Q2, S02 Galilee Encounters

Quarter 2, Session 2: Galilee Encounters

WHAT DO YOU EXPECT OF ME?

Passages

Luke 4:16–44

Luke 5:12–16

Luke 6:6–11

Luke 7:18–35

Luke 8:1–3

*You may want to take the time to read all of Luke 4–7. Though this section includes some passages we’ve already covered, it will give you a better feel for what’s going on at this stage in Jesus’ ministry.

Concept

This session falls under Jesus’ fourth question: Have you encountered me? As Jesus travels around Galilee, many different people have encounters with him. Once again, it is helpful to evaluate the way people respond. As Jesus heals and performs other miracles, we see him doing the works of the kingdom. We can either love him and find life in him and his ways, or we can do what religious people have always done and work against him.

Key Question

If you honestly assess your heart and expectations in light of the stories in Luke 4–7, does Jesus actually fit your expectations? Or is there a part of you that would prefer a different type of Messiah? How so?

The Parabola Tool

Do you see our Parabola tool being played out in Luke 4–7? With whom? How so?

Galilee Encounters

Who do you most want to be? When you close your eyes and dream about your ideal life, what does it look like?

We all have an idea of how we want to live, of what we want to get out of life. Very often, these ideas bleed into our picture of God. Have you ever noticed that your idea of God often matches your idealized version of yourself? It has been said that God created humanity in his image, and then we returned the favor. In other words, we tend to think that God is a lot like us.

So when you think about Jesus, does he care about the same things you care about? Is he involved in the same pursuits? Would his life look very different than your own? In this session, we will be looking at the big picture of a few chapters of Scripture: Luke 4–7. There are many stories here, so as you read, try to get the big picture. In this season of ministry, what is Jesus trying to communicate to people? What you will see is that different groups of people had differing ideas of who the Messiah is and what his purpose ought to be. These expectations should be a warning to us. If our vision of the Messiah looks too much like who we would naturally be, we are probably missing a lot.

1.     Read Luke 4–7. Right off the bat, what strikes you about this passage? What do you find interesting or challenging or confusing?

Healing the Sick

Let’s examine a few stories from this larger section of Luke’s Gospel. In Luke 4:16–30, Jesus reads a prophesy from Isaiah about the coming Messiah and the good news he would proclaim. Basically, Jesus is saying, “the one you’re looking for is here, because these things are happening: the sick are healed, the lame walk, the blind see, the captives are set free.” At first everyone is excited about this, but they quickly turn on him when he confronts them with difficult truths.

As we read some of these stories of people being healed, we see some of the ways in which Jesus makes this good news into reality. We need to be careful as we read these healing stories. God does heal. That is one major realization we gain from these passages. But we also have to recognize that these passages are descriptive rather than prescriptive. That is, rather than reading these as a manual for how to heal people, we need to ask what these descriptions tell us about what God is doing through Jesus.

Don’t take the descriptions as promises that God is going to heal everything that ails you. God can do this, but it doesn’t mean that’s what he’s going to always do in every case. Rather, these stories, as with every story in the Bible, are descriptions of the ways God interacts with human beings. God is alive and interacting with people in various ways according to what he is doing in any given season. We can’t turn individual stories into algorithms that predict how God will interact with human beings in every situation.

When Jesus heals the leper in Luke 5:12–16, the leper approaches Jesus and says, “If you will, you can make me clean.” He not only believes that Jesus can heal him, but he also submits to Jesus’ desire to heal him. Or not. We have these hurts and real sources of pain in our lives and we are right—like this leper—to come to Jesus and acknowledge his power to heal. But at the same time, it’s fitting that we submit to Jesus’ desire to heal us at any given time or in any given way. We don’t demand healing of a certain type on a certain timeline. Jesus is here and he can heal us, but we submit to his timing and his plan. This is difficult to do, but it gets down to the very essence of what it means to have faith in Jesus. It’s more than just faith that he can do anything he wants to do, it’s also faith that he will know the best time and the best manner to heal.

