The Galilean Ministry of Jesus Explained (5 of 12)

This is the busiest stretch of the ministry and the one most people picture when they think of Jesus.

It opens with a sermon in his home town that ends with a crowd trying to throw him off a cliff.

What Happened at Nazareth?

He read from Isaiah, sat down, and said the text had just been fulfilled.

Luke 4:16-30. He is handed the scroll of Isaiah and reads the passage about the Spirit of the Lord being upon him to proclaim good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, sight for the blind, and the year of the Lord’s favour. Then he rolls it up, gives it back, sits, and says today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.

The initial reaction is favourable. They speak well of him and marvel.

Something has already gone wrong before that, and it is in what he did not read. Isa 61 continues past the year of the Lord’s favour into the day of vengeance of our God, and further on into the promise that foreigners will work your fields and you will feed on the wealth of the nations. Jesus stops mid-verse, at favour, and hands the scroll back.

Bailey argues the town’s history makes that omission sharper. Nazareth was a Jewish settlement planted in Galilee during the Maccabean period, in territory the Scriptures themselves call Galilee of the Gentiles. A community founded to hold ground against the surrounding population had particular reasons to like the verses about foreigners doing the labour, and to notice a hometown teacher declining to read them.

Then what he says next. He reminds them that Elijah was sent to a widow in Sidon rather than to the many widows in Israel, and that Elisha healed Naaman the Syrian rather than the many lepers in Israel.

Two examples of God’s mercy going to foreigners while Israel was passed over. That is the sentence that empties the room. They drive him out of town and take him to the brow of the hill to throw him down.

The mission statement is announced and rejected in the same sitting, and the grounds of rejection are the inclusion of outsiders. It is the same offence that will start the riot at Paul’s arrest thirty years later.

Why Did Jesus Move to Capernaum?

Because Nazareth had thrown him out and Capernaum was better placed.

Matt 4:13 records the move. Capernaum sat on the Sea of Galilee on a trade route, with a customs post and a garrison, which made it a hub rather than a backwater.

It becomes the base. Peter’s house is there, the synagogue is there, and a substantial share of the recorded ministry happens within walking distance of it.

When Were the Twelve Appointed?

After a night of prayer, and Luke says so specifically.

Luke 6:12-16. He went out to a mountainside and spent the night praying to God, and when morning came he called his disciples to him and chose twelve of them, whom he also designated apostles.

The all-night prayer before the selection is the detail Luke wants noticed. This was not a casual choice and it produced a group containing a tax collector who worked for Rome and a man carrying a title associated with resisting Rome.

What Is the Sermon on the Mount?

The most concentrated block of teaching in the Gospels, and the most misread.

Matt 5 to 7, with a shorter parallel in Luke 6 usually called the Sermon on the Plain. Whether these are the same occasion or a repeated body of teaching is debated and not settled.

It opens with the Beatitudes, which are declarations rather than instructions. Blessed are the poor in spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger for righteousness.

Then it repeatedly intensifies the law rather than relaxing it. You have heard it said, but I say to you. Murder extends to anger. Adultery extends to the look. Oath-taking is replaced by simple honesty. Retaliation is replaced by the second mile.

The crowds were amazed because he taught as one who had authority and not as their teachers of the law. The scribes argued by citing other teachers. He did not cite anyone.

What Are the Kingdom Parables?

Stories about how the kingdom arrives, and they consistently emphasise smallness and hiddenness.

The sower and the soils, in Mark 4 and its parallels, is the one Jesus explains, and it is about the reception of the word rather than the sowing of it.

The mustard seed is the smallest of seeds and becomes a tree. The yeast is worked invisibly through a large quantity of flour. The treasure in the field and the pearl are found and everything is sold to get them.

Taken together they describe a kingdom that does not arrive with armies, which was not what most first-century Jews were hoping for and was not what the crowds following him wanted.

Jesus also says plainly that the parables both reveal and conceal, which is uncomfortable and is in the text.

What Miracles Define This Period?

Authority extended in every direction, one category at a time.

The paralytic lowered through the roof in Mark 2, where the pronouncement of forgiveness comes before the healing and the healing is offered as evidence for the authority to forgive.

The storm stilled on the lake, and the disciples asking who this is that even the wind and waves obey.

The Gerasene demoniac, delivered and then refused permission to follow, sent home to tell his own people instead.

Jairus’s daughter raised, with the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years healed inside the same story.

