Jesus’ Family | 5 Discoveries of Jesus (Ep. 3)

Hi, I'm Bob Wrongley and I'm your teacher and your guide on this course Five Ancient Discoveries That Will Rock Your View of Jesus. Welcome back to episode three. In episodes one and two we went to Bethlehem and to Nazareth and now in episode three we're going to Capernaum, the base of Jesus' mission as he launches now his public ministry. We're going to look at the new kind of family that Jesus built in Capernaum and consider what that means for us. Now Luke tells us that after Jesus' baptism in the Jordan River and after his time of testing in the Judean wilderness in the southern part of Israel, that he returned in the power of the Spirit to Galilee, the northern part of Israel, and a report about him went out through all the surrounding country and he taught in their synagogues, being glorified by all, and he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up. So you can see on the map here his baptism, his temptation is down here in the southern part of Judea, and then he makes his way north up through the Jordan Valley, stopping at various places, we're not sure exactly where, teaching in the synagogues, stops in Cana for a wedding, and then he comes back to his hometown of Nazareth, which we looked at in our last episode. And here Jesus is coming back to his own family. We saw in the last episode Nazareth today is a modern city, but it was a small village at the time of Jesus, and we also saw this incredible discovery of the house of Joseph. You know, when we go on our trips, this is one of my favorite places to visit because it's off the beaten track, hardly anybody knows about it, but it's so significant, and you go there and you just realize you're standing in the house that Jesus grew up in. And this is the house that Jesus returned to now, he's, as Luke tells us, he's about 30 years old, he's been fully prepared, his identity is confirmed in the baptism, his spiritual authority was established in his time of testing in the wilderness, he's filled with the power of the Spirit, and he's ready now to bring the good news of the kingdom. And so he comes back to his family, and you know, when we read the gospel text, they don't give a lot of details, which would have been culturally understood at the time, and we can miss out on that, because when Jesus comes to Nazareth, obviously he's staying

with his family, because as we've discussed, people in biblical times lived in an extended family, the Greek word is oikos, and you can see in the picture here, it was multiple rooms built around a central courtyard, where they shared their lives together, and they carried out their family business, and in the case of Jesus' family, that was building, they were tekton, right, stonemasons, and so when Jesus comes back, he's coming back to his oikos. Now, an oikos was comprised of grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, cousins, close friends, employees, even slaves, so blood and non-blood relations, multiple generations, and everybody that could lived in an oikos, and there were two primary reasons for that. One was protection. You didn't have police cars patrolling your neighborhood, keeping your family safe, and if you were just a mom and dad and kids, you were vulnerable, bandits came, you couldn't protect yourself, but if you had a big family, you could protect yourself, and you can see the way they built their houses, they were also like little mini-fortresses. Secondly, provision. If it was just mom and dad and kids, and they got sick at harvest time, who's gonna bring in the crops, right? They're gonna starve to death, but if you have a big family, you can have a successful family business and provide for yourself. So Jesus went on the Sabbath to the synagogue. Now, we can imagine him as a modern individual just going by himself to the synagogue, but in fact, he would have gone with his oikos, and that's how people attended the synagogue, and they would sit with their extended families. So Jesus' oikos of stonemason builders, they're all there, and even though Jesus wasn't trained as a rabbi, because of the authority of his teachings and his healings, he was recognized as a rabbi, and so they asked him to speak here in his hometown synagogue, which was kind of an amazing moment. Now, I mentioned we haven't discovered yet the synagogue in Nazareth, but we have discovered other synagogues from the time of Jesus.

For instance, recently they discovered this synagogue in Magdala, which is on the Sea of Galilee, quite near to Capernaum, which we're talking about today. And here you can see that there was kind of built in seating around the perimeter in the middle there was a stone table where they would unroll and read the Torah scrolls the scripture scrolls there was even a special seat a Moses seat that the rabbi would sit in and teach from. And so this is the context now when Jesus goes and teaches in the synagogue in Nazareth and as he teaches he shares from Isaiah 61 this incredible messianic vision of Jubilee that when the Messiah comes the blind are going to receive their sight and the lame are going to walk and the poor are going to have good news preached to them the oppressed are going to be set free. And as Jesus is teaching that people are just getting so excited that when the Messiah comes that will be so great. And then Jesus says today this has been fulfilled and you're hearing and they must have been shocked when Jesus said that the Messiah has come it's happening the kingdom of God is coming today incredible and yet Jesus went on and he explained that this kingdom that God was bringing that this Messiah which of course is Jesus was not just for the Jews but it was for all people for the Jews and the Gentiles and that was so shocking to them that was so offensive to them that they dragged Jesus out and they were about to carry out a stoning. Here's how Luke describes it when they heard all these things all in the synagogue were filled with wrath. How dare you include the Gentiles in our special position.

