Father Stephen De Young: So verse 14:

Then Jesus returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, and news of Him went out through all the surrounding region. And He taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all.

So he comes back. Lest you forget, the Holy Spirit was still with him. The Holy Spirit doesn’t depart. And this is important because in the Old Testament remember a few years back when I knew the Old Testament, the Holy Spirit would kind of come and go. Remember we saw in the Book of Judges, for example, Holy Spirit would come upon one of the judges and you do some great feat. And then Holy Spirit would sort of leave. Mission accomplished, right? And we saw with Saul, first King of Israel, the Holy Spirit came upon him when he was anointed as king. And then later on when he became wicked, the Holy Spirit departed. And in Psalm 50, David prays after he’s sinned. He says, “Take not thy Holy Spirit from me”, that’s one of his prayers to God, “Do not let that happen to me.”

So what we see is not only did the Holy Spirit in Christ’s baptism come to rest upon Him, but the Holy Spirit is dwelling within him continuously. When he goes out to the desert for 40 days, when he comes back and he’s preaching into synagogues, the Holy Spirit is dwelling with him permanently.

So He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up. And as His custom was, He went into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and stood up to read. And He was handed the book of the prophet Isaiah. And when He had opened the book, He found the place where it was written:

  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,

  Because He has anointed Me

  To preach the gospel to the poor;

  He has sent Me to heal the brokenhearted,

  To proclaim liberty to the captives

  And recovery of sight to the blind,

  To set at liberty those who are oppressed;

  To proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord.”

Then He closed the book, and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all who were in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.” So all bore witness to Him, and marveled at the gracious words which proceeded out of His mouth. And they said, “Is this not Joseph’s son?”

So, he comes to his hometown. Notice when he goes to read from the prophet Isaiah, it says he found the place. So, he chooses this; he’s reading this scripture deliberately, right? This isn’t just the one that came up in the lectionary. He reads this one on purpose. Notice also, and this is a very direct translation from the Greek, it talks about him opening and closing the book, not the scroll, the book. Why is that important? Well, because that verse that’s quoted in the middle of verse 18 where it says “and recovery of sight to the blind”, that is not in the Hebrew text of Isaiah. That piece is only in the Septuagint, in the Greek translation of the prophet Isaiah. So what Saint Luke is presenting to us here is that Jesus could read Greek, because Greek came in codices, books.

Basically, they’re like books. They would write it on a long piece of paper like a scroll, but then they would fold it up so that you had pages and run a binding through in between the pages to connect it to a cover, basically. So it was sort of the forerunner of our modern books. They didn’t have glue and printing press, but it was similar to a book. You would open it… and that’s what Luke says. He says the book and then he quotes it from the Greek, not just the Greek text, because of course St. Luke’s writing in Greek, so it’d be in Greek no matter what.

But he quotes part of it that’s only in the Greek version of the Old Testament, not the Hebrew version. So what he’s presenting to us is not Jesus going into the synagogue, rolling out the scroll and reading the Hebrew. But he’s presenting us Jesus going into the synagogue, taking out the book and reading from the Greek after he finds the place.

Now, how much you want to make of this is an open question. Some people have interpreted this to say this is sort of goes in tandem with Jesus teaching the rabbis and the scholars at the temple. This is another example of Jesus having this unbelievable knowledge that a peasant shouldn’t have. The biggest problem with that is the fact that then you would expect them when they marvel, you’d expect them not to marvel at how well he preaches. You’d expect them to marvel at the fact he could read Greek, for them to say, “Wow, how do you learn Greek?”, right, if that was the issue?

And we see that, for example, in Acts, the second part of St. Luke’s books, when St. Peter gets up on the day of Pentecost and is preaching and everyone hears them in their own language, it says the people marveled and said, “How is this? Because he’s illiterate and uneducated!”

