Peter's Confession of Christ
18Once when Jesus was praying in private and his disciples were with him, he asked them, "Who do the crowds say I am?"
19They replied, "Some say John the Baptist; others say Elijah; and still others, that one of the prophets of long ago has come back to life."
20"But what about you?" he asked. "Who do you say I am?"
Peter answered, "The Christ[a] of God."
21Jesus strictly warned them not to tell this to anyone. 22And he said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."
23Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. 24For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. 25What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self? 26If anyone is ashamed of me and my words, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his glory and in the glory of the Father and of the holy angels. 27I tell you the truth, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God."
Dig Deeper
For years I thought my wife was rude. I loved her, though, and was willing to just bear with that but I really did think that she could behave quite boorishly in certain situations. Little did I know that she thought the same of me. It took several years but it finally hit me one day as I was reading a book on cross cultural communications. It wasn’t that either of us were rude or even wrong in our behavior, It was that we were operating from different cultural backgrounds. These cultural backgrounds determined how we interacted with one another and how we perceived the actions of each other. The specific issue was that if my wife wanted a favor of me, should would just ask directly and straightforwardly. I didn’t know why that bothered me so much over the years but I just knew that it did. I, on the other hand, would tend to drop a hint and wait for her to pick up on the hint and offer to help me out. We were both acting according to our cultural training. The problem came in that I perceived her actions as being too straightforward and rude and not giving someone an opportunity to willingly do the favor without any obligation being placed on them. At the same time, she thought that I was rude by hinting and not just asking. The problem wasn’t necessarily with either course of action but the difficulty came in when either of us could not correctly understand or interpret the cultural context of the other.
That type of potential problem is just as present as we read the Bible. The word of God is living and active and able to be relevant to us even today, but the fact is that we are separated from the authors of the various books of the Bible by a large cultural gap. Most of us read the Bible according to our Western individualist mindset. We see everything as though it primarily pertains to us as individuals first. This can be demonstrated by a simple task. When you read the word “you” in the Bible, to whom does it refer? Most of us would say “you” refers to our own self as an individual reader. Yet, most of the usages of the word “you” in the Bible are in the plural form and actually refer to “you all,” as in the corporate church family. The fact is that the ancient culture in which the Bible was written tended to think collectively rather than individually. They thought first in groups of people and community rather than in individual terms.
With cultural differences like those described above, simply being aware of those differences is an important step to identifying them and working through those misunderstandings. When we read passages in the Bible, we do well if we remind ourselves that the authors and first readers generally approached things from this group-focused mindset rather than our me-first thought process. When we do that, we can begin to dig in and discover the full depth of what the author intended.
Jesus is about to take part in a pivotal conversation as far as his ministry is his concerned and we see him, as was his custom, to retreat into prayer before the conversation. Jesus truly knew that the source of his ongoing connection with the will of the Father was to commune with him in prayer and that serves as a constant reminder to us that if Jesus thought constantly going in prayer was necessary before he took action, so should we.
Jesus had an important question for his disciples. He wanted to know who people were saying that he was. Were they perceiving him to be the Messiah or not? The answers varied but they all had one thing in common. No one was thinking of him as Israel’s promised Messiah. A great prophet of some kind, surely, but the way he was acting was just too different from their messianic expectations. Israel wanted a great king that would lead Israel out of oppression and defeat her enemies, but they thought that Israel’s chief enemy was Rome rather than her true enemies of sin and death.
In his question and their response, though, Jesus has accomplished two things. He has verified that no one in Israel has perceived his true identity and vocation. At the same time, he has very subtly, but importantly, established that his disciples are a separate group from the masses. Jesus has created a category of the others that think he is nothing more than a prophet.
But the real question right now is who they think he is. Have they seen enough to realize that rather than downgrade Jesus, they must adjust their expectations of the Messiah? To this point in Luke, only the demons have identified Jesus as the Messiah (the Christ). No human being has perceived what God has revealed to the disciples. Peter, answering for the group, declares that Jesus is the Messiah. They have affirmed Jesus’ action in distinguishing them from the rest of the people in Israel. They know that he is the Messiah that God has sent. This doesn’t mean that they now grasp everything that Jesus is doing in inaugurating the kingdom of God or that they even fully grasp all of the implications of his identity but they do understand that he is the Messiah.
