a text potent with meaning, especially the claim of being empowered and anointed by the Holy Spirit, which served as the basis of the claims made here.

Jesus claimed that the Holy Spirit had sent him to “. . .preach the gospel to the poor. . .” What does this mean? The term “gospel” literally means “God’s good news.” The good news, in this specific context, is that the Messiah has come to liberate his people from their oppression. While his hearers understood this to be the political oppression of their Roman masters, Jesus was dealing with spiritual oppression. Sin always takes you further than you wanted to go and exacts a price higher than you wish to pay. But while sin enslaves, grace redeems. God intervened in history to save us from the effects of our own sin as well as that of others. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

To preach, here, is to proclaim or tell. In this case, it took the form of a homily or sermon in a Jewish synagogue. The focus here is on the content of the message, not the context in which it is delivered. This is true with probably every reference to preaching or proclaiming in the New Testament. Delivery styles change over time and vary from one context to another, but the message never changes. Here, Jesus announces his messianic claim in a distinctly Jewish context. In John 4:1-26, he is in a Samaritan context and speaks in a way that a Samaritan peasant woman would understand. But in both cases, the message is the same that Jesus is the long awaited Christ. The gospel message is focused on who Jesus is and what he has done. To argue that Jesus is any less than God in human flesh is to dilute the Gospel message and strip it of his power.

To the poor (v18) is rather enigmatic, at least to me. Kenneth Bailey, in his fine book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes, provides some clarification (see p. 158ff). Bailey holds that Isaiah used the words poor and meek interchangeably. He also contends that this is the way in which the Qumran Community, a religious order known as the Essenes that lived near the Dead Sea in Jesus’ day, understood the concept—suggesting the likelihood that Jesus’ hearers would also understand this in approximately the same way. Bailey goes on to say that the early church and later writings by Jewish believers reflect the same meaning. For Bailey, to define the concept of being poor only in political or economic terms is to ignore history.

Now that we have defined the term poor as being meek or humble, what are we to make of it? The idea of being meek can be juxtaposed to that of being arrogant or self-assured. Those who are such do not likely feel the need for God, but the meek and humble have no such barriers. In the ministry of Jesus it was the self-righteous Pharisees who gave him problems. The common people heard him gladly. They seemed much more open to the idea that they were sinners and in need of a Savior. Jesus spent much of his time and drew most of his disciples from the lower classes of Jewish society.

The meaning of the second line of the parallelism echoes the first. He has sent me to heal the brokenhearted. Being broken in life is part of being human and is one of the many consequences of sin. Life can be hard and harsh. People die unexpectedly, widowing spouses and orphaning children. Unexpected sickness comes and ravages bodies and drains bank accounts. The economy tanks or the stock market goes haywire and jobs and homes are lost. Some go through divorce or discover that their spouse has been unfaithful. The trials of life are endless. But to all who have been broken by life, Jesus offers good news of rest, recompense, and reconciliation in him. He is Immanuel, God with us. And if God is with us, then life, while the trials still come, has purpose, hope, and destiny. We are not cosmic accidents who crawled out the primeval slime as some would have us believe; we children of God upon whom his favor rests. And that’s not all.

*All Scripture references are from the New King James Version unless otherwise noted.

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

The Inauguration of Jesus' Ministry Part I: Setting the Stage

The Inauguration of Jesus’ Ministry Part I: Setting the Stage

By Dr. Dave Johnson

http://www.daveanddebbiejohnson.com/

www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com

Nazareth was hardly a thriving metropolis. It was small hick town in the lower hills of rural Galilee. The townspeople, like everybody in Galilee, spoke the local lingo with a distinct dialect and were regarded by their countrymen as country bumpkins. When Nathaniel asked if anything good could come out of Nazareth (John 1:46), no one who heard him, not even Jesus, wondered why he would ask such a thing. Kenneth Bailey, in his wonderful book Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downer’s Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2008, 147-169) gives some excellent backdrop on the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry. According to Bailey, Nazareth came into existence sometime in the second century B.C. Aristobulus the Maccadean intentionally settled Jews in Nazareth and elsewhere in Galilee to ensure that the area would remain loyal to him. Such settler communities, according to Bailey, tended to produce citizens that are politically nationalistic, which may partially explain what happened the day that Jesus spoke in the synagogue.