So that’s not the issue here. The issue here is just, “Wow, he preaches really good for a day laborers kid.” Which is a different thing. We’re finding out more and more that especially in Galilee, remember, Galilee is referred to a lot as “Galilee of the Gentiles”, that in Galilee there was a lot more mixing between Greek speakers, Gentiles and Jewish people, really Galileans, but that Galilee was a much more mixed area. We found a lot of synagogues there that have Greek Old Testament texts. So actually what we’re finding out now archaeologically, and by “now”, I mean in the last 20 years, if you go back more than 20 years that you suggested that Jesus spoke any Greek, people would laugh at you.

But what we’ve discovered now in the last 20 years is that actually in the synagogues, the villages like Nazareth and Galilee, people knew a lot of Greek because they were trading all the time. They’re doing business with Gentiles who are speaking Greek as the common language. And we’re finding Greek texts in the synagogues which we know were read in the synagogues. And so we’re finding out that what St. Luke presents here is actually pretty historically accurate to what probably would have happened.

Interlocutor: Is there anything that he worked as a scribe, or anything of that sort?

Fr. Stephen: I don’t believe so, because we’re told that after that incident when he was twelve, which is when he would have started as a scribe, that he went back to Nazareth with his parents and was obedient to them. Nazareth, remember, was not an established city. Nazareth was sort of a day laborer village that moved around based on where they set up camp during the harvest. That’s why there’s no archeological remains of it.

Interlocutor: Did they have a synagogue?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, well, a synagogue was basically a large room where people would gather on the Sabbath to read the Scriptures.

Interlocutor: Like here.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, basically. Yeah. Except much less elaborate here. They have a much nicer building at the synagogue.

Interlocutor: What I mean is in the beginning they would have met in a room like this, and that’s how they would have conducted their services.

Fr. Stephen: Right. And it seems like they don’t even have a permanent rabbi since Jesus and other people are just sort of taking turns getting up and reading the Scriptures and speaking, right? No, probably not in a village that’s poor. And so it would just be sort of whoever was going to read that day and had something to offer, had something to say. And that was not uncommon in synagogues, especially synagogues outside of Judea.

And that’s how when we get into Acts, we’re going to see St. Paul, we’ll just sort of come into a town and go to the synagogue and preach there. And you’re sort of like, “Wow, he just sort of wandered in?” Well, he had rabbinical trading and credentials, which helped. But also most of those places in those sort of outlying areas where there wasn’t a huge Jewish community, it’s a small Jewish community, they wouldn’t have a permanent rabbi there sort of on the payroll. So if someone came to town who had the training, they were more than welcome to preach. In this case, it’s probably just any adult male who wants to get up and share something on any given Sabbath. So on this day it’s Jesus.

But this is important because again, this is a passage in St. Luke that like I said, until about 20 years ago, everybody said was ridiculous. That Jesus would get up and read out of a Greek book, “this is totally ahistorical”. If there was a synagogue in Nazareth, they wouldn’t have been able to afford a Torah scroll in terms of a Hebrew Torah scroll, and so they probably wouldn’t have had anything. Now, archaeologically, we’ve discovered they actually had Greek texts of the Old Testament.

Also interestingly in the Jewish tradition, the Septuagint, is we’ve talked a little bit about it. Obviously we talked more about it when we were going through the Old Testament. But the Greek translation of the Old Testament then of course, the Orthodox church sees as the primary text, had a unique place in Judaism in the first century. I say unique place because it was literally the only text other than the original Hebrew text that was allowed to be read in the synagogue by itself. The Aramaic Targums, the Aramaic translations, you were not allowed to read by themselves. You would have one reader who would read the Hebrew, and then you’d have another reader standing next to him who would read the Aramaic for the people who didn’t understand the Hebrew. But they went back and forth a verse at a time. You had to read the original Hebrew if you were going to read the Aramaic. Not so with the Greek, with the Greek, with the Septuagint, you could just get up and read the Greek. The Jewish community saw it as being as good as reading the original Hebrew.

