[CatherineTorpey]

Hello bibliophiles!

Tomorrow we will be treated to our Rev. Dr. Jacqui Lewis preaching on “Release. Recovery. Reparations. Oh My!”

Her scripture is Luke 4:14-21

The book of Luke is the gospel account which most emphasizes the dignity of those whom society despises, discredits, ignores, mistreats. In this section, Jesus has just been baptized and roars onto the scene at the age of 30. Here we see him reading in the synagogue in Nazareth, his home town.

It might be useful to understand the difference between a synagogue and the temple. An easy (though very imperfect) analogy might be the difference between the Vatican and a local parish church — the temple in Jerusalem being analogous to the Vatican in Rome. You can only have ONE temple, ever, just as there will only ever be one Vatican. The temple was ordained by God, who gave very specific instructions for how it was to be built and what was to happen there. The temple in Jerusalem was the ONLY place where one could worship Yahweh in the way that Yahweh had commanded. The temple was run by priests, who were always chosen from the tribe of Levi. They were the ONLY ones who could perform the rituals at the temple, and they made their livelihood by the sacrificed animals and goods brought to the temple. The most important activity at the temple was animal sacrifices, which had a variety of meanings and rituals associated with them, depending on what the sacrifice was for — whether it was an individual offering a sacrifice for the birth of a child (for instance) or whether it was an annual sacrifice on behalf of the whole people of Israel during specific festivals (such as Yom Kippur). The temple physically dominated Jerusalem — it sat on the highest point, and it had a huge plaza, and so lots of activity happened there. Jews were expected to go to the temple for various holidays and to make various sacrifices.

A synagogue is an entirely different thing. The word “syn-agogue” is a GREEK word (since the New Testament was written in Greek), and it means “gathering together.” Synagogues are utterly different from the temple because they arose out of the need of the Jewish people to assemble together to understand how to live their lives faithfully as Jews, apart from the very ritualistic and occasional offerings they made at the temple. A source of confusion for us in the USA is that many liberal Jews will refer to their synagogues as temples. My understanding is that they do this as a way of acknowledging that Jews no longer need “the temple” (which was destroyed in the year 70). More conservative Jews use the word “shul,” while Israelis generally use the term “beit knesset” (house of assembly) to mean synagogue. The word itself isn’t so important — just as we can refer to Middle as a “church,” a “congregation,” a “parish,” etc.

The important distinction is that a synagogue is a place where Jews gathered because they wanted to live faithful lives by listening to the scriptures and hearing one of the “rabbis” (teachers) explain a bit about those scriptures. Over time, simple rituals like singing or greeting one another grew. Christian church practice on Sundays is entirely modeled upon synagogue practices.

So… when Jesus reads the scripture at the synagogue, it’s nothing like reading at the temple. He would not have been allowed to do anything ritualistic at the temple, because he was not from the tribe of Levi. He was of the tribe of Judah. So in this scene, he’s just reading scripture to the little group of Nazarenes who happened to be there, who are perfectly familiar with him and his mom and dad and brothers and sisters, and where they live and how he acted when he was a kid they used to boss around. The synagogue might have been a nice building the community had constructed, but it might have just been someone’s house or other simple location. The precious thing in a synagogue would not have been any fancy golden goblets, but the scrolls. Scrolls were extremely costly and delicate, so the main thing in the synagogue would have been preserving and handling with care the scrolls. There was no such thing, really, as “the Bible” back then. There were a bunch of scrolls that were held sacred because they contained the words of ancient authorities like Moses (the Torah), David (the Psalms) and the prophets such as Isaiah. Because there were fewer sacred scrolls than we have today, the Jews in the synagogue would probably have been far more familiar with them than we are.

We really have very little indisputable knowledge about synagogue practice in Jesus’ day. This article is a wonderful explication of what is known, including warnings that often people claimed that their modern practices had ancient origins, though that is usually doubtful. But we can’t know why historically (in terms of synagogue practice in these years in Nazareth) Jesus was handed the scroll of Isaiah.

However, we can know theologically why Jesus reads this section. The section Jesus reads is Isaiah 61:1-2. It says that the scroll of Isaiah was handed to him and that HE found the place he read from. So, it seems that someone else had decided which scroll, but Jesus who decided which section.

Modern scholars call chapters 56-66 “Third Isaiah” because we can now determine that the book of Isaiah was written by 3 different people. Third Isaiah was written at the time when the Jews (six centuries before Jesus) were returning to Jerusalem and rebuilding the temple (which in those days had been destroyed by the Babylonians). The Christians reading or hearing this account about Jesus reading from Isaiah would have heard it in the context of the recent Roman destruction of the temple, which occurred after Jesus died, but before this gospel was written. (Those listening to Jesus in the synagogue in Nazareth would NOT have heard it that way, since many of them would die before the Romans were to destroy the temple.) So there are a couple of levels here — the shock that the Jews in the synagogue had, and the knowing nods of the Christians reading this story decades later.

Jesus would have read it in Hebrew, but many of the early Christians reading this gospel account would have known it in its Greek translation:

“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed [“anoint” comes from our word “ointment” meaning oil – the Hebrew word is Messiah; the Greek word Christ] me to announce good news [Greek word here is “evangelize”].”

OK that’s enough for now! See you at 10am Eastern time on Zoom!

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