Authority Recognized in Unexpected Company

“All his sayings” gathers the whole sermon given on the plain in chapter 6, and “in the audience of” is 1611 English for “in the hearing of”. Capernaum, the lakeside town Luke has already made Jesus’ base (4:31), had a customs post and, as the next verse shows, a military officer living in it.

A centurion commanded about a hundred men; in Galilee he probably served Herod Antipas, whose troops were organised on the Roman pattern, rather than Rome directly. The servant is a doulos, a slave, and “dear unto him” renders entimos, prized or held in honour, a detail Luke gives and Matthew’s parallel does not.

He does not come himself. “The elders of the Jews” are the leading men of Capernaum’s community, not the council in Jerusalem, and a Gentile who could send them as envoys had built real standing in the town. Matthew’s shorter account leaves out the go-betweens and lets the centurion speak directly.

“Instantly” meant urgently in 1611, not immediately; the Greek describes eager insistence. The elders argue from merit, calling him axios, worthy, the very word the centurion will turn round and decline in verse 7.

Paying for a synagogue was a public gift of the kind wealthy patrons were honoured for in inscriptions. The white limestone synagogue now shown at Capernaum is centuries later, but it stands on a black basalt foundation that some excavators date to the first century.

The second delegation reaches Jesus almost at the door. “Trouble not thyself” uses skullō, a verb that first meant to flay and came to mean harass or pester. His “not worthy” here is hikanos, not fit or sufficient, and a Jew entering a Gentile home raised the scruple Peter voices in Acts 10:28.

“Neither thought I myself worthy” takes up the elders’ word from verse 4 and refuses it for himself. “Say in a word” is literally “say it with a word”. The sick man is now called pais, the household word for boy or servant, where verse 2 had the plainer doulos.

“I also” is the hinge: he is set under authority, not above it, and knows what it is to pass on a word backed by someone higher. His three examples, go, come, do this, run from a soldier in the ranks down to the slave at home, the whole range of people who obey him.

Crowds marvel all through the Book of Luke, but this is the only place where Jesus himself is said to marvel. He turns round to the people following him and makes a Gentile who is not even present the example held up to them.

No touch, no word over the sickbed, no moment of healing is described. Luke reports only what the envoys find when they get back: the servant who was “ready to die” in verse 2 is well, hugiainonta, the ordinary word for sound health.

Nain was a small village on the slope of the Hill of Moreh, about six miles southeast of Nazareth. On the far side of the same hill lay Shunem, where Elisha raised the Shunammite’s son (2 Kings 4). The two crowds, disciples and “much people”, make this the most public of the raisings.

Burial followed death on the same day and took place outside the town, so a procession heading out through the gate was a familiar sight. “Only son” is monogenēs, a word Luke will use again for Jairus’s daughter (8:42) and the convulsed boy (9:38). Without husband or son, a widow lost both her support and her standing.

Luke here calls Jesus “the Lord” in his own voice for the first time in the ministry. The verb for compassion, splanchnizomai, is a gut word, moved in one’s inward parts, and Luke saves it for two later scenes: the Samaritan on the road (10:33) and the father who sees his son afar off (15:20).

The bier was an open frame of wood; Galilean dead were carried wrapped, not shut in a coffin, which is how the young man can sit up. Touching it brought Jesus close to the corpse uncleanness of Numbers 19:11-16, and the bearers halt because a teacher has laid a hand on it.

Two signs of life are given, sitting up and speaking, and not one of his words is recorded. The last action belongs to Jesus and the last word of the scene is “mother”: the one who is given back a son is the one Jesus looked at first.

The fear is awe, the reaction Luke also records after the paralysed man walked home (5:26). “Visited” is episkeptomai, the verb of a physician calling or an overseer looking in, and in the Greek Old Testament of God attending to Sarah (Genesis 21:1) and to Israel in Egypt (Exodus 4:31).

“Rumour” carried no hint of falsehood in 1611; it meant report or talk. Nain is in Galilee, so “all Judaea” probably stands for the whole Jewish land, as it does when Luke calls Herod the Great “king of Judaea” (1:5), with “the region round about” widening it further still.

John has been in Herod’s prison since 3:20, so the news reaches him second-hand through his own disciples. “All these things” points at the two events just told, a Gentile’s slave healed at a distance and a widow’s son raised on the road.

“He that should come” is ho erchomenos, the coming one, and it echoes John’s own preaching of one mightier who “cometh” (3:16). He sends two, the number of witnesses Deuteronomy 19:15 requires for a matter to stand.

Luke alone repeats the question in full, now in the messengers’ mouths and with the formal attribution “John Baptist hath sent us”. The repetition makes it an official embassy, and puts the words on record before any answer comes.

Matthew has no counterpart to this line: the messengers watch healings happen in that very hour. “Plagues” translates mastix, a whip or scourge, used of afflictions that fall like blows, and the verb for giving sight, charizomai, means to bestow as a free gift.

Of the six items, the cleansing of lepers is the one not found in Isaiah’s lists; it recalls Elisha and Naaman, whom Jesus named in the synagogue at Nazareth (4:27). The sequence climbs to the raising of the dead and then steps past it, ending on the poor hearing good news, one Greek verb, euangelizontai.

“Offended” is skandalizō, from skandalon, the trigger stick of a trap and then anything that trips a person. The blessing is open to anyone, John included, who might stumble over a coming one who heals and feeds rather than swinging the axe and fan of John’s own preaching (3:9, 17).

Reeds grew thick along the Jordan where John baptised, so the crowd had seen them bend. Herod Antipas put a reed on the early coins he struck at Tiberias, and some scholars hear a sideways look at him in the question, an inference the next verse’s talk of kings’ courts makes more tempting.

