GOD’S WORD FOR YOU
LUKE 4:28-30
28 They were all filled with rage in the synagogue when they heard these things. 29 They got up and drove him out of the town. They led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, in order to throw him off the cliff. 30 But he passed through the middle of them and went on his way.
We will give special attention to three things here: The reaction of the crowd, the brow of the hill, and how Jesus passed through the crowd and went on his way.
The reaction of the crowd
Public speaking is an art form that many people avoid at all costs. This hesitation almost always has to do with an instinctive human need for acceptance. Public speakers draw attention to themselves and invite acceptance or rejection immediately. Pastors who are faithful to their work face another hurdle on this difficult path: They must proclaim God’s truth even when their audience doesn’t want to hear it. This leads to three grave temptations: Avoiding the truth, diluting the truth, or novelty.
A pastor who avoids the truth will speak out against certain sins which probably don’t really infect his flock. They will be comfortable listening to him whether he is a powerful preacher or a boring one, because he doesn’t make them squirm over their sins.
A pastor who dilutes the truth will mask God’s wrath over sin with trivialities and social commentary. He will focus the attention of the congregation on the problems he sees with entire groups, either the communists, or the liberals, or the extremists, or some other group, and he will not focus anyone’s attention on their own particular sins.
A pastor who is altogether uncomfortable with God’s word, and who refuses to admit that he doesn’t know it very well at all, may discover a thrill when his congregation gets excited over some opinion of his. He may drift into novelty: inventing theology or adapting false doctrine he’s been exposed to and parading it as a new idea, as the “real truth” of the Bible. He will be tempted to invent all sorts of allegories and adaptations of the Word of God, and lead his flock further and further away from the truth.
To be faithful to God’s word, as Jesus was here in Nazareth, a pastor must condemn the very sins of his congregation. The fear of imminent unemployment must not keep a pastor from speaking up. Jesus addressed the immediate sin in Nazareth—doubt and disbelief—and faced their reaction.
The (eye)brow of the hill
In this case, the people took him to the precipice of the hill above Nazareth. There is a Maronite Church there today. The cliff face is about fifty feet above the rocks below (that is, the height of a five- or six-storey building). Luke uses a word from anatomy, the “eyebrow” or ophrys (ὀϕρύς) of the hill (see also the Greek text of Leviticus 14:9, “he must shave his…eyebrows”). Greek-speaking physicians like Luke used this word for anything resembling the arc of an eyebrow. Filled up with rage, a crowd forced Jesus up there, but Jesus did not permit himself to be thrown down. Instead, he passed through the middle of the crowd and left.
How he passed through the crowd
What does “passed through” mean? Was this a miraculous, supernatural act? Or did his calm demeanor allow him to leave them without performing a miraculous escape? The very same word (διελθὼν) is used by Luke to describe Paul passing through Macedonia or Achaia (Acts 18:27; 19:21; 20:2) and by Paul for the same action (1 Cor. 16:5; 2 Cor. 1:16). In the Apocrypha, this word is used to describe a bleeding man “running through” a crowd (2 Maccabees 14:45). So the word doesn’t automatically carry a supernatural meaning, but in this case there may have been a miracle involved. Pastor Vic Prange, in the Luke People’s Bible, judges that this was indeed a miracle: “Making use of his divine power, he walked right through the crowd and went on his way” (p. 48). Luther seems to agree: “The Jews had to let Christ alone. When they wanted to stone him in the temple, he hid and walked out from the midst of them (John 8:59). Nor could they harm him when they tried to hurl him headlong from a hill. They were impotent against him” (LW 22:207).
In the matching Gospel accounts, neither Matthew (13:53-58) nor Mark (6:1-6) mention this incident on the hilltop. Very gently, those writers simply say that he “did not do many miracles there” (Matt. 13:58). Mark says that he only laid his hands on a few sick people to heal them (Mark 6:6). If this act of passing through the raging crowd were also a miracle (and I think it was), it would certainly fall within the paltry “few miracles” that he did.
The miracles were a sign of his compassion. Miracles were done by Jesus primarily to show that his message was exactly in line with the message of the Father in every way, so that people could at least believe in him “on the evidence of the miracles themselves” (John 14:11). But the healings here in Nazareth? This was Jesus having compassion on families he had known in his youth. Healing the little children of his childhood friends, or their grandparents—those were probably the miracles he quietly performed before sadly leaving them for a place where someone would listen to his Word.
Are we sometimes too familiar with Jesus to listen to him carefully? What are some of the most ordinary things Jesus ever said or did that we have recorded in the Bible? What can we learn even from those things?
In Christ,
Pastor Timothy Smith
Archives by Wisconsin Lutheran Chapel: http://www.wlchapel.org/worship/daily-devotion/
Pastor Smith serves St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, New Ulm, Minnesota