The Announced Mission Meets Resistance

The Greek is imperfect and reads “was being led in the wilderness”: the Spirit’s leading continues through the forty days, not only on the road there. After the long genealogy, “returned from Jordan” picks the thread back up from the baptism in 3:22.

Moses fasted forty days on the mountain (Exodus 34:28), and Elijah walked forty days on one meal to Horeb (1 Kings 19:8). “Being tempted” is a present participle: in Luke the testing runs through all forty days, and the three recorded temptations come at the end.

The Greek “if” assumes the fact rather than doubting it: since you are the Son of God. It picks up the voice at the baptism and the last words of the genealogy. Matthew has “these stones”; Luke has one stone for one loaf, a hungry man’s single meal.

Deuteronomy 8:3 speaks of the manna, bread Israel did not make for itself. The oldest manuscripts of Luke give only the first half of the verse; the words “but by every word of God” came into later copies from Matthew’s account.

“In a moment of time” is found only in Luke, literally a point of time. No mountain on earth shows every kingdom, so the scene is a vision. “The world” is the oikoumene, the same word used of the world Augustus ordered to be enrolled (2:1).

“Power” is exousia, authority, a word that becomes important in this chapter, where Jesus’ word comes “with authority” (verses 32, 36). “Delivered unto me” is perfect tense: has been handed over. Only Luke records this boast, and he leaves it unanswered.

“Worship” is proskyneo, to bow to the ground before a ruler. The Greek says “before me”. The price named for all the kingdoms is one act of homage.

Deuteronomy 6:13 in the Greek Old Testament reads “Thou shalt fear the Lord thy God”; Jesus says “worship”, answering the devil’s demand in its own word. The oldest manuscripts of Luke lack “Get thee behind me, Satan”, which appears to have come in from Matthew 16:23 or Mark 8:33.

“Pinnacle” is literally a little wing, probably a corner of the temple platform. Josephus says that from the royal colonnade on the south side the drop to the valley was so deep that looking down made a man dizzy. Luke puts this temptation last; Matthew has it second.

The devil quotes Psalm 91:11 but leaves out its final words, “in all thy ways”. The psalm promises protection to someone walking in God’s ways, not to someone leaping from a roof to force a rescue.

The devil stops at Psalm 91:12. The next verse promises that the one God protects will tread upon the lion and the adder. In Luke 10:19 Jesus gives his disciples power “to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy”.

“It is said” is a slightly different formula from “it is written”. Deuteronomy 6:16 continues, “as ye tempted him in Massah”, the place where Israel demanded water and asked, “Is the LORD among us, or not?” (Exodus 17:7).

“All the temptation” means every kind of test. “For a season” is literally until an opportune time. Luke names the moment when it comes: “Then entered Satan into Judas” (22:3).

“Power” here is dynamis, the word for strength in action, set beside the Spirit as in the angel’s words to Mary (1:35). “Fame” is pheme, the talk that runs ahead of a man. Luke gives no account of early work in Judea; Jesus goes straight to Galilee.

Elsewhere in Luke people glorify God when they see what Jesus does (5:25, 7:16). Here, unusually, Jesus himself is the one glorified. Galilee had many synagogues; a first-century one has been excavated at Magdala on the lake shore.

“As his custom was” is the phrase Acts uses of Paul’s habit of going to the synagogue (Acts 17:2). Readers stood to read Scripture and sat to teach. Any competent adult man could be invited to read.

The “book” is a scroll, and “opened” means unrolled. “Found the place” could mean he chose the passage or found the reading already appointed; a fixed cycle of prophetic readings is attested only later, so which it was is uncertain.

“Anointed” is echrisen, the verb from which “Christ” comes: the Spirit makes him the Anointed One, literally the Christ. The phrase “to heal the brokenhearted” is absent from the oldest manuscripts of Luke, though it stands in Isaiah 61:1.

“Acceptable” is dektos, and five verses later Jesus says no prophet is “accepted” (dektos) in his own country. The year of the Lord’s acceptance is announced to a town that will not accept its prophet.

The attendant, the hazzan, kept the scrolls in their chest and handed them out. Sitting was the teacher’s posture. “Fastened” is a word Luke loves, a fixed stare, used again of Stephen gazing into heaven (Acts 7:55).

“Began to say” suggests Luke gives only the opening sentence of what followed. “In your ears” is a Hebrew idiom: while you are listening. The fulfilment happens in the hearing, before anyone has seen a miracle in Nazareth.