When the Romans came, one trusted source stated that they established an army outpost in Nazareth—complete with all the vice normally associated with military towns, which contributed to Nazareth’s poor reputation. In all, it was a small town on the backside of nowhere. Of all the desirable places for launching a global ministry to save the world, Nazareth was not on anyone’s list.

Except one.

Our story begins in Luke 4:16-30. Jesus had waited approximately thirty years for this moment. For three decades, under the tutelage of the Holy Spirit, he had prepared for public ministry. With a common name and growing up in the obscurity of a carpenter’s workshop with parents who had deep roots in the community, Jesus was thought of as an ordinary lad. He was just one of them, or so they thought.

Bailey notes that around this time a lay movement of pious Jews known as the habarim sprung up in towns like Nazareth where laymen gathered to discuss the Old Testament, the Bible of the day, and how to apply it to their lives. They likely also discussed the writings of the various well known rabbis. These groups nurtured a rabbinic style of debate or discussion and we can be certain, based on Jesus’ knowledge of the law and his familiarity with the rules of rabbinical debate, that he was an active participant. Becoming known as a lay scholar maybe what gave him the opportunity to speak in his hometown synagogue.

By the time Jesus rose to speak in the synagogue, he had gone to Judea and had been baptized by John the Baptist, been driven into the wilderness by the Holy Spirit to be tested by the Devil, returned to Judea where he picked up his first few disciples, Andrew, Peter, and perhaps John and his brother, James, traveled through Samaria and encountered the woman at the well (John 4), performed some miracles in Capernaum, and returned home.

Since it was the custom of the Jews to allow any man in good standing in the community to address those gathered at the synagogue, Jesus had no problem gaining an audience. According to Bailey, the text he read, Isaiah 61:1-2, could have been the assigned reading for the day, or Jesus could have arranged it in advance with the attendant. Jesus’ intentional declaration that the text, which everyone understood to be a prophecy of the coming Messiah, was fulfilled that day suggests that he may have done the latter. Bailey also notes that the phrase “bore witness to him,” (4:22 NKJV) could also been “bore witness against him.” The confusion comes from the fact that the Greek pronoun used here could be translated either way. This would mean that the crowd was against him from the beginning rather than turning on him as he continued to speak.

A careful analysis of the text reveals that Jesus did some editing, something that was common practice in the public reading in the synagogue, according to Bailey, and similar to what modern preachers do when reading some verses from a given text and not others. It may be that the editing was done by Luke, the author of the account. For reasons that will be obvious as we continue in this study, I believe that Jesus himself did the editing.

Bailey also contends that the average villager did not understand Hebrew, the language of most of the Old Testament, as Aramaic had become the common language in Israel after the Babylonian exile, and that an interpreter was used to translate what was said. Other scholars, however, believe that Hebrew, as well as Aramaic and Greek, which came into Palestine with the Romans, were understood by the masses. That Jesus, a nearly life long resident of Nazareth, spoke Hebrew indicates that the latter was probably the case.

Why Jesus selected Isaiah 61:1-2, how he edited it to suit his purposes, what exactly it was that so irritated his listeners that they wanted to murder him, and how he fulfilled the claims in the text will be dealt with in the blogs that follow.

PLEASE NOTE: Permission is hereby given to forward, print, and post this blog as long as it is done as a complete blog, and its authorship is acknowledged. Thank you for your cooperation. For automatic notification of future blogs please visit, www.drdavejohnson.blogspot.com and click on “follow.”