Hearing Is Tested on the Road and the Water

“Afterward” is kathexēs, in order or in sequence, the same word Luke used for his “order” in 1:3. “Shewing the glad tidings” is one Greek verb, euangelizomenos, preaching good news, and Luke sets the Twelve beside Jesus as travelling companions before any of them is sent out alone (9:1-2).

Magdala, a fishing town on the western shore of the lake, gave Mary her surname; its Greek name, Taricheae, came from the salted fish it exported. Seven is a number of completeness, so “seven devils” marks a severe case, and Luke says nothing more about how she was freed.

Chuza was Herod Antipas’s epitropos, a household manager or estate steward, so Joanna came from the tetrarch’s own court, the court that held John prisoner. Susanna appears nowhere else in Scripture. “Of their substance” means from their own property, and the better manuscripts read “unto them”, the whole company, not only Jesus.

Luke sets the parable before a crowd drawn “out of every city”, which is itself a picture of mixed ground. Unlike Mark 4:1, there is no boat and no lakeshore; the setting is simply the gathering.

Luke alone adds that the path seed “was trodden down”, trampled by passers-by before the birds took it. “Fowls of the air” is literally “birds of the heaven”, a Hebrew phrase. The sower scattered by hand and sometimes ploughed afterward, so seed landing on the path was ordinary, not careless.

Luke says simply “upon a rock”, and gives a different reason for the withering from Matthew and Mark: not the scorching sun but the lack of moisture, ikmas, damp. The shoot has nothing to draw on, and the failure is described from underneath.

The Greek has the thorns “springing up with it”, a compound verb for growing alongside: seed and weed come up together, and for a while the field looks well. “Choked” is apopnigō, strangled, the word Luke also uses for the swine drowned in the lake later in this chapter (8:33).

Luke gives only the hundredfold and drops the thirty and sixty of Mark and Matthew, so the good ground has a single, lavish result. “He cried” is phōneō in the imperfect: he called out aloud, raising his voice for the closing summons.

The disciples ask about this parable in particular, “what might this parable be?”, which in Greek is a question about its meaning, what it is saying. In Luke they ask openly, with no sign of the private setting Mark 4:10 describes.

“Mysteries” in the New Testament are not puzzles but secrets now made known by God. The quotation from Isaiah 6:9 is shortened in Luke to a single clause about seeing and hearing; the harder line about turning and being forgiven, which Mark includes, is left out.

“The word of God” is Luke’s favourite phrase for the message; it returns in verse 21 and runs all through Acts. Where Mark says “the sower soweth the word”, Luke names the seed first and at once gives it its source.

Luke alone gives the devil’s motive: “lest they should believe and be saved”. The seed is taken “out of their hearts”, which places the loss after the word has been heard, not before it arrives.

Luke’s “in time of temptation” (peirasmos, testing) is broader than Mark’s “tribulation or persecution”, and “fall away” is aphistēmi, stand off or withdraw, the root of the word apostasy. “For a while believe” grants them real belief; what they lack is root.

Only Luke adds “pleasures of this life” to the cares and riches, and his verb “bring no fruit to perfection” is telesphoreō, a farmer’s word for bringing fruit to ripeness. The thorny ground does bear something; it simply never ripens.

“Honest and good heart” is kalē kai agathē, a Greek pairing used of the noble, well-born person, turned here to describe a hearer. “Keep” is katechō, hold fast, and “with patience” is hupomonē, endurance: the harvest takes a season.

The lamp was a small clay oil lamp, and a “vessel” could be a clay pot or a grain measure set over it. The bed was a raised couch, so putting a lamp under it is absurd. Luke’s phrase “they which enter in” imagines the lamp placed in the entryway, lighting guests on their arrival.

The saying is a double rhyme in Greek, hidden and manifest, secret and known. It stands between the lamp and the warning about hearing, so the disclosure it promises is of what has been taught in parables, not first of private sins.

“Take heed therefore how ye hear” is Luke’s wording where Mark has “what ye hear”; the emphasis falls on the manner of listening. The final clause is ironic: the one who “hath not” loses “even that which he seemeth to have”, what he only thinks is his.

