ROUGHLY EDITED COPY LUTHERAN WORSHIP 2 09.LW2 Captioning provided By: Caption First, Inc. P.O. Box 1924 Lombard, IL 60148 ******** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ******** >> NICK: Let me also ask you to give us an example of synagogue worship in Luke's gospel, and would you include some comments describing the structure of the synagogue worship service. Thank you. >> DR. ARTHUR JUST: In the fourth chapter of Luke's Gospel beginning in Verse 14, we are told that Jesus is coming up from the Jordan into in Nazareth and he is going throughout Galilee, now, from synagogue to synagogue teaching. The synagogue becomes the place for Jesus to teach. And it says very clearly that throughout Galilee, he is becoming well-known because of his synagogue teaching. Sometimes we forget that John the Baptist, perhaps next to the high priest, was the most well-known figure in Israel, at least in its religious world. And when Jesus is baptized by John in the Jordan and comes up into Galilee, everybody knows that this is an extraordinary person, maybe even the Messiah. And so he is, perhaps even more than John, the best known figure in Israel. And as he goes from synagogue to synagogue in Galilee, he is taking his message to the people in their place of worship. In Verse 16 of Chapter 4, we have a glimpse into this extraordinary synagogue worship that Jesus participated in. And Luke tells us that Jesus comes to Nazareth, his home town, and he enters into the synagogue, which was his custom. It was his pattern. It was the rhythm of his ministry. And he's there on the Sabbath, which indicates that this is clearly a Sabbath day synagogue worship, and that what he does is he enters into the synagogue. And if you look at the Greek here, it's really extraordinary. He enters in in order to read. Now this is an extraordinary moment because here you have Jesus, the author of scripture, the word made flesh, now reading the scriptures. This is what Israel has been waiting for for thousands of years, for the creator, the word made flesh, the author of Scriptures, to now come into a humble place of worship in his home town of Nazareth and read the word Of God. Now, we actually don't have the full structure of the synagogue liturgy in scriptures. We only have a glimpse of it. And in fact, we have to kind of reconstruct a little bit what the synagogue worship looked like at the time of Our Lord. But I've already mentioned, and I'll reiterate now, the three major components of worship. The first thing is the reading of God's word. That is first and foremost the most important thing. In the reading of God's word, they read the word of God in a little different way than we do. They began with the most important books of the Bible and that were the first five books. I've already mentioned them, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, the Torah or the Pentateuch. They were like the equivalent of the Gospels. And that was kind of the starting point for them. Everything else was now going to be an interpretation of that. We know that they read other texts, too. They read the prophets which were chosen specifically to interpret whatever was read from the Torah. And then sometimes, they would read from the historical books like First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings, First and Second Chronicles. And that also would be chosen to be a comment on the Torah. Now, notice what they're doing here. They're having scripture interpret scripture so they start with the Torah, the first five books of Moses, then they go to the prophets, and then they go to the historical books. Now, we're not sure if this happened at the time of our Lord, even though we do know it happened later in Jewish worship, and we do know that it certainly happened in Christian worship, but it's likely that between each of the readings, that is when they would sing the psalms. This is the second part of the worship, not only the reading of scripture, but the singing of songs like the psalms and other songs as part of the synagogue worship. The psalms were chosen to reflect on the theme that was read. And the psalms were kind of a time out, a time of meditation and reflection where the people would stand back and they would reflect on what was read from, say, Genesis or from Isaiah because the psalms interspersed all the lessons. Before the reading of scripture, though, there was kind of a prelude to it, very much like in our liturgy today. They would start with an invocation, bless the Lord who is to be blessed, for example. Then they would sing, perhaps, the Sanctus. Many people don't realize that the Sanctus is one of the oldest hymns in the church. Jesus sang the Sanctus which was a combination, of course, of Isaiah 6 and Psalm 118, one of not only the earliest hymns in the Christian church, but one of the earliest hymns among the Jews. Then the Old Testament creed was the shema from Deuteronomy 6. Hear O Israel, the lord our God is one Lord. Then they would have prayers, prayers which were called the eighteen benedictions which were a series of blessings that were known as the *amada or the *tephela. These were petitionary prayers where they would petition God in the format that I described earlier. And then there would be a priestly benediction, something perhaps similar to what we call the Aaronic benediction, the Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord look upon you with favor and give you peace, from Numbers 6. This was all a prelude for the reading of the word. And when the reading of the word was finished, this is when the preaching would take place. The preaching is called the midrash, the interpretation. And what is so fascinating, and we're going to see this when we look at the sermon in Nazareth itself that Jesus preaches in the synagogue service, the preaching of Jesus is so different from the preaching of the Pharisees. The preaching of the Pharisees was very moralistic. It was about ethics. It was very legalistic whereas Jesus announces something that is happening now, that in him, there is now life. There is salvation. There is freedom. And Jesus' preaching was so radical from the Pharisees that they had no idea what they were going to do with it because it was just almost beyond their imagination. It was too good to be true. It's one of the reasons why people flocked to Jesus because he was a preacher beyond compare. After the preaching, there was a final blessing. And that is, essentially, the character of the synagogue service. Again, a service of word, prayer, and song. Now, we're going to see that the synagogue worship is the foundation for what we now do in the liturgy of the word. And later on when we talk about our liturgies of prayer, which we call the liturgy of the hours and the divine office, it also forms the foundation for what we now call matins, vespers, morning and evening prayer. But we will return to the sermon in Nazareth because we must look very carefully at what Jesus says in that sermon because it is foundational for our understanding of our worship today.