2.     How does Jesus healing the sick embody the good news? Why is this significant?

3.     Does this have any implications for the way we think about and announce the good news today?

Creating a New Family of Broken Followers

As Jesus continues to encounter different people, he heals, restores, and forgives. In doing this, he is creating a new spiritual family. Looking ahead a bit, we read in Luke 8:1–3 about many followers of Jesus who themselves had been healed or set free by Jesus, and who were now following him. It seems clear that not everyone Jesus healed became a follower, but many did. And here we get a glimpse of Jesus healing people and then calling them to join him, to become part of the new family he was creating. These were not perfect people; they were simply people who had been healed and were now walking alongside Jesus.

This is true of us as well. We have been touched by Jesus in some way, healed by Jesus in some way, and now we follow him as part of his new family. It changes who we are and gives us a new purpose and a new calling. We do not have it all together, but we follow Jesus because we know who he is and we believe in what he’s called us to.

4.     As we see more people begin to travel with Jesus, how would you describe your own journey with Jesus? Are there any characters that you identify with? How so?

Interfering with the Work of God

Even in the midst of all of these amazing stories of transformed lives, we find people resisting Jesus. For example, in Luke 6:6–11, Jesus heals a man with a withered hand on the Sabbath. Even as Jesus performs this miraculous act, the Pharisees actively oppose him.

There are always those people who resist Jesus. They are uncomfortable with the boundaries that Jesus pushes; it does not fit in their understanding of what God desires. So they resist Jesus even as he does the works of the kingdom.

It’s easy to point fingers at the Pharisees, but this is a warning for us as well. We can get too caught up in trying not to cross certain lines and miss the very things God is doing all around us. We can actually find ourselves opposing God.

Those of us who interfere in the work of God the most today are likely those who care about God’s laws the most, who miss church the least, who know these stories about Jesus the best, who have memorized the largest chunks of Scripture, but who have come to love the method more than the Messenger. We all have ways in which we interfere with Jesus. We have lines we don’t want him to cross. We have things we don’t want him to ask for. We have idols we’re not really willing to set down.

We have to be careful, because the last thing we truly want is to be those people who could encounter Jesus working in our world and wind up resisting him for reasons we believe are justified.

5.     Try for a moment of complete honesty here. As you consider your life right now, are there any ways in which you may be opposing God’s work? How so?

Jesus’ Purpose

In Luke 7:18–35, John’s disciples came to Jesus and asked him if he was the one John had prophesied about. In answering their question, Jesus pointed to all of the things he had been doing between Luke 4 and this moment in Luke 7: The blind were receiving sight, the sick were being healed, the captives were being freed. These were the very things that Jesus had announced in Luke 4 as he read from Isaiah’s prophecy. Jesus was doing the things he said he would do—not in an abstract spiritualized way, but he was literally doing all of this in the lives of real people. In this season of his ministry, Jesus was demonstrating that he was indeed the Messiah, the Son of God.

In this context, Jesus says that the people in this generation are like children who simply bicker back and forth. They are arguing about who the Messiah would be, what he would look like. It’s possible that even now we have turned Jesus into someone he is not. We identify Jesus with all of our church activities, but when we look at the life of Jesus, he ate and spent time with tax collectors and sinners. He healed the sick and outcasts. He was compassionate with sinners. Jesus broke down many religious and societal structures. If we are not careful, we create boxes for Jesus to fit in that are significantly different than who Jesus actually is. We must be sure that the Messiah we call other people to follow is in fact Jesus himself, and not some version of him that we have created in our own image.

6.     Spend some time in prayer. Ask God to reveal the work he is doing around you. Pray that he would expose any areas in which you are opposing his work. Thank God for the work he is doing in you and around you.

Key Question

If you honestly assess your heart and expectations in light of the stories in Luke 4–7, does Jesus actually fit your expectations? Or is there a part of you that would prefer a different type of Messiah? How so?