And they rose up and drove him out of the town and brought him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built so that they could throw him down the cliff. Now Nazareth is built up on a ridge overlooking the Jezreel Valley and there's a particular ridge there called Mount Precipice which is identified with this event and we don't know exactly where it happened but it would have been in a place like this and it can seem kind of like random sort of mob violence but in fact this is a very deliberate act. In the Old Testament where a blasphemer or a heretic was to be stoned to death the rabbis explained you should take someone to twice the height of a man on a building or a cliff that'd be 10 feet high or higher you should tie their hands behind them and you should push them off the cliff. And if the fall doesn't kill them then you drop stones on them from that height. Brutal right. And this is what they're about to do to Jesus. They're about to stone him to death basically. And it's the most extreme rejection that they could possibly give and it shows you just how shocking Jesus' message was to them. But there's another interesting point and that is that Jesus' oikos is there. His family is there. And remember the purposes of oikos protection and provision. So we have to ask the question why aren't Jesus'

brothers protecting him. Right. That's what you do you protect your oikos. But I mean mothers wouldn't you grab your son's leg and at least you know say don't you dare hurt my son. Where's Mary. Well Jesus said you know a prophet has no honor in his own hometown or among his own relatives or in his own family. And this one must have been one of the most painful moments in Jesus' life when he realized his own oikos wasn't with him. They didn't embrace his vision of the kingdom. They weren't willing to stand with him. And Luke says passing through their midst this this mob that was about to stone him to death he went away. I don't know is that some kind of Jedi mind trick. This isn't the Messiah you're looking for. I mean I don't know exactly how that works but Jesus just passed through their midst and it says he went down to Capernaum a city of Galilee. Now Capernaum was about a half a day's journey. You can see on the map here from Nazareth down to the Sea of Galilee and he goes down to this town of Capernaum. It sits on the north shore of this beautiful lake. We call it the Sea of Galilee. It's a little misleading because it's a freshwater lake but the same word can mean sea or lake. So it's really the Lake of Galilee and it's an incredibly beautiful place.

When we go on our trips it's one of my favorite places to go because it's actually less populated there today than it was in the time of Jesus and you really get the sense of what it would have been like. We always go swimming in the lake every afternoon when we're there on our footsteps of Jesus trips. But it was here particularly in Capernaum that Jesus decided to make the base of his mission. He he didn't find the support from his family in Nazareth, and so he went to Capernaum. In fact he had met a couple of guys from Capernaum, James and John and Simon, who knows Peter and Andrew. He had met them down at his baptism and they were friendly to him, they were interested in him, and so I think he went to Capernaum to see if those guys were kind of going to be open to him. And so when you go to Capernaum today, it's quite fascinating because unlike Nazareth, it's not a built-up modern city, and so it's been extensively excavated. You can see that it sits right on the shore of the lake here, and it was a significant town, not a city, but a town in the time of Jesus, bigger than Nazareth, which was a village, and its main industry was fishing. And the excavators have discovered there a synagogue as well as a number of houses from the time of Jesus. So we get a fascinating glimpse into the actual town where Simon and Andrew and James and John lived, and where Jesus kind of moved in. So here's the facade of the synagogue that stands there today. This synagogue actually dates from a couple hundred years after the time of Jesus, but it's built directly on the foundations of the first century synagogue. In fact, you can see the black basalt stones there. That's the foundation in the lower wall of the first century synagogue. So when you stand in the synagogue today, you're standing exactly in the footprint of the synagogue that Jesus stood in. Here's a reconstruction of how that synagogue would have looked at the time of Jesus, not the white limestone, but the black basalt stone. And again, you can see the built-in seating and the scroll table where the rabbi would have read the scriptures in the Moses seat, just like we described. And so Jesus comes, he teaches in the synagogue, he delivers a demonized man from an unclean spirit, and then when the Sabbath service is over, Simon, Peter, invites Jesus into their family home. It says, Jesus arose, he left the synagogue, and he entered Simon's

