(3) In the third temptation Jesus in imagination saw himself on the pinnacle of the Temple where Solomon’s Porch and the Royal Porch met. There was a sheer drop of 450 feet into the Kedron Valley below. This was the temptation to do something sensational for the people. ‘No,’ said Jesus, ‘you must not make senseless experiments with the power of God’ (Deuteronomy 6:16). Jesus saw quite clearly that a sensational action would cause amazement for a short time; but he also saw that sensationalism would never last.
The hard way of service and of suffering leads to the cross, but after the cross to the crown.
THE GALILAEAN SPRINGTIME
Luke 4:14–15
So Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee; and the story of him spread throughout the whole countryside. He kept on teaching in their synagogues; and he was held in high reputation by all.
NO sooner had Jesus left the wilderness than he was faced with another decision. He knew that for him the hour had struck; he had settled once and for all the method he was going to take. Now he had to decide where he would start.
(1) He began in Galilee. Galilee was an area in the north of Palestine about fifty miles from north to south and twenty-five miles from east to west. The name itself means a circle and comes from the Hebrew word Galil. It was so called because it was encircled by non-Jewish nations. Because of that, new influences had always played upon Galilee and it was the most forward-looking and least conservative part of Palestine. It was extraordinarily densely populated. Josephus, who was himself at one time governor of the area, says that it had 204 villages or towns, none with a population less than 15,000. It seems incredible that there could be some 3,000,000 people congregated in Galilee.
It was a land of extraordinary fertility. There was a proverb which said that ‘it is easier to raise a legion of olive trees in Galilee than to bring up one child in Judaea’. The wonderful climate and the superb water supply made it the garden of Palestine. The very list of trees which grew there shows how amazingly fertile it was – the vine, the olive, the fig, the oak, the walnut, the terebinth, the palm, the cedar, the cypress, the balsam, the fir tree, the pine, the sycamore, the bay tree, the myrtle, the almond, the pomegranate, the citron and the oleander.
The Galilaeans themselves were the highlanders of Palestine. Josephus says of them, ‘They were ever fond of innovations and by nature disposed to changes, and delighted in seditions. They were ever ready to follow a leader who would begin an insurrection. They were quick in temper and given to quarrelling.’ ‘The Galilaeans’, it was said, ‘have never been destitute of courage.’ ‘They were ever more anxious for honour than for gain.’
That is the land in which Jesus began. It was his own land; and it would give him, at least at the beginning, an audience who would listen and be stirred into life by his message.
(2) He began in the synagogue. The synagogue was the real centre of religious life in Palestine. There was only one Temple; but the law said that wherever there were ten Jewish families there must be a synagogue; and so in every town and village it was in the synagogue that the people met to worship. There were no sacrifices in the synagogue. The Temple was designed for sacrifice; the synagogue was for teaching. But how could Jesus gain an entry into the synagogue and how could he, a layman, the carpenter from Nazareth, deliver his message there?
In the synagogue service there were three parts.
(a) The worship part in which prayer was offered.
(b) The reading of the Scriptures. Seven people from the congregation read. As they read, the ancient Hebrew, which was no longer widely understood, was translated by the Targumist into Aramaic or Greek, in the case of the law, one verse at a time, in the case of the prophets, three verses at a time.
(c) The teaching part. In the synagogue there was no professional ministry nor any one person to give the address; the president would invite any distinguished person present to speak, and discussion and talk would follow. That is how Jesus got his chance. The synagogue and its platform were open to him at this stage.
(3) The passage ends by saying that he was held in high reputation by all. This period of Jesus’ ministry has been called the Galilaean springtime. He had come like a breath of the very wind of God. The opposition had not yet crystallized. Human hearts were hungry for the word of life, and they had not yet realized what a blow he was to strike at the orthodoxy of his time. The person who has a message will always command an audience.
WITHOUT HONOUR IN HIS OWN COUNTRY
Luke 4:16–30
So Jesus came to Nazareth where he had been brought up; and, as was his habit, he went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read the lesson. The roll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He opened the roll and found the passage where it is written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring the good news to the poor. He has sent me to announce release to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who have been bruised, to proclaim that the year which everyone is waiting for has come.’ And he folded up the roll and handed it back to the officer and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed intently on him. He began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your ears.’ And all witnessed to him and were amazed at the words of grace that came from his mouth. And they said, ‘Is this not the son of Joseph?’ He said to them, ‘You are bound to quote the proverb to me, “Physician, heal yourself; we have heard about all that happened in Capernaum; do the same kind of things in your own home country.”’ He said, ‘This is the truth that I tell you. No prophet is accepted in his own home country. In truth I tell you there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up for three years and six months and when there was a great famine all over the earth. And to none of them was Elijah sent but he was sent to Zarephath, to a widow of Sidon. There were many lepers in Israel in the times of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was healed; but Naaman the Syrian was.’ And the people in the synagogue were filled with anger as they listened to these things; and they rose up and hustled him out of the town. They took him to the brow of the hill on which their town is built, to throw him down; but he passed through the midst of them and went upon his way.
ONE of Jesus’ very early visits was to Nazareth, his home town. Nazareth was not a village. It is called a polis which means a town or city; and it may well have had as many as 20,000 inhabitants. It stood in a little hollow in the hills on the lower slopes of Galilee near the Plain of Jezreel. But a boy had only to climb to the hilltop above the town and he could see an amazing panorama for miles around.
The biblical scholar Sir George Adam Smith vividly described the scene from the hilltop. The history of Israel stretched out before the watcher’s eye. There was the plain of Esdraelon where Deborah and Barak had fought; where Gideon had won his victories; where Saul had crashed to disaster and Josiah had been killed in battle; there was Naboth’s vineyard and the place where Jehu slaughtered Jezebel; there was Shunem where Elisha had lived; there was Carmel where Elijah had fought his epic battle with the prophets of Baal, and, blue in the distance, there was the Mediterranean and the isles of the sea.
Not only the history of Israel was there; the world unfolded itself from the hilltop above Nazareth. Three great roads skirted it. There was the road from the south carrying pilgrims to Jerusalem. There was the great Way of the Sea which led from Egypt to Damascus with laden caravans moving along it. There was the great road to the east bearing caravans from Arabia and Roman legions marching out to the eastern frontiers of the Empire. It is wrong to think of Jesus as being brought up in a backwater; he was brought up in a town in sight of history and with the traffic