Now that the disciples understand that Jesus is the Christ of God, he will be able to begin to teach them the true nature of his vocation and what it means to follow Jesus. The Messiah would not be an exalted and celebrated figure. He would, like the suffering servant of Isaiah 53, suffer and be rejected by the religious leaders of Israel. This was so different from what anyone would have thought would be the fate of the Messiah that they had to come to the conclusion of Jesus being the Messiah on their own. The expectations of the Messiah were so entrenched that for Jesus to simply say that he was the Messiah would have been misleading. This is why Jesus never simply told Jewish people that he was the Messiah. If asked, he always pointed people to his actions. They had to see what he was doing first and then realize that this was what the Messiah would be like. This is why he asked his disciples to keep quiet about his identity as Messiah. If they went and simply declared that Jesus was the Messiah it would lead to mass confusion and many people would follow him for the wrong reasons. People simply had to understand what Jesus was doing in introducing the healing power of the kingdom of God for all people first, then they could come to the conclusion that this is what God’s Messiah would look like after all. They had to follow him because they embraced the values of the kingdom that he was calling people to rather than following him because they thought he was going to do what they expected of the Messiah. They had to be willing to follow God’s Messiah not Israel’s Messiah.
Those who truly understood that he was the Messiah would be ready for his further re-working of the Messiah’s vocation. This is why he immediately began to teach them that to follow him meant that they needed to be ready to go the way of death and suffering just as surely as he would. Verse 23 is one of those passages that we will read in the tone of our Western individualistic cultural mindset if we’re not careful. We tend to read that verse as though Jesus is saying that we must deny ourselves, meaning that we must deny our own desires and wants and follow Jesus’ way. Although that’s true, Jesus’ call here, in it’s cultural context, is far more demanding. The call for denial would have been heard by the people of Jesus’ day in a more collective mindset. To deny oneself meant to deny your identity within your community and family. The Jews believed that their family identity is what made them who they were as a people so Jesus is calling them to be ready to lay that down. They must deny their claim to being the people of God based on their standing as Jews. They must concede that they had no claim to being the people of God on their own at all. Thus, rather than just denying their own personal wants and desires, Jesus was calling his disciples to forfeit their very lives. They must give up everything that gave them security, identity, and status as God’s people.
They must die to all of that and go the way of the cross, which was an instrument of death alone in the first century. If they wanted to hang onto their identity and their own life, then they would find the irony of losing it. If they embraced the concept of dying to themselves, their identity, and their own will, then they would surely find life in Christ.
The Jewish belief was that when the Messiah returned that Israel would be freed from oppression and would be exalted to rule over the entire world. That would certainly happen but not in the way or in the timing that any Jew expected. But what a shame it would be to gain the whole world and think one was going to rule over it with the Messiah, only to find the deeply bitter irony that they had forfeited their soul by trusting in their own life rather than that of Jesus. We shouldn’t think that Jesus was teaching the entirety of the need to die to self and enter into the life of the Messiah, but he was laying the foundation. At the very heart of following Jesus was the need to understand that we have to deny our entire identity and see our need for a completely new way to reconcile with God. We need to embrace the life and way of the Messiah regardless of how embarrassing or counter-culture it might be. To be ashamed of the life of a Messiah who would suffer and be put to death would be to incur his being ashamed of them at the day of final judgment.
Yet, this death that Jesus was speaking of for them was not a literal death. They didn’t need to literally die on a cross in order to be part of the kingdom of God, that was his role. They needed to die to themselves but this would not be a physical death like his would be. Some of them (not all of them, for Judas would not see the kingdom of God come fully) would still be alive when the kingdom of God came at Pentecost. In the same way, we do not have to wait until our physical deaths in order to enter into the kingdom. We can do that right now through the very principles that Jesus described, by denying ourselves and trusting in the life of Christ rather than trusting in our own lives.
