Verse 2 establishes the situation: the centurion, whom we can assume is a Gentile, has a slave the slave is important, but sick, and about to die. ĬLOSER READING: V1 refers back to the preceding chapter, the entire “sermon on the plain” which includes blessings and woes, the instructions to love enemies, not to judge, and to know trees (or people) by their fruits, and to do what Jesus says to do, which is like building a house on a firm foundation. We don’t have enough of that context in this story, either to assert, or to rule out, any particular one of the roles a slave could have played in the ancient world. But the Greek word in question, pais, seems to be a very general term, with a wide range of meanings, including “son” or “child.” Although it does seem always to mean something about a person’s social status, it doesn’t allow us to presume a person’s specific age or family connection or much more about the relationship without context. So some readers insist that this is definitely a story about a “gay centurion,” and other readers insist equally strongly that it isn’t and wouldn’t be. Recently, a lot of commentary and controversy has centered on the possible relationship of the centurion to this slave, because the centurion refers to him using a word that can mean a sexual partner, as it does in some Greek literature from more or less the same period. And there’s an interesting video of the structure of the military unit a centurion would have commanded here: Bond at Bible Odyssey summarizes what we can know about the centurion: definitely a Gentile, probably not a Roman, “career military”. Here’s an old, non-copyrighted map, that seems to have Capernaum, Nain, and the political boundaries in the same places as the newer, copyrighted and behind a subscription wall one: Palestine in the Time of Jesus, in Charles Foster Kent, Biblical Geography and History, 1926, online at Project Gutenberg This story, however, is firmly set in Capernaum, a city on the north end of the Sea of Galilee, which Luke presents as something like a base of operations for Jesus’s ministry. Luke can be vague about place references. Even so, he’s already done more healing and exorcising than most of the rest of us will do in our whole lives.
So, at this point, Jesus is just getting started. That sermon is the “sayings” that Jesus “had finished” in the first verse of our text.Īfter this, Jesus will go on to do everything else in the gospel of Luke, which is about 2/3 of it. He has been preaching, performing miracles, calling disciples and apostles, healing people on the sabbath, and preaching a long sermon to an audience that includes people from Tyre and Sidon ( Luke 6), presumably Gentiles. We are still in the story of Jesus’s early ministry, in Galilee, Nazareth, Capernaum, and “Judea” (or else Galilee again) Luke 4:44. If we have been reading along in Luke’s gospel, by the time we get to this story we’ve heard the stories of Elizabeth and Mary, from annunciation to the birth of John the Baptist and then of Jesus, complete with angels and shepherds, and of Jesus’s presentation in the temple complete with songs of Simeon and Anna, and John’s proclamation and Jesus’s baptism, and then genealogy, in which Jesus is ultimately a descendant of Adam, “son of God,” Luke 3:38). Here are my notes on this text:īACKGROUND AND CONTEXT: It’s Luke’s gospel, so Jesus does good things for Gentiles and Samaritans. (Also the kick-off day of our church’s bicentennial celebration! We have so much planned, it looks like we’ll be thoroughly exhausted and feeling 200 years old ourselves by the time it’s over.) This text tells the story of Jesus’s healing of a centurion’s slave, a story which has played a prominent role in Christian imagination over the centuries. We are studying Luke 7:1-10 for Sunday, October 20.
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