That changed as we talked about when we were going through the Old Testament, that changed once Christianity started. And Christians were primarily using the Septuagint because it was in Greek. So many Christians were Gentiles and couldn’t read any Hebrew, or Aramaic for that matter. And so that was sort of their go-to Old Testament. And so at that point, the rules changed and the non-Christian Jewish community sort of rejected the Septuagint. The Christian community embraced it, and the Jewish community went back to strictly using the original Hebrew.

Interlocutor: How much of the world was speaking Greek?

Fr. Stephen: The entire Roman world was using Greek as their main language. The entire Roman Empire, you get outside the Roman Empire to the east, like if you’re talking about Persia going all the way over what’s now Afghanistan going into India, a lot of places were still using forms of Aramaic, left over from the Persian Empire. And of course, if you go into Western Europe, you get into the Germanic languages with the barbarians. I remember the word barbarian originally meant someone who didn’t speak Greek because to the Greeks it sounded like they were saying “bar, bar, bar, bar” when they talked, literally. And so the Greeks called them the barbari, so it was all “bar bar” as far as they were concerned. Yeah, so that’s where that comes from. But yeah, and if you go into down to Ethiopia, they were still using Ethiopic, which is a Semitic dialect similar to Aramaic. But the entire Roman Empire was Greek.

Interlocutor: When did people start using Latin?

Fr. Stephen: Latin was only really used at this time for official Roman documents. So the proceedings of the Senate, the Roman Senate were all in Latin. When Caesar issued a decree, it was in Latin, or one of the governors issued a decree. Formal correspondence was all in Latin, but most everyday people did not speak any Latin. Unless you were a lawyer or involved in politics directly in some way, then you’d know Latin, but otherwise they didn’t really.

Once the Western and Eastern Roman Empire split, which happened in the third century, in the 200s, they divided the Roman Empire for administrative purposes. It had gotten so big, unwieldly and hard to govern, they sort of had a western portion and eastern portion that were governed separately. And that was when they started making more use of Latin in the western portion. And so starting in the third century, that’s when you start seeing Latin church writers. There’s nobody, no Christians are writing in Latin in the first and second centuries. Once you get into the third century, you have St Cyprian of Carthage and Tertullian and other Christian writers start writing in Latin because it’s in the third century that Latin sort of becomes but only in the western half. The eastern half is still using Greek and used Greek all the way until 1453 when Constantinople fell. But yeah, that’s where Latin comes in.

And it was only in the fourth century when Gennadius was the Bishop of Rome, he was the first one to translate the liturgy into Latin, and that they started having religious services in Latin, was at the beginning of the fourth century, the early three hundreds, about 303. Before that, they were celebrating Greek liturgies even in Rome itself. And then Jerome, of course, translates the Scriptures, the Old and New Testament into Latin at the end of the fourth century around in the 390s, there were only sort of piecemeal copies of parts of the Bible, mostly the Psalms and stuff had been translated into Latin for use in services. So that’s really a third and fourth century thing.

Interlocutor: I thought the kyrie eleison was in Latin.

Fr. Stephen: Well, there was a period, I’m digressing a little bit, but this is interesting to me, so I’m going to do it in about the 13th century, after the split, some Latin Christians sort of re-encountered the liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, the Greek liturgy, and they thought the litany, the great litany at the beginning was really beautiful. And so they took the whole great litany and stuck it on the front of the Latin Mass at that time in the 13th century, and celebrated it that way for about 100 years or so. And then slowly, over time, it sort of was kind of long and unwieldly, and didn’t really fit with the rest of the service, right, because it was in Greek. The petition started dropping out and all you have left now is that Christe eleison, kyrie eleison at the beginning of the Latin mass, but those are the responses from the great litany that at one point got stuck onto the front of the Latin mass and then sort of mostly fell out. There’s a little sort of residue of it there. That’s where that came from.