Devotional Thought
Have you truly made the decision and stayed with the decision to completely deny the totality of your life in order to live the life of Christ? Read Galatians 2:20. Does that verse truly describe your heart or do you find yourself living for yourself much more often than you would like?
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Monday, March 29, 2010
Luke 9:1-17 Commentary
Jesus Sends Out the Twelve
1 When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, 2 and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. 3 He told them: "Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt. 4 Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. 5 If people do not welcome you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them." 6 So they set out and went from village to village, proclaiming the good news and healing people everywhere.
7 Now Herod the tetrarch heard about all that was going on. And he was perplexed because some were saying that John had been raised from the dead, 8 others that Elijah had appeared, and still others that one of the prophets of long ago had come back to life. 9 But Herod said, "I beheaded John. Who, then, is this I hear such things about?" And he tried to see him.
Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand
10 When the apostles returned, they reported to Jesus what they had done. Then he took them with him and they withdrew by themselves to a town called Bethsaida, 11 but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing.
12 Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to him and said, "Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here."
13 He replied, "You give them something to eat."
They answered, "We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd." 14 (About five thousand men were there.)
But he said to his disciples, "Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each." 15 The disciples did so, and everyone sat down. 16 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to set before the people. 17 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.
Dig Deeper
When I was a kid I had a dream of what I wanted to be when I grew up just as most kids do. But instead of wanting to become a fireman or a professional athlete, I always wanted to be an Egyptologist. Believe it or not, that dream went back to about the 3rd grade and stayed with me until college. When I got to college my father wisely counseled me on the wisdom of getting a degree in history education and becoming a teacher which would enable me to go and be an Egyptologist later if I so chose to. So I went to college to get a degree in education and become a teacher. We had many classes that dealt with the theory of education, the specifics of education, and classes that taught us how to teach. We had classes on our subject area and even classes that taught us how to use the technology of the time. Yet there was one thing that seemed to be missing during my first year. I had never actually shared in the work of teaching. So regardless of how many classes I listened to on the topic, I still did not really know how to do it. In my second year, however, I had the opportunity to take part in a practicum. This was a very early experience in the education process where education majors actually spent a few weeks with a teacher and then get to take over a class and teach it themselves for a week (this is still a couple of years before the student teaching semester that education majors go through). For the first time, I began to really understand what it would take to teach a class. I still needed more training and I wasn’t ready to completely go it on my own, but the experience of sharing in the work and teaching on my own prepared me to become a teacher in a way that just listening to lectures or reading books could never have done.
The Twelve have done little more since their calling to follow Jesus than walking with him and learning his way of life. They have listened, they have observed and absorbed, but that only takes one so far. It was certainly necessary for them to walk in the steps of Jesus and learn what the kingdom of God was and what it looked like to announce it to people that were locked in slavery to the many other competing kingdoms of the world. But the time had come for them to begin to share in the work. They had learned the importance of obeying Jesus and putting his word to work in their lives and they had witnessed his unbridled authority as it smashed in on the predictable reality of the physical world, but now they needed to take the next step in their apprenticeship. They needed to share in the work and get their first taste of what it would be like to carry on Jesus’ ministry on their own, the very thing that they would be called to do one day.
It is, I suppose, one thing to have a certain amount of authority or ability in and of yourself, but it is a whole different level of authority that one has when they can simply transfer their authority to someone else, whether in part or in whole. It demonstrates a complete authority over that particular area. Jesus has not only shown the authority and Spirit-driven power over the demonic world and diseases and illnesses but he also now will show that he can pass some of that authority on to his closest followers. They have seen Jesus declare and demonstrate the kingdom of God, as his miraculous actions confirmed and illustrated the power of his words, but now they were being called to share in the work. As they did so, they would learn some valuable lessons from the present mission that would carry over into invaluable experience in their mission to come.
