Jesus' Return to Nazareth:

Ministry in the Synagogue

Luke 4:16-21

 

     Will you open your Bible, please, to Luke chapter 4?  In our ongoing study of this immense work of God, the gospel of Luke, we come to verses 16 and following.  This is Luke's first account of Jesus' public ministry.  It's taken a long time to get here, hasn't it?  Four chapters and many, many months of going through the beginning of the gospel of Luke to finally arrive at the point where Jesus begins His ministry.

 

     Luke could have selected a number of events.  None of the gospel writers give us all of the events that occurred in Jesus' life.  In fact, the gospel of John says that all the books in the world couldn't contain everything He did and said.  The gospel writers are selective.  They pick and choose things that pertain to the emphasis that they want to make.  Luke's first account of Jesus' public ministry is not the first actual event in His public ministry.  As we noted last time, Jesus after His temptation, which Luke records in the first thirteen verses of this chapter, went up to His home town of Nazareth very briefly, attended a wedding there at Cana and did His first miracle, He turned water into wine. 

 

     He was there for the duration of the wedding, which would have been a week or maybe a total of two weeks.  He started south again back to Judea, stopped and spent a few days in the city of Capernaum which is right at the tip of the Sea of Galilee, not far east from Nazareth and then proceeded south.

 

     He was in Judea for something short of a year.  Luke skips all that.  He skips the miracle at Cana.  He skips the visit to Capernaum.  He skips the nearly a year of Jesus doing miracles, cleansing the temple, giving the gospel to Nicodemus, meeting the woman at the well.  He skips all of that.  John writes all of that.  So in John chapter 1, 2, 3 and 4 we can fill in the gap of that part of Jesus' ministry.

 

     Luke goes right from the temptation of Jesus to the launch of His formal Galilean ministry.  Remember now, the land of Judea is divided into three sections, really, the southern part, the land of Israel, the southern part is Judea, the northern part is Galilee and in the middle to the east is Samaria.  And Jesus ministered in Galilee and in Judea.  The opening, as I said, the opening months of His ministry were in Judea with the exception of a few weeks when He attended the wedding in Cana.  The rest of the time was in Judea.  It was then that He cleansed the temple, made a whip and threw all of those that were turning it into a den of thieves out.  It was there that He met Nicodemus.  It was there that He began to cement some of the relationships with His early disciples.  It was there that He did some of His early miracles that followed up the miracle of making water into wine.  But Luke skips all of that.  And, in fact, so does Matthew and so does Mark.  Only John fills in that period of time in the life of Jesus.

 

     Luke begins in verse 14 with the Galilean ministry.  It says, "And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit.  News about Him spread through all the surrounding district and He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all."  That's how Luke launches his account of the ministry of Jesus, but keep in mind, now, nearly a year has passed before Jesus begins the Galilean ministry.

 

     Now the Galilean ministry was the time that Jesus spent in the Galilee, as it was called, and it was about a year and a half long.  For about a year and a half Jesus went through the towns and villages of Galilee.  Josephus tells us there were about 240 towns and villages, so there were plenty of locales to visit and Jesus did that for a year and a half.

 

     Now that Galilean ministry is the content of Luke's gospel from chapter 4 verse 14 through chapter 9 verse 50.  So the next number of chapters, we're going to be occupied with seeing events that occurred in the Galilean ministry of Jesus.

 

     Verses 14 and 15 just kind of give us an overview before Luke gets into details.  And we learn about the place, the place was Galilee, as we pointed out last time.  We learn about the power, the power was the power of the Holy Spirit.  We learn about the popularity, news about Him spread through all the surrounding district.  And we learn about the priority, verse 15,  He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

 

     The place was Galilee, the power was the Holy Spirit, the   popularity was everywhere, all through the surrounding district.  And the priority for Jesus was teaching in the synagogues.  As we will learn all the way through the study of Luke, as you would learn through Matthew and Mark and John, the priority for Jesus was teaching God's Word.  Long ago somebody said, "God had only one Son and He was a preacher," and that is true.  Jesus was a preacher and teacher, that was His primary responsibility, to preach and teach the Word of God.  And you see that as the story unfolds.

 

     For example, drop down to verse 31 chapter 4, "He came to Capernaum, a city in Galilee, and He was teaching them on the Sabbath."  Go to chapter 5 verse 3, "He got into one of the boats which was Simon's and asked him to put out a little bit from the land, and He sat down and began teaching the multitudes from the boat."  Verse 17, "It came about one day that He was teaching and there were Pharisees and teachers of the Law," etc.  Chapter 6 verse 6, "It came about on another Sabbath He entered the synagogue and was teaching."  And that is precisely what we're going to see all the way through.  In fact, in chapter 11 His disciples come to Him, verse 1, and say, "Teach us to pray."  He was a teacher.  They recognized Him as a teacher and they asked Him to each them. 