So okay, back to Luke. So notice that Jesus gets up, he reads this passage. And this was a passage that everyone at that time understood was a messianic passage. This was talking about the Messiah. That’s why it says when he finished reading, all eyes were on him. He’s already been preaching in the synagogues. He’s already got this reputation. And now he gets up and reads this. So everybody’s kind of like, “Where is this going? Where is this going? Is he saying he’s…” 

Notice again sort of the details in the text in terms of what we’ve just been talking about, in terms of the temptation, in terms of St. Luke’s themes. He sent me to heal the broken hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, to set at liberty those who are oppressed. So this is not only a passage talking about the Messiah. This is picking up on some of the themes we’ve already seen in St. Luke’s Gospel in terms of what Jesus is going to do.

So notice also that he began to say to them, today the Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing. That’s not all he said. Sometimes if you see this in one of those Jesus movies where they sort of dramatically reenact it, he sort of reads this, and sort of dramatically says, “Today, this is fulfilled in your hearing”, and then walks away or something.  Notice it says he began to say to them and then it says, “so all bore witness to him and marveled at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth.” This is the beginning of his sermon on that passage. Today this is fulfilled in hearing. And then he went on to preach to them about the passage. And they’re all saying, they’re going, “Wow, this is pretty impressive for Joseph’s kid, he was over there building furniture. Now all of a sudden he’s got some pretty good stuff to say!”

He said to them, “You will surely say this proverb to Me, ‘Physician, heal yourself! Whatever we have heard done in Capernaum, do also here in Your country.’ “

Then He said, “Assuredly, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own country, But I tell you truly, many widows were in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a great famine throughout all the land; but to none of them was Elijah sent except to Zarephath, in the region of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And many lepers were in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

He says to them, “I know what you’re thinking.” He knows what they’re thinking. He says, “these things you did in Capernaum, and that was the big city”. Now, notice St. Luke hasn’t told us any of those things. We know about those things from St. Mark’s Gospel and St. Matthew’s Gospel, but St. Luke hasn’t told us any of the things he did in convert them. But they’re assumed those things we heard you doing, meaning miracles. These things, “Do some of those here, right? Show us some of the stuff. We heard all these stories. Show us the stuff!” And he says basically to them, “No.”

Why? Because a prophet is without honor in his own country. “You want to see some tricks, but you’re not going to believe you’re not going to believe who I am.” And then he gives these two examples, both from the stories of Elijah and Elisha, the widow Zarephath, Sidon, naming the leper. Do you notice something about these two examples? Because it’s not just like an example of somebody going out of town, right? People go out of town to do miracles. Do you know something about these two specific examples?

Interlocutor: They’re both Gentiles.

Fr: Stephen They’re both Gentiles. Exactly. Naaman was Assyrian and the widow Zarephath is from Sidon. That’s the same place Jezebel was from, not Elijah’s friend. It was a pagan area. In both of these cases… These are both cases from the Old Testament of Jewish prophets going to the Gentiles, going and working miracles for the Gentiles and not necessarily for the Jewish people, who at the time were what? Not completely, but mostly faithless.

Remember, Elijah at that one point thought he was the last person following God left. Remember, he cries out to God, he says, “You might as well just kill me, too, because I’m the last one left”. God says, “No, there’s 10,000 more out there.” So there was more than just Elijah, but 10,000 was a minority, a distinct minority in terms of the rest of Israel. They’ve gone over to Baal worship and following Jezebel. So most of Israel at the time was faithless. So Jesus isn’t just saying, “No, this is the way it works. I can’t do anything in my hometown, I got to go elsewhere.” That’s not his point. He’s comparing them and we’re going to see they get this point, He’s comparing them in that synagogue on that day in Nazareth to the people of Israel in Elijah’s day, who are following Jezebel and worshiping Baal. That’s the comparison He’s making: “You people are faithless, and so I’m going to have to go to another people.”