house. Now Simon's mother-in-law was ill with a high fever, and they appealed to him on her behalf, and he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her, and immediately she rose and began to serve them. So this was an amazing moment. They invited Jesus, who's now become a famous rabbi, he's the builder, who's now become a famous rabbi, and they invite him into their home. And that would have been a thing of honor, to have a rabbi in your home brought honor, because it was a shame and an honor culture, and this would have brought honor to their family. And plus, he yielded their mother-in-law. What a blessing. So they must have been so excited to have Jesus there. Now it's important to kind of understand how these houses were. We've looked at that a little bit, but here you can see the actual first century houses. There's a doorway from the street that leads into an open courtyard, which is the area you see right here. And then there's multiple rooms. There's rooms over here, rooms back here, rooms at this end, rooms in the foreground. All these rooms open up into the courtyard, and this is where they cook. There's a clay oven over here in the corner. There's a pestle where they would grind spices. There's a grinder for grinding wheat into flour. This is where they lived, shared their meals, and carried out their family business. And amazingly, just next to this house is another block of houses, and underneath this modern church that they've built to protect it, lie the remains of the actual house of Simon and Andrew. This is an incredible discovery that the very home and the very family that we're reading about, we actually know the house. The remains are there. And if you look, you can see the black basalt stones. These walls come from a later period when they built a church over this house. But these stones here, this is the doorway of the house of Simon and Andrew. This is the paving stones in their courtyard. Again, rooms all around, open courtyard. This is the actual house that Jesus came into, and when we go there, I just find it incredible that we can look at the actual house of Simon and Andrew. Here's an accurate reconstruction of that house. You can see right there, there's the doorway that we were just looking at that leads in from the street. There's the courtyard. We just saw the paving stones of that courtyard, and here are the rooms. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven rooms. A big room right here, the largest room. A little pen for the animals. Remember in episode one, we talked about how they would keep the animals sometimes right in the house. But this is the house of Simon and Andrew. It's right on the waterfront. They're a fishing family.

So they're Oikos, they're fishing, their family business is fishing, and they're right on the seafront. So it's an incredible house and an incredible place for this family. And this is where Jesus enters in, heals the mother-in-law. They're loving having him there. But now Jesus is gonna do something totally unexpected, something kind of shocking. It says, when the sun was setting, all those who had any who were sick with various diseases brought them to him, and he laid his hands on every one of them and healed them. Now you see what's happened is, Jesus has basically invited in the whole town into Simon and Andrew's house. And that was not something you did. The Oikos was for the Oikos. The family was for the family. And you only invited people into your Oikos that would bring honor to your family. But now everybody's coming, the sick and the lame. And look, it says, demons also came out of many crying. You are the son of God, but he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak because they knew that he was the Christ. Now, when you're inviting demon-possessed people, you know that pretty much everybody's invited at that point, right? That's pretty low bar for the invitation.

And so Jesus is showing them a radically different way to be a family, not an exclusive family just serving themselves, but an open family that welcomes in the hurting and the lost and the broken and ministers to them and leads them into the kingdom of God. It was a whole different way of thinking about what it looks like to be a family. Now, when we read through the Gospels, what you'll notice is Jesus goes out and he preaches in different synagogues and he heals and he does different things, but he keeps coming back to Capernaum. He keeps coming back to the house of Simon and Andrew. And really it's become his oikos. That's what Mark says. Mark says in chapter two, verse one, when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. That word is oikos. He was in the family compound of Simon and Andrew and it's now become his home. And many were gathered so that there was no more room, not even at the door, he was preaching the word to them. So same thing, everybody's invited in. The courtyard is full of people. And we can just picture that now that we see there's the house. So that whole courtyard is full of people and Jesus is teaching them in this kind of base.

And then Mark says that these four friends brought their paralyzed friends to Jesus, but they couldn't get near to him because of the crowd. They were stuck at that outside door. And so then it says they removed the roof above him. And when they had made an opening, they let down the bed in which the paralytic lay. Now, when we read that, it's like, how did they get up on the roof? How did that happen? Well, interestingly, when you look at these houses, here's a doorway of another house that you can see more clearly, but just like the one we saw at Simon and Andrew's house, and look at right beside it is a set of steps. Now, the steps would have led right up to the rooftop because they use the flat roofs for drying fish, drying fruit, even in the summers, they would sleep up there. And so it was very natural for them to think, oh, if we can't get to Jesus through the courtyard, we'll just go up the steps, we'll go on the roof. The roofs were kind of a mud thatched roof. So they would kind of dig open the mud and the reeds, and they let their friend down. It was a radical thing for them to do, but when you see the actual archeological remains, it kind of makes sense in a way that it doesn't otherwise. And so what we see is that this home, this oikos, becomes the center of Jesus' mission, the place that he comes back to.

