Thoughts on Luke 4

Today’s reading: Psalms 76-77; Luke 4

The people going from marveling at Jesus’ words to trying to do a murder on Him in a matter of minutes has had me scratching my head all day, but I think the answer lies in the immediate context.

I’ve mentioned before that I generally try to stay a day ahead of the reading plan because these posts can take a while to write some days and I feel like they are most helpful and useful if people have the available when they do the day’s reading. So if I’m a day ahead, whether I finish the post at 7:00am or at 5:30pm, it will be there the next morning. But then there are other readings, like today’s, where I spend an entire day mulling over it and/or reading up on it, and I still don’t feel ready to write about it.

The reaction of the people of Nazareth to Jesus just doesn’t make sense to me. In no time at all they go from speaking well of Jesus to trying to throw Him off a cliff. Now, to be fair, Jesus does seem to actively inflame the situation, which is also confusing to me, but that still doesn’t seem to justify the reaction. So why does Jesus go out of His way to make sure they know He is going to do miracles for other people and not for them? I’m not entirely sure. And why does that result in attempted murder? I’m also not sure.

I have read a lot of people’s thoughts on this passage that I don’t really find satisfying. Different commentators have different takes on it, but all of them left me feeling like, “Eh, I guess that could kind of explain it, but I don’t really feel like it’s a full explanation.”

But then I stumbled across one man’s musings on it and felt like it really helps things click into place. He pointed out that the immediate context to this interaction is the wilderness temptation and Luke’s statement, “when the devil had ended every temptation, he departed from him until an opportune time.” This man was wondering if this interaction at Nazareth is the more opportune time, and that makes a lot of sense to me.

Matthew tells us, in Matthew 13, that Jesus did not do many mighty works in His hometown because there was not faith there. They clearly wanted Him to be doing the kinds of miracles He was doing elsewhere, but people didn’t actually believe in Him, so they were more like the crowd looking for Jesus the morning after the feeding of the 5000, more interested in the spectacle or the benefit than in Jesus the messiah. So could this have been a temptation to put on a show and “prove” His power and authority to His skeptical family, friends, and neighbors? And/or could their anger have been inflamed by the devil, well beyond what would have been reasonable, to the point of attempted murder, to tempt Jesus to exercise His power to miraculously free Himself from His would-be murderers? This line of thinking makes a lot of sense to me.

Jesus is, and was, fully God. In coming to earth as a man, Jesus did not lose His “God-ness,” but He did set aside the use of His Godly attributes. In order to go to the cross and die in our place, Jesus first lived the human life perfectly, without sin. This means that He limited Himself to match the ways in which we are limited. Rather than making use of His own personal spiritual ability and power, Jesus relied on the Holy Spirit’s power. And rather than relying on His own will, Jesus relied on the will of the Father. So standing before that crowd, Jesus, as God, could have used His own personal power to perform any sign and wonder, but He instead chose to rely on the Holy Spirit who didn’t make the power available for such miracles. And when the people grabbed Jesus and carried Him off to throw Him off the cliff, Jesus could have exercised His personal power to stop them, but He instead chose to wait on the timing of the Father.

Especially once the crowd grabs you and tries to kill you, that would be a terrifying position to be in, and, if you have the power to free yourself, it would be incredibly tempting to use that power! Especially if, as you are being carried off, the Holy Spirit is still not making His power available to you for any work, the level of faith and trust required as you get closer and closer to the brow of the hill just keeps ramping up. However God finally rescued Jesus, allowing Him to pass through te crowd to safety, it wasn’t until the very last second when they had already brought Jesus to the top of the cliff!

So while murder seems like a dramatic overreaction to the conversation in the synagogue, it actually makes a ton of sense if this is one of the more opportune times the devil was waiting for in order to tempt Jesus into a misuse of His power and authority.

I personally feel satisfied with that explanation.