NOTES for Luk 4:32

Why were people astonished? After all, so much of what Jesus said echoed the words of the prophets and the wisdom books of the Bible... There were other teachers in Israel at that time, as the discoveries at Qumran have made especially clear. What, then, distinguished Jesus from them? Here we are given the answer: He spoke with authority. Or, as the Gospel of Matthew puts it, ‘He taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes and Pharisees.’ By that time there was already an immense tradition of teaching and interpreting Scripture, and Israel's teachers spoke very cautiously, constantly citing authorities, as though hiding behind them.

Jesus does not hide. He speaks as fearlessly as the great prophets of Israel. He does not even appeal to the authority of Moses the lawgiver, and when He mentions him, He allows Himself expressions such as ‘Moses says... but I say to you...’ The point is neither the commanding tone of His words nor His self-exaltation—there is not the slightest trace of either—but the complete correspondence between this man and what He says, which His hearers sensed. Love and truth were always united in His preaching, and that is precisely why people felt that He had the right to teach them.

Sometimes we meet people along our way in whom we sense that same authority—the authority of love and the authority of truth—and something responds in our hearts, because in the depths of every human person there lives an unquenchable thirst for both.