 

     Jesus was commonly known as "teacher."  He was called teacher, He was called rabbi.  In Matthew you have the great Sermon on the Mount, or better, the Sermon on Salvation in Matthew 5, 6, and 7.  And when it was done, the Jewish people said, "He teaches as one having authority, not like the scribes and Pharisees."  He was a teacher but His teaching was unique because He didn't have to quote anybody.  He didn't have any footnotes in His sermons, He just took the Word of God which, of course, was His own Word, and taught it with power and explained it with clarity.  He was a teacher.  And you can read in Mark and you can read in John and you'll always see the priority of His ministry is teaching.  And that is the important matter, to be teaching the truth, the miracles were simply to draw attention to the fact that He was from God, that He was the Messiah, that He was God in human flesh, but it was His message that was always the priority.

 

     The word "teaching" there in verse 15 comes from didasko, a very familiar Greek term that you know, and it's simply a word from which we get the English word didactic.  He was engaged in a didactic effort, that is an explanation of the meaning of things, and in His case it was the Scripture.  And so we see in verse 15 He began teaching, and that's what He did all through His entire ministry, He was a teacher and a preacher.

 

     Now you'll notice the place where He was teaching, and it's very important, He began teaching in their synagogues.  He went into Galilee and He had ready-made venues in which to teach.  Synagogues were perfect places for Jesus to teach, and I'll explain why they were.  Every town and village had one.  All it took to have a synagogue was ten Jewish men.  If you had ten Jewish men in a town or a village, that was enough men to constitute a synagogue and they would build a permanent synagogue.  In most cases, the synagogues were made out of stone and typically they faced Jerusalem.  So in Galilee they would face south, that is to say when the teacher or the preacher was giving the sermon, he would be facing south.  When people turned to go out the door they would be going south, they would be headed toward Jerusalem, the synagogue faced Jerusalem.  And so the speaker would look to the back out the door and would be looking directly toward Jerusalem.  Synagogues that were built to the east of Jerusalem faced west.  Synagogues that were built to the south of Jerusalem faced north because Jerusalem was always the focal point because that was where the temple was.  For Jesus, every synagogue He ever preached in faced Calvary, and so He taught in the synagogues. 

 

     Two hundred and forty towns and villages in the Galilee, certainly there may have been a town that didn't have ten men but it would be a rare on.  Most of them would have at least ten men, some of them would have populations of 20, 30, 40 thousand people, they would have more than one synagogue.  There would be a number of synagogues that would be built in larger places.  For example, according to the Jerusalem Talmud and there are some scholars who debate this number, but according to the Jerusalem Talmud there were 480 synagogues in the city of Jerusalem alone.  Only to point out that there were many, many synagogues in larger population areas.  So Jesus traveling around the Galilee in 240 towns and villages would have more than that in the number of synagogues that He could teach in.  So there were plenty of places for Him to teach.  His priority was teaching the Word.  And Jewish history had so worked itself into a situation by the time He began His ministry, that He had available venues which He could teach, namely these synagogues.

 

     Now Philo, ancient Jewish writer, tells us that synagogues had a name.  They were called "houses of instruction."  They were called "houses of instruction."  And that is exactly what they were for.  They were for the teaching of God's Word.  They weren't for the teaching of anything else, they were for the teaching of the Law, the Torah, the prophets, the haftorah and the holy writings, the hagiographa, as it's often called, sacred writings, all of the Old Testament.  That was what they were for.  They were houses of instruction and perfect places for Jesus to teach.  The Old Testament would be read there and it would be exposited there by someone who could explain its meaning.

 

     By the time of Jesus, it was established in the land, synagogues were firmly established.  As I said, many of them built out of stone.  Archaeologists believe they have the footings even today of some of those synagogues from the time of Jesus although most of the ruins of synagogues, and you will see some synagogue ruins in the land of Israel, are from synagogues of later times, after the time of Christ, that may well have been built on the footings of synagogues there at the time of Jesus.  But every town had at least one if they had ten men, and some cities would have many more than that.

 

     Now if there was not a synagogue, let's say there was a town that didn't have ten men, the Jewish people typically the women and the few men that were there, would gather by a running stream or they would gather on the seashore on the Sabbath to worship and to read the Law and to have someone explain it.  That's what you have in Philippi.  Philippi was in Greece, as you know, and when Paul went to Philippi in Acts 16, there was a group of Jewish women meeting by the river and that is an indication that there weren't enough men to build a synagogue and that's where they would traditionally meet to read the Law of God, the prophets, the holy writings and to be taught.

 

     I would say that probably the proliferation of synagogues in the time of Jesus would be somewhat parallel to the proliferation of Christian churches in our society today.  You go into the average town and there are churches all over.  The smaller the town, the fewer the churches, the larger the city, the more the churches.  That's the way synagogues developed. They even developed around certain rabbis who taught a certain way and they also developed around certain trades.  There were certain guilds, or certain groups of craftsmen who would have a synagogue for themselves.  Maybe that's because they lived in a certain part of the town and that local area suited their craft and so that's where they lived and they came together in their own synagogue.