The widow of Nain’s son raised, in a scene Luke alone records, where nobody asks and Jesus simply stops the funeral procession.

Who Funded the Ministry?

Women, and Luke names them.

Luke 8:1-3 says the Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary called Magdalene, Joanna the wife of Chuza who managed Herod’s household, Susanna, and many others. They were supporting them out of their own means.

Joanna’s position is the striking one. A woman connected to Herod’s household finances an itinerant preacher whom Herod’s family had reason to watch.

Why Did the Crowds Leave?

Because of the bread of life discourse, immediately after the feeding of the five thousand.

John 6 has the largest crowd of the ministry fed, and then trying to make him king by force.

Why Does It Matter That the Crowd Tried to Crown Him?

Because it is the only place in the Gospels where Jesus runs from an offer of power, and because of what accepting it would have meant.

John 6:15 says he knew they intended to come and make him king by force, so he withdrew to a mountain by himself. The verb is the one used for seizing or snatching. This is not a delegation with a petition. It is a crowd of thousands, in the hills, ready to take him whether he agreed or not.

Three things make that dangerous rather than flattering.

It is the wilderness temptation offered again, this time by people who love him. All the kingdoms of the world, without the cross. The first time it came from an enemy and was easy to name. Here it arrives as gratitude from men he has just fed, and it is the same offer.

It would have been read by Rome as exactly what it looked like. A Galilean crowd acclaiming a king was an insurrection, and Galilee had produced them before and would again. Every one of those movements ended with soldiers, and the followers scattered as soon as the leader was taken. Accepting would have got a great many of those men killed within the month.

And it would have defined the wrong office. They had watched him produce bread in a wilderness, which is what Moses’s generation received, and they drew the obvious conclusion about what kind of deliverer he was. A king who solves the bread problem is a king you keep for as long as the bread lasts.

What he does next is the part that shows how seriously he took it. He does not simply decline. The following day he tells them plainly that they are looking for him because they ate the loaves, and then delivers teaching so hard that the crowd dismantles itself.

He had the largest following of his ministry and he preached it away on purpose, rather than lead it where it wanted to go.

This is also why he keeps telling people to stay quiet about him. The title Messiah carried a job description in that period, and the job was expelling Rome. Accepting the acclamation would have been accepting the description, and the pattern of enforced silence running through the Gospels is covered in the post on Caesarea Philippi and the transfiguration.

He withdraws. The teaching that follows, about eating his flesh and drinking his blood, is what they find intolerable.

Wright points out that John dates the feeding to Passover, and that this is the second of three times he does so. The first was the temple action. The third is the final week, which John flags three separate times. The reader is being told where this is going before it goes there, and the wilderness feeding is being set against the manna in Exod 16, which was also given to a crowd that was complaining.

John 6:66 records the result: from this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.

That is the high-water mark of the Galilean ministry and the point where it breaks. He then asks the Twelve whether they want to leave as well, and Peter answers with the question that has no good alternative: Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.

Part of a series following the Life of Jesus timeline.

Sources

The biblical texts cited: Luke 4:16-30, 6:12-16, 8:1-3, Matt 4:13, 5:1-7:29, Mark 2:1-12, 4:1-41, 5:1-43, and John 6:1-71.

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 12. Supports the reading of the Nazareth sermon, the founding of Nazareth as a Maccabean settler town in Galilee of the Gentiles, the significance of the line Jesus stops short of in Isa 61, and the Elijah and Elisha examples that provoked the crowd. In my Logos library.

N. T. Wright, John for Everyone, Part One: Chapters 1-10 (SPCK, 2002). Supports the observation that John dates the feeding to Passover as the second of three such markers, and the connection to the manna of Exod 16. Supplied in full.

Where the sourcing stops: whether the Sermon on the Mount and the Sermon on the Plain describe one occasion or two is unresolved and both readings are held by serious scholarship. The ordering of events within the Galilean period varies between the Gospels and the sequence here follows the timeline rather than claiming chronological precision.

Footnotes

1. The Nazareth rejection is worth reading beside the arrest of Paul in Acts 21. In both cases the audience listens through remarkable claims and erupts at the inclusion of outsiders. Whatever else was contested, that was the live nerve.
2. Luke 8:1-3 is a short passage carrying a lot of weight. It names three women, indicates there were many more, and states that the ministry ran on their money. Very little in ancient literature records the financing of a movement this plainly.