The first thing Jesus expected of them was to change their mindset from the normal practice of traveling teachers of their day. They would not take supplies and they would not take anything with which they could collect money and support from others as they traveled and proclaimed the truth of the kingdom of God. They would trust in God and rely on nothing more than the unexpected hospitality of those who shared in their repentance and longing for the values of the age to come. Once they found like-minded people who would bring them in and treat them like members of the family, something that Jesus was continuing to show that the kingdom of God was, they should stay with those people. They should not be like the traveling teachers of their day and move from house to house, constantly looking for more and looking to move up into better accommodations. But if people rejected this message, they should not stay and waste time trying to convince them. They should simply shake the dust from their feet, a testimony against their rejection.
They were certainly sharing in Jesus’ mission, but we should note the fact that this seems to have been a specific mission that Jesus sent them out on. Nowhere in the book of Acts or anywhere in the life of the early church do we see this type of ministry approach duplicated or encouraged. They were sharing in the specific and urgent call for Israel to respond to the coming of the promised Messiah before being judged as a nation (an event that Jesus will speak of in detail in Luke 21 and which would take place with a crushing finality in AD 70). The actions were part of Jesus’ urgent call to Israel to repent and put their faith in him as the true Son of God but the principles of sharing in and declaring the authority of Jesus, trusting in God’s provision, and proclaiming the kingdom of God were things that they would need and would carry with them for the remainder of their lives.
One of the things that trainees and apprentices need to learn, however, is that not everything is always victories and positive things. Just as Jesus faced storms of all kinds, Luke reminds us that there was a storm brewing around Jesus and his followers as well. As they were out experiencing the first hand the power and authority of the kingdom of God and the ability to proclaim its coming, the dark cloud of Herod the tetrarch was growing blacker by the minute. Jesus’ ministry had gone firmly public now that the disciple were spreading out and declaring the message and it had made it all the way to Herod. The question that was brewing in Herod’s mind is the very question that Luke has been urging his readers to consider over and over again. Who is Jesus. The possibilities that were raised, John come back from the dead, Elijah, or one of the other prophets, all point to the fact that Jesus was no ordinary person. The very fact that he was so extraordinary help explain the level of threat that Herod felt in Jesus’ ministry. No one fears the ordinary but we do fear that which is obviously beyond our grasp or ability to explain.
After coming back to Jesus and reporting all that had happened to them, Jesus knew that it was time for them to hear further about the kingdom of God but also to have another opportunity to share in his work. They had another lesson to learn. Just has Jesus had commissioned them to spread the news about the kingdom, they also needed to continue to learn the dual lesson of taking part in Jesus’ ministry and authority while at the same time relying on the power of the Spirit as the true source of whatever they did.
As with so many other incidents in the life of Jesus as recorded by Luke, the miraculous feeding one is full of echoes that both look back to the Old Testament and look forward to the life of the church as well. This miracle certainly brings to mind the provision of God for his people through manna (Ex. 16:1-36) and quail (Num. 11). God’s people, because of their obedience, were in a position where they could not provide for themselves but had to rely on God’s provision. Those listening to Jesus were in the same situation. But there are also parallels with 2 Kings 4:42-44 where Elisha miraculously fed one hundred men with a less-than-adequate amount of bread saying “the LORD says: ‘They will eat and have some left over’” (2 Ki. 4:43). Those were mighty events where God invited his people to eat with him at his table of provision, but Jesus has now recapitulated and even surpassed those miracles. He has the very authority of God and has provided for his people in the wilderness just as God had so long ago. The Psalmist had asked: “Can God really spread a table in the wilderness . . . Can he supply meat for his people?" (Ps. 78:19-20). In this miracle, Jesus had answered “yes” just as God did for the Exodus generation. This is yet another picture of Jesus doing what only God can do.