“Brethren” are Jesus’ brothers, whose names Mark 6:3 gives; whether they were younger sons of Mary or Joseph’s sons by an earlier marriage has divided readers since the early church. “Could not come at him for the press” means they could not reach him because of the crowd.

They stand “without”, outside, a word that places them on the edge of the crowd around Jesus. Luke gives them a neutral motive, “desiring to see thee”, and leaves out Mark’s earlier notice that his family thought him beside himself (Mark 3:21).

Luke’s version is gentler than Mark’s: Jesus does not look round and ask “Who is my mother?” He simply widens the circle. “Hear the word of God, and do it” gathers the parable’s key phrase from verse 11 and adds the missing verb.

The lake is some thirteen miles long and eight wide, and crossing to the eastern shore meant moving from Jewish Galilee into Gentile territory. Luke always calls it a lake (limnē), where Matthew and Mark call it a sea, the more accurate word to a traveller who knew the Mediterranean.

“Came down” is exact: the lake lies about 700 feet below sea level, and cool air from the surrounding hills can drop suddenly through the valleys and stir violent squalls. “Filled with water” speaks of the boat as the people in it, the danger shared by all aboard.

Luke doubles the address, “Master, master”, epistata, a word only Luke uses, meaning overseer or chief. Jesus rebukes the wind and the “raging” of the water, klydōn, the surge or rough swell, with the same verb he uses against fevers (4:39) and devils (4:35).

“Where is your faith?” is gentler than Mark’s “how is it that ye have no faith?” The disciples’ final question names the obedient elements in a line that recalls Psalm 107:29, where the LORD makes the storm a calm.

Manuscripts disagree on the name of the region: Gadarenes, Gerasenes or Gergesenes. Gadara lay some six miles from the lake, Gerasa over thirty; either could name a wider district. “Over against Galilee” means opposite, on the eastern shore.

Luke tells that he met Jesus “out of the city”, meaning he belonged to the town, and adds that he had worn no clothes “long time”. Tombs cut in the hillside rock were a known refuge for outcasts, and living among the dead was ritually unclean for a Jew.

“What have I to do with thee” is a Hebrew idiom of refusal, literally “what to me and to thee”. “God most high”, El Elyon, is a title Gentiles often used of the God of Israel, as when the slave girl at Philippi uses it (Acts 16:17), fitting for Gentile country.

Luke explains in a parenthesis why the man is begging: Jesus had already begun to command the spirit out. “Oftentimes it had caught him” uses a verb for seizing a person, and “kept bound” with chains and fetters suggests guards posted over him, not only restraints.

A Roman legion numbered around five or six thousand soldiers, and the Tenth Legion, which later garrisoned Jerusalem, carried a boar on its standard. The man answers the question about his own name with the name of what possesses him.

“The deep” is abyssos, the bottomless pit, the prison of spirits in Revelation 9:1-2 and 20:3. They do not fear the lake; they fear the abyss. Luke alone uses this word here, where Mark has them ask not to be sent out of the country.

A herd of pigs placed the scene firmly in Gentile land, since swine were unclean under Leviticus 11:7. Luke puts them feeding “on the mountain”, the hills that come down close to the eastern shore.

“Ran violently” is hormaō, rushed headlong, and the “steep place” is the cliff edge where the hills drop into the water. Luke does not give Mark’s figure of about two thousand. Tradition places the spot near Kursi on the eastern shore, where the slopes come closest to the water.

The herdsmen spread the news in two directions, into the city and into the farms and hamlets around it, so that what follows is a gathering of the whole district, not a single town.

“Sitting at the feet” was the posture of a disciple before a teacher, the place Paul took before Gamaliel (Acts 22:3) and Mary takes in 10:39. “In his right mind” is sōphroneō, of sound mind, the opposite of the frenzy of verse 29.

“Healed” here is sōzō, saved, the same verb Luke uses for the woman’s faith in verse 48. The witnesses tell “by what means”, how it happened, which means the swine and the man are reported together.