Now, that’s the immediate context. He’s making that comparison. But now St. Luke is writing this later into a Gentile audience. So what is St. Luke adding to that in terms of his context? St. Luke is writing to a lot of the Gentiles who the Gospel has gone to, why? Well, in part because the Judeans rejected it. Jesus came to his people first, they rejected him. And so he did what? He went to the Gentiles. Right? He went to the Gentiles.

And so part of this is St. Luke saying “That’s not something new, that’s not something unexpected.” This was a big problem in the early Church. People didn’t understand, because people, look, you read the Old Testament, and from the Christian reading of the Old Testament, at least, the Old Testament is all sort of building up to Jesus. The story’s leading somewhere, right? And so you say, “Well, how could the people, the Jewish people who were immersed in the Old Testament were immersed in this text, who really believed this and practice it, how could they have the Messiah come to them and they don’t get it and they don’t recognize him as the Messiah? How could that happen?”

And then all these Gentiles, all these pagans, they do recognize him as the Messiah, and they all become Christians. That was a big issue in the early Church in terms of trying to wrap their head around. That’s what most of the Book of Romans is about. That’s what most of the Book of Romans, that St. Paul writes, is about, is trying to explain that. Well, we get a little piece of that explanation here from St. Luke, and that’s if you really read closely, this isn’t a unique happening. This happened in Elijah’s day. This happened in Elisha’s day. Prophets were usually rejected by the people of Israel. A lot of them were killed or at least abused. And so they always… this happened over and over again that the people God sent them to rejected them. And other people who you wouldn’t expect: Syrians, Phoenicians, Gentiles, accepted and wanted to hear what God had to say to them.

So this is, from St. Luke’s perspective, normal. This is normal. This is to be expected. As I said, that doesn’t mean the people of the synagogue take kindly to being compared to Baal worshippers, they know exactly what Jesus is doing.

So all those in the synagogue, when they heard these things, were filled with wrath, and rose up and thrust Him out of the city;

They not only throw him out of the synagogue, right? They throw him out of town. We’re going to see they don’t just throw him out of town, they throw them out of the city. And they led him to the brow of the hill on which the city was built. So the city is on a hill, one edge of that hill, there’s a cliff. They’re dragging him to the cliff. So Luke writes:

and they led Him to the brow of the hill on which their city was built, that they might throw Him down over the cliff. Then passing through the midst of them, He went His way.

Interlocutor: They wanted a miracle, they got one.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] So somehow they’re all bent on killing him. But somehow Jesus makes his way through the crowd and leaves.

Interlocutor: They recognized him as Mary’s son, he couldn’t hide in the crowd.

Fr. Stephen: Well, yes, you would think yeah. That they would be able to identify him on site. So, yes, miraculously, he departs. So there’s a couple of things here. Number one, remember Satan’s last temptation? “Oh, God’s promised he’s going to protect you. Let’s see.” Well, it turns out he did, right? When they tried to throw him off the cliff. So Jesus didn’t test them, they were testing God. But also, ironically, Jesus accuses them of being part of this generation that killed the prophets. And how do they respond? “No, we’re not. We’ll show you. We’ll kill you! How dare you call us violent? We’ll kill you!” So they sort of fulfill his prophecy sort of immediately, right? They become Exhibit A of exactly what he’s talking about.

They marveled at his gracious words when he was preaching, telling them what they wanted to hear. Until he confronted them. Until he confronted them with something, right? We’ve talked about that before that this is how we tend to be when someone’s telling us things we want to hear. We nod our head and say, “Oh, yeah, I like that guy. He’s got a good head on his shoulders.” And then when someone tells us something we don’t want to hear, condemns us or criticizes us, then “They’re a jerk. How dare they?” Right? But really, in terms of our own spiritual health and well-being, we’d be better off listening to the people who criticize us and hold us accountable and confront us about things and ignoring the people who flatter us and tell us what we want to hear and are yes-men, but the tendency is to do the exact opposite.

