Sermon Tone Analysis

We all have pictures in our minds of individuals who epitomize authority: Perhaps Winston Churchill, his jowls set like a bulldog as he faces the falling darkness of the Third Reich, or take-charge Vince Lombardi in black coat and hat as he instructs his quarterback Bart Starr, or perfectly coiffed Margaret Thatcher calmly addressing a noisy House of Commons, or confident General Norman Schwarzkopf, dressed in camouflage fatigues, pointer in hand, as he holds court on the strategy of war.

We all have pictures in our minds of individuals who epitomize authority: Perhaps Winston Churchill, his jowls set like a bulldog as he faces the falling darkness of the Third Reich, or take-charge Vince Lombardi in black coat and hat as he instructs his quarterback Bart Starr, or perfectly coiffed Margaret Thatcher calmly addressing a noisy House of Commons, or confident General Norman Schwarzkopf, dressed in camouflage fatigues, pointer in hand, as he holds court on the strategy of war.

The reason there was such a crowd was that the Pope was in Galilee.

He was making an official visit to the Holy Land, and Roman Catholic pilgrims from all over the world, many of whom were there for the first time, had come to be with him, particularly at a huge service up on the hill a little way north of the sea of Galilee.

Our own little party were not put out.

As someone said, it made it a bit more like what happened once word got out that Jesus was in town.

But they didn’t have to bring pilgrims in by public transport, even if such a thing had existed in those days.

People came in a hurry, because Jesus began doing remarkable healings.

The little town of Capernaum, a fishing village on the north shore of the sea of Galilee, had never seen anything like it.

Jesus had evidently decided to make it his base of operations, after he’d left Nazareth.

It was where the two pairs of brothers, Peter and Andrew, and James and John, had their homes and their small fishing businesses.

We all have pictures in our minds of individuals who epitomize authority: Perhaps Winston Churchill, his jowls set like a bulldog as he faces the falling darkness of the Third Reich, or take-charge Vince Lombardi in black coat and hat as he instructs his quarterback Bart Starr, or perfectly coiffed Margaret Thatcher calmly addressing a noisy House of Commons, or confident General Norman Schwarzkopf, dressed in camouflage fatigues, pointer in hand, as he holds court on the strategy of war.

You can still walk into the ruined synagogue there, where some of Jesus’ first remarkable healings took place.

The buildings you can see date from some while after Jesus’ time, but it’s the correct site and you can get a sense of it all: a small town, gathering in its main public meeting-place.

(Synagogues were used for public gatherings as well as what we think of as ‘worship’; indeed, for a loyal Jew worship and community were and are so intertwined that it’s hard to imagine the one without the other.)

That’s where we find Jesus’ first encounter with a shrieking, yelling, demon-possessed man.

Many people in the modern world don’t believe in demons.

They are inclined to say that this sort of thing was simply a medical condition that people hadn’t diagnosed in Jesus’ day.

Many others, however, in several parts of today’s world know only too well that strange forces seem able to invade a personality, so that the person talks with a strange voice and has a peculiar, one might say haunted, look in the eye.

It’s more than just an illness of the mind, though some of the signs are similar.

And sometimes people in that condition do seem to know things that nobody else does.

Each image is instructive and worthy of study.

But for the Christian, the greatest study in authority is of course the incarnate Son of God, Jesus Christ.

He is the fountain of all authority and the well from which all believers must draw for the proper use of authority in the church and in this fallen world.

Whatever we say about such a condition, there is no historical doubt that Jesus dramatically healed a good many people who were regarded as ‘possessed’.

Such cures were not unusual.

Elsewhere in the gospels, and in Acts, we find mention of exorcists working from within Judaism.

But the strange thing about Jesus, here and elsewhere, is that he did what he did by simple commands.

No magic formulae; no (what we would call) mumbo-jumbo.

He just told the spirits to go, and they went.

That was what astonished people.

He didn’t have to summon up stronger powers than his own; he just used the authority he already possessed in himself.

And, as this passage makes clear, he did the same with ‘ordinary’ diseases as well, like the raging fever of Simon’s mother-in-law.

Having recounted how Jesus’ initial exercise of authority was murderously rejected by his hometown, Luke now describes another Sabbath in another town, Capernaum, where Jesus’ authority was given full recognition.

Once again Luke wants us to recognize what all this is saying about Jesus.

Those with special insight can see behind his work and teaching, where he appeared to most people as a prophet.

He was ‘the son of God’, here in the sense of ‘the Messiah’.

He was God’s anointed.

The Lord’s Spirit was indeed resting on him, as he said at Nazareth, to release the oppressed, to give sight to the blind, to unloose the chains of the prisoners.

Jesus’ message from the very first was “the good news of the kingdom of God” (v.

43).

That storied day in Nazareth when he took up the scroll of Isaiah and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor,” El Espíritu del Señor está sobre mí, Por cuanto me ha ungido para dar buenas nuevas a los pobres he was preaching the kingdom of God.

His emphasis on the poor, the prisoners, cautivos the blind, ciegos and the oppressed oprimidos was an implicit summary of the humble spiritual state of those to whom the kingdom comes.

But Jesus’ insistence upon this sense of spiritual inadequacy so enraged the self-satisfied Nazareth congregation that they attempted to kill him.

Though Capernaum was his base of operations, he spent most of his time on the move.

This may have been partly for the sake of the village itself; it couldn’t have sustained having more and more people come there for healing.

Some have suggested that Jesus didn’t want to risk people setting up a kind of local industry around him.

But the main reason is that he had to go to where other people were.

He had to tell people that God was becoming king in a new way, that God’s long-awaited salvation was breaking into the world, even though it didn’t look like they had expected it would.

And in doing this he had to stay one jump ahead of the authorities.

It isn’t too long before we find opposition following him.

Crowds and healings, powerful teaching about God’s kingdom: many found it threatening then, and many find it threatening still.

El Espíritu del Señor está sobre mí,

Jesus’ message from the very first was “the good news of the kingdom of God” (v.

43).

That storied day in Nazareth when he took up the scroll of Isaiah and read, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor,” he was preaching the kingdom of God.

His emphasis on the poor, the prisoners, the blind, and the oppressed was an implicit summary of the humble spiritual state of those to whom the kingdom comes.

But Jesus’ insistence upon this sense of spiritual inadequacy so enraged the self-satisfied Nazareth congregation that they attempted to kill him.

Por cuanto me ha ungido para dar buenas nuevas a los pobres

Reina Valera Revisada (1960).