Now, it's fascinating. They've built a modern church to protect these ancient remains, and it's sort of boat shaped in a way, but the church is in the round. And when you go in there, in the very center of the church, there's a large opening in the floor. You can see it through the glass there. And that square opening matches the main room of the house of Simon and Andrew. And so you can look down through that glass and you're looking down into the very room where Jesus healed the paralytic. And it's fascinating because when you look down, you suddenly realize that's the perspective of the four friends as they lowered their friend into Jesus. It's amazing to be there and to see the reality of these sites. These are not just made up stories. This is historical reality. These things really happened. And what we see is this home is now a place of ministry and mission. And we read on in Mark, again, he goes out, he visits other cities, he preaches in other places. Then Mark 3.20 says, he went home, meaning he went back to. The house of Simon and Andrew and Capernaum. The crowd gathered again, so they could not even eat, right? There must have been people sitting on the clay oven and Peter's mother-in-law couldn't fix the lunch. And then when his family heard it, meaning his biological family back in Nazareth who had rejected him,

He says they went out to seize him for they were saying he is out of his mind. They heard all these things that were happening. Jesus was teaching and healing and casting out demons. They thought he's gone crazy. And so what do you do when a family member is kind of got mental illness and they're out on the streets? You go and find them, right? You bring them home. You nurse them back to health. Well, that's exactly what happens. In Mark 3 31, it says his mother and his brothers came, meaning came to Capernaum, came to the house of Simon and Andrew. Standing outside at that outer gate, they sent to him and called him. But a crowd was sitting around Jesus. Again, the house is full of people. They said to him, your mother and brothers are outside seeking you. And he answered them, who are my mother and my brothers? And looking at those who sat around them, He said, here are my mother and my brothers. Forever does the will of God. He is my brother and sister and mother. See, Jesus has done something incredible. He's showed them a whole new way to be a family. Not just a biological family, but a spiritual family. Not just a small nuclear family, but a big extended family. Not just a family that serves itself, but a family that's been kind of turned inside out. A family that is seeking and saving the lost, as Jesus said. A family that is on mission together. And this is the kind of family that Jesus formed. And this became the basis of the movement of Jesus. The followers of Jesus continued to follow this pattern. It's interesting, Paul uses the same language. He says, to the Ephesians, you are no longer strangers and aliens, but your fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. That word household, of course, is oikos, I keep saying. Built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone. This is how Paul describes the followers of Jesus. This is how he describes the church. That you're now members of a new kind of family. A family that is carrying out the mission of God. It's interesting, when you read through the book of Acts and you see how the movement of Jesus spread, it was through oikoi. It was through extended families. The churches that are planted in the book of Acts are spiritual families on mission, just like Jesus built in Capernaum. There was Lydia's oikos in Philippi. There was Tysha's justice oikos in Corinth. Chloe's oikos in Corinth. Phoebe's oikos in Centrae. Aquila and Priscilla in Ephesus. Nympha in Laodicea. These were these were the first churches and they were

spiritual families of disciples who were living on mission together. And I know for me and my wife Pam, this has changed our whole understanding of our family. That if we're disciples of Jesus, we're meant to reach the lost and make disciples as a spiritual family. That we're doing this with spiritual brothers and sisters who have spiritual parents who are helping them to grow up in the faith. That's the way of Jesus. That's the pattern of that he set for us. You know, there's different ways of thinking about your family. You can think, well, I can either have a family or I can have a mission. And some churches think that way. Like to be a priest or something, you can't be married. Like you have to choose between family or mission. That doesn't doesn't really make a lot of sense in a way, not biblically. I know for me and my wife Pam, we thought, well, we want to raise our boys to love Jesus and have a healthy family. And we want to carry out our mission kind of at the church. And we thought of those as two separate things. But the problem was it was always pulling us in two separate directions. It was it was kind of pulling us apart a little bit. Some people think of their family as their mission. Like, this is my whole mission in life is to raise my children. And there are times when you need to focus on your family. But we're called to a much bigger mission than just our own biological family. And what we've come to see is that Jesus shows us how to live as a family on mission. That our biological family is meant to be at the core of a spiritual family that is seeking the lost, that is making disciples, and that is living out the kingdom of God. And so I just want to encourage you to reflect a little bit as we think about Capernaum, Jesus' family. about this new kind of family that Jesus built. And just ask God, what is it that he's saying to you about that? And what's the next step of faith on your own journey? So I encourage you just to reflect and pray and to take that step of faith, whatever it is.

In our next episode, our fourth episode in this course, we are going to continue around the Sea of Galilee, but we're gonna look at some discoveries that illustrate the specific calling that Jesus gave to disciples and what it means to follow Jesus as his disciple. So I hope you'll join us and come back for episode four in this ongoing course, five ancient discoveries that will rock your view of Jesus.