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 prea