Verse 31:

Then He went down to Capernaum, a city of Galilee, and was teaching them on the Sabbaths.

So he goes back to the big city and notice this is happening over time. It says he’s teaching them on the Sabbaths, plural. So, he’s going to that synagogue every week and preaching,

And they were astonished at His teaching, for His word was with authority.

So he’s not just sort of, “Well, here’s my opinions”. He’s preaching, and they recognize that he’s speaking with authority on these things, the way he’s interpreting things, the way he’s applying things. This isn’t just another sort of wandering guy sharing things. There’s something going on here with his preaching.

Now in the synagogue there was a man who had a spirit of an unclean demon. And he cried out with a loud voice, saying, “Let us alone! What have we to do with You, Jesus of Nazareth? Did You come to destroy us? I know who You are—the Holy One of God!”

So once again, we see demons just like Satan, know all this stuff. They know exactly who Jesus is. They know exactly who he is. He’s the Holy One of God, right? And he’s Jesus of Nazareth. They’ve even got Christ’s divine and human natures down. Right. They know the theological points,

But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be quiet, and come out of him!” And when the demon had thrown him in their midst, it came out of him and did not hurt him.

That “thrown him in their midst” means basically threw him on the ground and he had some sort of seizure as the demon was leaving him.

Then they were all amazed and spoke among themselves, saying, “What a word this is! For with authority and power He commands the unclean spirits, and they come out. And the report about Him went out into every place in the surrounding region.

So, notice here the issue is what? Authority. Going back to the temptations again, we’re at the second temptation where Satan offered Jesus the kingdoms of the world. We see here that Jesus has authority over demons, like Satan, that he can command them. Why do they marvel? Well, who does that make Jesus who could tell demons what to do?

Interlocutor: God!

Fr. Stephen: Right. There is no one else. And you notice it seems like an odd circumlocution to us, “a spirit of an unclean demon”. But again, this is because remember St. Luke’s audience, he can’t just say demon because they might not understand. If they’re Gentiles, that means bad, right? So he has to say it’s “a spirit of an unclean demon” to say this is an evil spirit, right?

But from the Gentiles’ perspective, they’re gods, right? These are spiritual powers. These things are more powerful than human beings. So if a human being could give one an order and it immediately follows the order, who does that mean Jesus is? We don’t see any of the prophets doing that in the Old Testament, right? Job would have loved to be able to tell Satan to take a hike. We don’t see that in the prophet. There’s only one person who could command spirits, who’s the Lord of Spirits. So that’s God. That’s God. And so once again, we see that and the people realize that because the people are going, “Whoa, good preachers are one thing, but this guy, he can order demons around?” That’s another thing.

Now He arose from the synagogue and entered Simon’s house. But Simon’s wife’s mother was sick with a high fever, and they made request of Him concerning her. So He stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her. And immediately she arose and served them.

So now, not only is the casting demons out of people, but a fever obeys him. Now, this is not sometimes hear people say, “Oh, this is just primitive. They thought that diseases were evil spirits and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah”, right? But St. Luke here makes a clear distinction. Remember, St. Luke is a physician, right? Such as a physician was in the ancient world, but he’s a physician. He makes a distinction here. He clearly talks about casting out a demon, and then he talks about curing a fever as two separate things. It’s two separate things. But what this is saying is, a disease obeys Jesus command, right? So not just the spiritual world, but the natural world, the physical world, the material world, obeys his commands. What does that call us back to? Let’s go back to Genesis again. How did God create the world in Genesis one? By speaking, right? He spoke, it happened. “Let there be light.” Boom! There’s light. He says it, and it happens. So make no mistake, that’s what St. Luke is saying here about Jesus. Jesus shows up, he tells the fever to scram. The fever scrams, right? Fever is gone just from him saying it.