“Soft raiment” was the fine cloth of courtiers, the opposite of John’s wilderness life, and “live delicately” is en truphē, in luxury. The irony lies close to the surface: John was then in a king’s domain, at Machaerus according to Josephus, but in the prison, not the hall.

Two guesses have been set aside, and the third question at last receives a yes, which Jesus immediately raises higher. The “much more” is spelled out in the next verse: John is not only a speaker of prophecy but its subject.

The words fuse Malachi 3:1 with Exodus 23:20, where God sends an angel before Israel on the way through the wilderness. Malachi has the messenger prepare the way “before me”; here it is “before thy face”, so that the one whose road is prepared is addressed as someone other than the sender.

“Born of women” is the idiom of Job 14:1 for simply being human. “Least” is literally “the lesser”, and a minority reading as old as John Chrysostom takes it of Jesus himself, younger than John and coming after him; most read it of the humblest member of the kingdom.

“Justified God” is a striking phrase: they declared God to be in the right by accepting his verdict through John’s baptism. Tax collectors had come to John asking what to do (3:12). Editors differ on whether verses 29 and 30 continue Jesus’ words or are Luke’s own aside.

“Lawyers” (nomikoi) are experts in the law of Moses, not courtroom advocates, and Luke uses the word far more than any other gospel. “Rejected the counsel of God against themselves” means they set aside God’s purpose for them, a plan that had room for them too.

The double question, whereunto shall I liken and what are they like, is a teacher’s way of opening a comparison, a form known from later rabbinic parables as well. “This generation” in the Book of Luke is a pointed phrase for the contemporaries who resist, and it will return with a sharper edge in 11:29-32.

Children in the market square played at weddings and funerals. One group pipes a wedding dance and the other will not dance; they switch to a dirge and the others will not join the wailing. Matthew 11:17 has “lamented”, the beating of the breast, where Luke has plain weeping.

Luke alone names the missing items, “bread” and “wine”. John had been marked from before birth to “drink neither wine nor strong drink” (1:15). “He hath a devil” means he is out of his mind, the same charge later made against Jesus in John 10:20.

“Winebibber”, a heavy drinker, entered English through Coverdale’s Bible of 1535. Glutton and drunkard together recall Deuteronomy 21:20, the charge laid against a rebellious son who was to be stoned, which gives the jeer a legal edge. Jesus quotes the slander against himself.

Wisdom is pictured as a mother, as she is a hostess in Proverbs 9, and her children are those who answer her call. “Justified” means shown to be right. Where Luke has “all her children”, Matthew 11:19 has “her works”.

Only Luke records Jesus dining with Pharisees, and he does it three times (here, 11:37 and 14:1). “Sat down to meat” is literally “reclined”: at a formal dinner guests lay on couches, propped on the left elbow, with their feet stretched out away from the table.

Such meals were semi-public, with onlookers free to stand along the walls, which is how an uninvited woman could reach the couch. Alabaster was a soft, translucent stone carved into narrow-necked flasks that kept perfume from spoiling. This is a different anointing from Mary’s at Bethany in John 12.

Because Jesus reclines with his feet behind him, she can reach them without coming to the table. A respectable woman did not loosen her hair in front of men, and she uses it as a towel. The verb for kissing, kataphileō, is intensive: kissing again and again.

Simon reasons in two steps: a prophet would know what she is, and a man who knew would not allow it. “Toucheth” is haptomai, the verb for contact that could pass on uncleanness. His “this man” (houtos) carries a note of disdain.

The host’s name is given only now, as Jesus answers a thought that was never spoken aloud. Simon replies with “Master”, didaskalos, teacher: polite enough, but not the title of prophet he has just privately withheld.

A denarius, the King James “penny”, was a labourer’s day wage (Matthew 20:2), so the debts are roughly a year and a half’s work against under two months’. The ratio of ten to one carries the parable, and the creditor is unnamed.

“Frankly” meant freely in 1611, without payment; the Greek is charizomai, the verb of grace. Joachim Jeremias argued that Aramaic had no ordinary word for thanks, so that “love” in the question carries the sense of gratitude, a suggestion many commentators follow.

“I suppose” (hupolambanō) sounds grudging, as though Simon can see where the question is heading. Jesus replies with a teacher’s approval, “Thou hast rightly judged”, much as he will commend the lawyer’s answer in 10:28.

Jesus turns toward the woman while still speaking to Simon, so the host has to look at her too. Water for the feet was the ordinary courtesy to a guest in from dusty roads, the first thing Abraham offered his visitors (Genesis 18:4); she has supplied it with tears.

A kiss on the cheek was a host’s welcome between equals. Simon gave none, while she has not stopped kissing Jesus’ feet “since the time I came in”, which suggests she was there from his arrival. A few manuscripts read “since she came in”.

The contrast is doubled: common oil against costly ointment, and the head against the feet. Olive oil on a guest’s head was cheap and customary at a feast (Psalm 23:5); she pours perfumed myron on the lowest part of the body.

“Her sins, which are many” concedes Simon’s premise in full; Jesus does not dispute that she is a sinner. “Are forgiven” is a perfect tense, forgiven already and standing forgiven. The closing clause is aimed across the table at the man with little love to show.

Now, for the first time, Jesus speaks to her directly. The words match those spoken over the paralysed man let down through the roof (5:20), and they will provoke the same question in the next verse.

The guests talk “within themselves”, as Simon did in verse 39. Their question recalls the scribes’ objection at 5:21, “Who can forgive sins, but God alone?”, but this time no one supplies the answer, and the Book of Luke leaves it open.

“Saved” is sōzō, the verb Luke also uses for healing, and the same Greek sentence, rendered “thy faith hath made thee whole”, is spoken to the woman with the issue of blood (8:48). “Go in peace” carries the Hebrew farewell shalom. Luke never records a word from her.