Luke 4:14-30 Commentary

Jesus Rejected at Nazareth
14 Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about him spread through the whole countryside. 15 He was teaching in their synagogues, and everyone praised him.

16 He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

18 "The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." [f]

20 Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. 21 He began by saying to them, "Today this scripture is fulfilled in your hearing."

22 All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his lips. "Isn't this Joseph's son?" they asked.

23 Jesus said to them, "Surely you will quote this proverb to me: 'Physician, heal yourself!' And you will tell me, 'Do here in your hometown what we have heard that you did in Capernaum.' "

24 "Truly I tell you," he continued, "prophets are not accepted in their hometowns. 25 I assure you that there were many widows in Israel in Elijah's time, when the sky was shut for three and a half years and there was a severe famine throughout the land. 26 Yet Elijah was not sent to any of them, but to a widow in Zarephath in the region of Sidon. 27 And there were many in Israel with leprosy [g] in the time of Elisha the prophet, yet not one of them was cleansed—only Naaman the Syrian."

28 All the people in the synagogue were furious when they heard this. 29 They got up, drove him out of the town, and took him to the brow of the hill on which the town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he walked right through the crowd and went on his way.


Dig Deeper
I really love to eat pizza. I mean I really love to eat pizza. Almost any kind of pizza will do. I do, however, have a favorite pizza place in Milwaukee, the city in which we used to live for over ten years. Not too far from where we lived the last few years that we lived there is a pizza place named Ballisteri’s. The pizza there is absolutely incredible and is still well worth the nearly two-hour drive to go back there to get it whenever we can. When we lived there, though, we got to eat pizza from there a couple times a month. I actually always wished that we could have eaten there more often but we weren’t made of money so we had to limit our visits. A bout a mile further away from Ballistreri’s was another place owned by the same family called the Ballistreri Inn or something along those lines. One night we were coming home from the other side of town and happened to be driving right by the other Ballistreri’s. We were in a bit of a hurry and noticed that this one was less crowded than the other Ballistreri’s usually is so we decided to stop and get pizza from there and take it home to eat. All night I had been anticipating having Ballistreri’s pizza and so we got our pizza from the other location and went home. I opened up the pizza, with my mouth dripping in eager anticipation for one of my great joys in eating, and I took a bite waiting for the bliss that was sure overwhelm my palate. Suddenly, I noticed something horrible. This was not the same Ballistreri’s pizza that I loved so much. This was not the same at all. I was so disappointed and disillusioned that I couldn’t even eat that pizza, even though it wasn’t bad. I went to the refrigerator and got some leftovers instead. I had so built up my expectations that any variation from those expectations were met with complete rejection. I just refused to alter what I was expecting and what I wanted.

We can do something like this on a much more profound scale when it comes to our religious beliefs. It is easy to build up expectations of what God should do or what his word should say that we simply will not accept if we somehow find it different than what we expected. The Jews of Jesus’ day were certainly as guilty of that as so many humans since then have continued to be. We know the kind of God we want and when he doesn’t match up with our expectations we have a choice. We can either humble ourselves and embrace who God says he is and who he has revealed himself to be or we can angrily reject that and shove him back in the box in which we want him to stay and go get our own religious leftovers out of our refrigerator of comfortability. The Jews that went to the synagogue the day that Jesus walked in certainly had many expectations of what God was going to do, when he was going to do it, and how he was going to do all of this through his Messiah. Yet, Jesus walked in and gave them something very different from what they wanted or expected and they were faced with that same choice to embrace the new thing that God was revealing or to reject it and keep their own preconceived notions. The big difference between this and the pizza analogy was that, in this case, the new thing was infinitely better than their expectations.

Luke doesn’t give us much for details as he begins this passage but does draw attention to two things. The first is that as he returns to Galilee, he returns full of the power of the Spirit. The second is that news about him spread quite quickly which tips us off to the fact that Jesus did many miracles in addition to his powerful teaching while at Capernaum. Thus, Luke has stressed that Jesus’ experience with John through his baptism and his time of testing in the wilderness have confirmed that Jesus is walking in the full power of the Spirit. Everything that follows should be viewed in that light with that knowledge.

Jesus followed his normal custom of going to the synagogue on the Sabbath (something that, after his death, his followers would only do to announce the message of his gospel as they immediately switched their day of worship to Sunday). He went in and took the scroll from the prophet Isaiah to read and choose his passage. His reading came from Isaiah 61, a passage that was all about the coming of the Messiah. The Messianic signs of proclaiming the good new to the poor, setting the prisoners free, and giving sight to the blind was finally here, says Jesus. This was the year of the Lord’s favor and Jesus would bring miracles of physical healing to those groups of people so as to announce that the kingdom of God was breaking into the present. The point of the physical miracles was to point to the larger spiritual truths. The spiritually poor, blind, and oppressed were being set free.