 

     Now Jerusalem had always been centered on the Temple.  You need to understand the difference between the Temple and the synagogue.  There were hundreds and hundreds of synagogues, there was only one Temple.  The Temple, of course, is clearly identified in the Old Testament.  First of all, God designed a tent called the tabernacle, it was to be the place where He would dwell in the Holy of Holies, a place where the people of Israel would come and they would offer prayers and they would offer offerings and sacrifices and there were ceremonies and festivals and feasts and the priesthood would function there, of course, in the matter of taking care of all of that.  And the Temple was a singular facility.  The Lord gave instructions for the tabernacle when they settled in the land, the Lord gave them instructions and you remember Solomon built the great...the great Temple.

 

     Well the great Temple was destroyed.  It was destroyed in 586 B.C. when the Babylonians came.  They first came in 603, they came back in 597, each time they deported the Jews out of Judah, the southern kingdom.  They finally came back in 586, completely devastated the city, razed it to the ground, destroyed the wall and destroyed and sacked the Temple and stole all of its wealth and hauled it off to Babylon, along with the remaining people.

 

      Judaism, up to that point, had been defined by the Temple.  The Temple was the place of ceremony.  The Temple was the place of worship.  The Temple was the place of instruction.  And there were priests who served in the Temple but there were many more priests who weren't there.  Priests, as you remember, they went to the Temple only a couple of weeks a year because there were 24 orders of priests.  The rest of the time when they weren't serving in the temple for their two-week stint, they were out in their villages and towns where they lived and they were informal teachers of the Law.  The priests would be the local expert.  If you had an issue of understanding the Law, or of understanding the prophets, or the holy writings, you would go to the local priests and you would ask for help and they would be the experts in understanding the Law.  Some of those priests would be scribes, very careful in their handling of the Law. 

 

     So there was an informal network of teaching, but in the entire Old Testament you will never find reference to a synagogue.  There isn't any reference to one in the Old Testament.  There is no divine charter, there is no divine design for them.  They don't have any holy hardware in there like the Temple does.  They don't have special altars and special lavers and special curtains and sideboards and all of the kinds of things that made up God's instructions for both the tabernacle and the Temple.  They would be no different than this kind of a building, just a place.  There were no sacrifices offered there.  There were no ceremonies held there.  There were no feasts held there as such in terms of the large feasts, the national feasts, they were still going to be held in Jerusalem, the Passover, Feast of Fruits, Pentecost, all of those kinds of things.

 

     But what happened in 586 B.C. really shattered the Jewish structure.  When the Babylonians came in in 586 B.C. and finally demolished Jerusalem and tore the wall down and literally devastated the entire Solomonic Temple and hauled all the people into captivity, that captivity lasted 70 years.  For 70 years there was no land, there was no nation, there was no city and there was no Temple.  The people then were in need of some manner, some method of getting together and hearing the Law of God taught. 

 

     If you read the book of Ezekiel you will find out one thing they did.  Ezekiel, for example, was a prophet of God, he was taken into captivity by the Babylonians.  So when he was in captivity, he would be sitting somewhere, you'll find this in Ezekiel 8, Ezekiel 14, Ezekiel 20 and I think once in Ezekiel 33, Ezekiel sitting down with people sitting around him and he's teaching them the meaning of the Word of God.  They simply did what they needed to do, they found somebody who could explain the meaning of God's Word and they sat at his feet.  So in the captivity, the exiles met often and sat at the feet of prophets like Ezekiel to hear the Word of God.

 

     Well apparently during the time of captivity, they began to develop these patterns and they would gather together in small groups on a regular basis, and increasingly regular basis, eventually on the Sabbath and they would read the Word of God and they would hear the Word of God explained to them.  Devout Jews had a hunger for that.  And as I said, they had no land, they had no nation, they had no Temple, they had no opportunity for instruction.  And then the 70 years of captivity was over, you remember, and they were allowed to go back to the land.  And when they went back to the land, the first thing they wanted to do was recover the Word of God and read it and explain it again.  And you remember who did that, don't you?  Ezra did that. In Nehemiah chapter 8, they opened the book and they read the Scripture and gave a sense of it, which means they translated it into the common language, the local language and explained its meaning. 

 

     So after the captivity when they came back, they don't have the Temple anymore but what has developed is small gatherings of Jewish people sitting around the feet of a teacher who reads the Scripture and explains it to them, reading and expositing, or giving the sense of it.  It was the destruction of the Temple and the destruction of Jerusalem that precipitated or created the need for a place and an opportunity to meet for the teaching of divine revelation.  It is also true that prior to, during and after the captivity, Jews were scattered all over the Mediterranean world.  They were everywhere in the Mediterranean world.  It was called the diaspora, the dispersion of the Jews.  And as they were dispersed out all over the world, they obviously didn't have immediate access to the Temple which if they lived in the land of Israel was very near to all of them because it was a very small place.  Now that they're all over the world, they need some place where they can gather and meet together.  And so in the dispersion these synagogues began to develop.  And so by the time you get to the life of Jesus, there are synagogues everywhere there are ten Jews, in Galilee, in Judea, and all over the Mediterranean world.

 

     Now the term "synagogue" is from the Greek word sunagogos which simply means a gathering...a gathering or a gathering place.  And that's exactly what they were.  They were not a Temple, they are not to be confused with a temple, no sacrifices were ever made there, no altars are th