“Bare him witness” is usually read as speaking well of him, but some scholars take the Greek as testifying against him, which would make the turn to anger begin here. “Gracious words” is literally words of grace. The question about Joseph shrinks him to a local carpenter’s son.

“Physician, heal thyself” was a known proverb in Greek and Jewish sources. The works at Capernaum have not yet been told; Luke narrates them later in this chapter (verses 31–41), placing the rejection at Nazareth first so that it heads the whole ministry.

“Verily” is amen, and this is its first use in Luke. The saying appears in all four gospels. An early papyrus from Oxyrhynchus pairs it with a second line: a physician does not heal those who know him.

1 Kings 18:1 says the rain returned “in the third year”; James 5:17 also gives three years and six months, so the longer figure was a known tradition. Three and a half years is also the length of a time of distress in Daniel 7:25.

Sarepta is Zarephath, a coastal town between Tyre and Sidon, in the very territory of Jezebel’s father, the king of the Sidonians (1 Kings 16:31). Elijah was fed in the heartland of Baal worship by a woman who was down to her last handful of flour.

Eliseus is the Greek form of Elisha. Naaman was commander of the army of Syria, Israel’s enemy, whose raiders had carried off an Israelite girl as a slave (2 Kings 5:1–2). Luke’s next leper, a Samaritan, will be the only one of ten to return and give thanks (17:11–19).

Luke uses “filled” for the Spirit in 4:1 and for wrath here; in 6:11 the scribes and Pharisees are “filled with madness”. The same congregation that wondered at his words now fills with fury.

Nazareth lies in a hollow on a ridge, with steep drops nearby. Executions took place outside a town, as with Stephen (Acts 7:58), and the Mishnah describes stoning as beginning with a push from a height. The crowd means to kill him.

“Went his way” is the verb Luke uses for the journey toward Jerusalem. In 13:33 Jesus says, “it cannot be that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem.” Nazareth is not the place appointed, and the account moves on without him being harmed.

Nazareth sits in the hills, and Capernaum on the lake shore well below sea level, so “came down” is literal. The name is Kefar Nahum, village of Nahum. Luke explains that it is “a city of Galilee” for readers who did not know the region.

“Power” here is exousia, authority, the word the devil used in verse 6. Mark adds that Jesus taught “not as the scribes”; Luke leaves out the comparison and says only that the word itself carried authority.

“A spirit of an unclean devil” is a doubled phrase found only in Luke. In ordinary Greek a daimonion could be a neutral or even a helpful spirit, so Luke specifies that this one is unclean for readers who would not assume it.

“What have we to do with thee” renders a Hebrew idiom, literally “what to me and to you”, the words the widow of Zarephath spoke to Elijah when her son died (1 Kings 17:18). The spirit uses “us”, speaking for its kind. “Let us alone” may also be a cry of alarm: ha!

“Hold thy peace” is literally be muzzled, the verb used for muzzling an ox (1 Corinthians 9:9). “In the midst” means he was thrown down in the middle of the congregation, in full view, before the spirit left.

“Authority and power”, exousia and dynamis, are joined again in 9:1, when Jesus gives the twelve “power and authority over all devils”. What the crowd sees here is later handed on to others.

“Fame” here is echos, a sound or noise, the word from which “echo” comes; in verse 14 it was pheme, talk. The report now reverberates through the whole district.

Simon appears without introduction, before his call in 5:1–11, as if Luke’s readers knew him already. At Capernaum excavators found a first-century house that early Christians venerated and later built an octagonal church over. “Great fever” matches medical usage of the time, which distinguished great fevers from small.

Mark says Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up; Luke has him stand over her and rebuke the fever, the verb used of the unclean spirit in verse 35. Luke says the fever left her, as a spirit leaves.

The sabbath ended at sunset, and carrying a sick person counted as work, so the town waited for the sun to go down before bringing its sick. “Divers” means various.

The first voices in Luke’s account of the ministry to call Jesus “Christ” aloud are demons. Peter will say it in 9:20, “The Christ of God”, and even then Jesus tells the disciples to tell no one.

A “desert place” is a deserted spot, not sand dunes. “Stayed him” is literally held him back, tried to detain him. In Mark it is Simon and the disciples who come searching; in Luke it is the townspeople themselves.

This is the first time Luke uses the phrase “the kingdom of God”, which recurs about thirty times in the gospel. “Sent” is the verb of the Isaiah reading in verse 18, “he hath sent me”, so Jesus ties his travels to the text he read at Nazareth.

Many manuscripts, including the oldest, read “the synagogues of Judaea”. Luke sometimes uses Judaea loosely for the whole Jewish land, and the King James follows copies that corrected it to Galilee.