The people at the synagogue that day had already heard that Jesus had been doing incredible things and performing signs and wonders and they were surely expectant that he was there to do these same sorts of things for them. Yet , they were skeptical. How could he be the promised Messiah when they all knew him and knew his Father? The initial reaction was a positive one, but still one of great surprise. They were amazed that he was speaking of God’s grace being poured out and had questions. How could Joseph’s son be the one to announce this? At the point of their question, though, it seems that they were seeing this with some skepticism but still as more of a possibly pleasant surprise.

Their expectation was that he would do the same things for them that he had done in Capernaum. They wanted to be convinced rather than believe. Jesus’ response was not what they were expecting nor what they wanted. They wanted him to do what he did in Capernaum but Jesus hints that the miracles won’t be coming. He seems to imply that even if he did miracles there, they would not believe. He would not, in the long traditions of the prophets of God, be accepted by his own people in his own town. The irony is that verse 19 literally reads that Isaiah was proclaiming the “acceptable year of the Lord.” The acceptable year of the Lord would not be acceptable to his own people.

To make his point clear, Jesus tells two stories from Israel’s past involving Elijah and his protégé Elisha. In both cases these men saved, not members of God’s people Israel, but foreigners. Elijah wasn’t sent to the many Israelite widows but to a woman that was not of Israel. It was she who received the saving power of Israel’s God. In the same way, Elisha didn’t bring God’s healing power to the many Jewish people who had leprosy. Instead he healed the Syrian, Naaman. For Jesus, these were more than coincidental details, they were pointing to something important.

This was not what the people of Galilee wanted to hear at all. They were furious, as Jesus’ point was obvious. The miracles that he had been performing which pointed to the coming of the Messiah, the year of the Lord’s favor, would not be done among Jesus’ own people, which in itself was pointing to the fact that God’s outpouring would eventually, in large part, not be focused on Israel but on the people of the whole world. It was one thing to remind them that Elijah had ministered to a poor Gentile widow but to bring up that Elisha had healed a Syrian soldier while they were awaiting freedom from Roman oppression and then to imply that in those acts that God’s healing and freeing ministry would include Gentiles, and even be focused on them. Well, this was just too much. They were expecting a Messiah that would come and free them and crush Israel’s enemies, not minister to them, and not pour out God’s Spirit on the despised pagans.

The passage that Jesus quoted from in Isaiah 61:1-2 skipped one important line that spoke of the “day of vengeance.” The assumption of most Jews was that the parts about God’s favor being poured out was for them while the vengeance stuff would be for the pagan nations. But Jesus flipped that all around by only quoting the portions about God’s grace and connecting it to his own ministry, and then connecting that to the precedent that had been set by the two prophets who poured God’s grace out to Gentiles. The implication was that if the prophets gave God’s blessings to Gentiles and if Jesus was also a prophet who would not be honored in his hometown, then the reason that he had left out the part about God’s vengeance was because it was being reserved for Israel who had rejected the prophets and would, in large part, reject Jesus. The Messiah had not come to inflict vengeance on the nations but to bring God’s mercy to them. The punishment would be meted out to Israel who had been called to be a light to the nations and to pour the blessings of Israel’s God out to all people, but had rejected that vocation and instead attempted to turn the light and the blessing in on themselves.

Jesus’ declaration was so counter to their deeply held expectations and beliefs of who he was going to be and how he was going to work that they didn’t consider adjusting their own beliefs. Rather, their response was to remove the contradiction at any cost, even including the willingness to kill him. In the previous passage, Satan had taken Jesus to a high point and urged him to jump off to show that he was the Messiah. Jesus wasn’t willing to go outside of God’s will and his timing and refused, but now he finds himself in the same situation by doing God’s will. And God did protect him from being thrown to his death not because he was trying to take the sensational path of exalting himself but because he followed God’s will. Perhaps Luke wants us to see that when Jesus really stayed true to God’s will, then the Scriptures would indeed be fulfilled.

Jesus would stay true to God’s will but would his countrymen? If they didn’t abandon their own conceptions and expectations of who God should be and how he should work then they would indeed be left out of God’s favor. This is a stinging reminder for us to constantly go back to God’s word as our guiding light. Tradition and expectation have a far more likely result of leaving us outside of God’s will rather than leading us to it. This is something of which we must always be aware and be on guard against.


Devotional Thought
Are you more committed to who Jesus is and his revelation of God coming to us in the flesh or are you hanging onto your own expectations of who God should be and how you would have like him to work? Are you willing to go wherever Jesus’ leads and embrace the kingdom that he called us to? What does that mean for you today?