And again, it’s not that he did some trick that she recovered because it says immediately, he says it, the fever is gone, she gets up and makes dinner because she’s so happy to be feeling better that she serves… And this shows what a spiritual man Simon Peter was, that he asked Jesus to heal his mother-in-law [Laughter]. Not every man would do that, but he has compassion on his mother-in-law and asks Jesus to heal.

But it also tells us another thing. We’re going to see this referred to later in St. Paul’s writings, that St. Peter was married and had children. So the first Pope was married and had kids.

When the sun was setting, all those who had any that were sick with various diseases brought them to Him; and He laid His hands on every one of them and healed them. And demons also came out of many, crying out and saying, “You are the Christ, the Son of God!” And He, rebuking them, did not allow them to speak, for they knew that He was the Christ.

So notice again, St. Luke is aware of the difference between diseases and demon possession. He doesn’t think they’re the same thing.

Interlocutor: How does anybody know the difference?

Fr. Stephen: Well, it’s that Jesus rebuked them and told them to be quiet the way he did the other one, right? These people who are demon possessed, as soon as they get within 5 feet of Jesus, scream about who Jesus is because they know who he is. Jesus tells them to be quiet.

But why is Jesus telling them to be quiet? For a couple of reasons. Number one is that it’s not time yet. We saw how well things went in Nazareth, right? So he’s not going around to say, “Yes, I’m the Messiah!” right? It’s not that time yet. We’ll get there in St. Luke, but also he doesn’t necessarily want their testimony, right? He’s not going to call a bunch of ugly spirits as witnesses to the fact of who he is. They do all know, but he doesn’t necessarily want them speaking up for him in public.

Interlocutor: Are these creatures the same angels that were cast out?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. These are jealous spiritual beings who he created, they don’t have physical bodies. And these are ones that rebelled against God, along with Satan and that are destined for eternal punishment for having done that. So he’s healing everyone who’s brought… notice, he heals every one of them. Jesus isn’t being picky. He isn’t like, “I’ll heal you and not you.” He’s not asking for money. He has compassion on everyone, regardless. Remember again who St. Luke is writing to. He’s writing to this broad audience of all kinds of Christians from all kinds of backgrounds. The healing that Jesus brings is for everybody.

Interlocutor: He doesn’t even ask that they repent.

Fr. Stephen: Right. It’s for everyone. He gives freely to everyone.

He said Christ offers Himself freely to everyone, to every human being. That’s what he’s getting at here. And that in turn makes Him, again, we’re showing He’s like God, because God causes the rain to fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. That’s the rain seen as a positive thing. If you’re a farmer, rain is good. So God waters the crops of wicked people and pagans and believing people. God continually gives good things to everyone on this earth generously. Every one of us has a huge amount to thank Him for.

Part of the condemnation for those who reject God is the fact that He has done all this good for them, and they have not given Him the thanks or the glory for it. They’ve either taken it for themselves, or they’ve given it to someone else, or they’ve given it to idols, but they haven’t responded to all the grace that God has given them with thanksgiving and worship and praise.

Verse 42:

Now when it was day, He departed and went into a deserted place. And the crowd sought Him and came to Him, and tried to keep Him from leaving them; but He said to them, “I must preach the kingdom of God to the other cities also, because for this purpose I have been sent.” And He was preaching in the synagogues of Galilee.

Notice, Capernaum is sort of in contrast to Nazareth. At Nazareth, they drug him out of town and tried to kill Him, right? Capernaum, He goes to leave. He says, “since my work is done here”, they don’t want him to go. They’re trying to keep Him there and notice what Jesus appeals to. He says, “The things I’ve done here, I need to do in these other cities, also.” Once again, what Christ is offering, he’s offering to everyone, not just to one city, that one city can’t lay claim to Him at the expense of others. In the same way, St. Luke’s audience, eventually, there’s no one group that could sort of lay claim to Jesus and say to the rest, “He’s ours, he’s for everyone.” We should probably end here because we’re at the end of a chapter.