Luke gives the whole population’s reason directly: “they were taken with great fear”, the verb synechō, gripped or held fast, used of fevers in 4:38. Jesus does not argue; he gets back into the boat, and his only visit to that shore in the Book of Luke ends almost as soon as it began.

The man asks to be “with him”, the phrase used of the Twelve in verse 1. The request is refused, which is unusual: elsewhere Jesus calls men to follow, but here he sends one back.

The command says “God”, and the man proclaims what “Jesus” has done; he draws the conclusion himself. “Published” is kēryssō, to herald, the verb used of Jesus’ own preaching in verse 1, so a Gentile town receives its first preacher.

The mood on the western shore is the reverse of the eastern: the people “gladly received him”, a verb of welcoming a guest, because they had been waiting. The two crowds bracket the crossing.

A ruler of the synagogue was a layman who arranged the services, chose readers and looked after the building. Jairus is a man of standing, and falling at Jesus’ feet in public sets that standing aside. His name is probably the Hebrew Jair, “he will give light”.

“One only daughter” is monogenēs again, as with the widow’s son in 7:12. Twelve was the age at which a Jewish girl came near marriageable age, so she is dying on the edge of adulthood. “Thronged” is sympnigō, pressed in to the point of choking, the verb for the thorns in verse 14.

Under Leviticus 15:25-27 a woman with a continuing discharge was unclean, and so was anything she lay on or anyone who touched it. Some important manuscripts omit the clause about spending all her living on physicians, and Mark’s harsher remark that she grew worse is not in Luke.

The “border” is the kraspedon, probably one of the tassels commanded on the corners of an Israelite’s garment in Numbers 15:38-39. She approaches from behind, so no one sees. “Stanched” means stopped, stood still, the flow halted in an instant.

“All denied” is Luke’s detail: everyone near him disclaims it. Peter’s reply uses two crowd verbs, synechō and apothlibō, hemming him in and pressing hard, so the question sounds absurd to the one man bold enough to say so.

“Virtue” in 1611 meant power or efficacy, as in “by virtue of”; the Greek dynamis is the ordinary word for power. Jesus distinguishes a touch that drew power from the jostling that did not.

She realised she “was not hid”, and the promise of verse 17 that nothing hidden stays hidden comes true in miniature. Only Luke says she spoke “before all the people”, so her healing becomes a public testimony and her uncleanness a thing publicly ended.

She is the only individual Jesus calls “Daughter” in the gospels, in all three tellings of this scene. It is spoken while Jairus, whose own daughter is dying, stands close enough to hear. “Made thee whole” is sōzō, saved, the word used to the forgiven woman in 7:50.

The messenger calls Jesus “the Master”, didaskalos, the teacher, a polite way of saying there is no more point in bringing him. The present tense, “there cometh”, pulls the reader into the moment the news arrives.

The aorist “believe only” calls for a single act of trust now, and Luke alone adds the promise “she shall be made whole”, sōzō again, the word just spoken to the woman. Two daughters are joined by one verb.

Many manuscripts of Luke put John before James, pairing Peter and John as Acts does (3:1); the King James follows those with James second. The parents are the only others allowed in, so the scene has five witnesses and the girl.

“Bewailed” is koptō, to beat the breast, the formal act of mourning. Custom expected even a poor family to hire at least two flute players and a wailing woman at a funeral, and the house is already full of them.

“Laughed him to scorn” is a single verb, katagelaō, to laugh down. Luke adds “knowing that she was dead”, which makes their laughter a witness to the fact: nobody present doubted it.

Luke omits Mark’s Aramaic “Talitha cumi” and gives the Greek, “Maid, arise”, hē pais, child. Taking a dead body by the hand incurred corpse uncleanness under Numbers 19:11, and Jesus does it without hesitation.

“Her spirit came again” uses the words of 1 Kings 17:22, where the soul of the widow’s child “came into him again” at Elijah’s prayer. “Meat” in 1611 meant any food. Only Luke says she rose “straightway”, parachrēma, his favourite word for at once.

The command to tell no one could not have kept the fact secret, since the mourners had seen her dead. It keeps the parents from turning her into a sign to be exhibited, and the Book of Luke ends the scene on their astonishment rather than on any report.