But this wasn’t just another demonstration of Jesus’ power, authority, and provision for his people. Jesus invited his disciples to take part in this work. They would distribute the loaves of bread and fish to five thousand men which means, if we include women and children, that the crowd could have been as much as 20,000 or more. (Many commentators have tried to offer up logical explanations for this miracle but the fact is we don’t need logical explanations when it comes to God’s creative power breaking into the present age. The very point of miracles like this is that there is no logical explanation.) This was looking ahead to the time when these men would distribute the provision of God to his people throughout the world. They had learned the lesson that there was more need than they could possibly provide for on their own but if they would simply trust in Jesus, rely on God’s provision, and take part in the work, that the need would be met.
Certainly God would provide for his people and one of those means of continued provision is almost surely foreshadowed here in Jesus’ actions. As he gave thanks to God, took the bread, broke it, and distributed it, Jesus uses language that is highly reminiscent of his words as he instituted the Lord’s Supper (Lk. 22:19; see also 1 Cor. 11:23-24). The Lord’s Supper is the weekly reminder to God’s people that we are called to take part in his work but that we must remember him and first rely on his provision before we can possibly hope to feed a hungry world.
Devotional Thought
Do you ever feel, when God calls you to do something, like the disciples must have felt when they were staring at a crowd of 20,000 hungry people and only a few scraps to feed them with. John tells us a detail that Luke omits, which is that the five loaves and 2 fish that they had came from a young boy. It’s amazing what Jesus can do with so little when we turn it over to him. Turn over what little you might feel like you have today and see what God does with it.
1 When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, 2 and he sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. 3 He told them: "Take nothing for the journey—no staff, no bag, no bread, no money, no extra shirt. 4 Whatever house you enter, stay there until you leave that town. 5 If people do not welcome you, shake the dust off your feet when you leave their town, as a testimony against them." 6 So they set out and went from village to village, proclaiming the good news and healing people everywhere.
7 Now Herod the tetrarch heard about all that was going on. And he was perplexed because some were saying that John had been raised from the dead, 8 others that Elijah had appeared, and still others that one of the prophets of long ago had come back to life. 9 But Herod said, "I beheaded John. Who, then, is this I hear such things about?" And he tried to see him.
Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand
10 When the apostles returned, they reported to Jesus what they had done. Then he took them with him and they withdrew by themselves to a town called Bethsaida, 11 but the crowds learned about it and followed him. He welcomed them and spoke to them about the kingdom of God, and healed those who needed healing.
12 Late in the afternoon the Twelve came to him and said, "Send the crowd away so they can go to the surrounding villages and countryside and find food and lodging, because we are in a remote place here."
13 He replied, "You give them something to eat."
They answered, "We have only five loaves of bread and two fish—unless we go and buy food for all this crowd." 14 (About five thousand men were there.)
But he said to his disciples, "Have them sit down in groups of about fifty each." 15 The disciples did so, and everyone sat down. 16 Taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he gave thanks and broke them. Then he gave them to the disciples to set before the people. 17 They all ate and were satisfied, and the disciples picked up twelve basketfuls of broken pieces that were left over.
Dig Deeper
When I was a kid I had a dream of what I wanted to be when I grew up just as most kids do. But instead of wanting to become a fireman or a professional athlete, I always wanted to be an Egyptologist. Believe it or not, that dream went back to about the 3rd grade and stayed with me until college. When I got to college my father wisely counseled me on the wisdom of getting a degree in history education and becoming a teacher which would enable me to go and be an Egyptologist later if I so chose to. So I went to college to get a degree in education and become a teacher. We had many classes that dealt with the theory of education, the specifics of education, and classes that taught us how to teach. We had classes on our subject area and even classes that taught us how to use the technology of the time. Yet there was one thing that seemed to be missing during my first year. I had never actually shared in the work of teaching. So regardless of how many classes I listened to on the topic, I still did not really know how to do it. In my second year, however, I had the opportunity to take part in a practicum. This was a very early experience in the education process where education majors actually spent a few weeks with a teacher and then get to take over a class and teach it themselves for a week (this is still a couple of years before the student teaching semester that education majors go through). For the first time, I began to really understand what it would take to teach a class. I still needed more training and I wasn’t ready to completely go it on my own, but the experience of sharing in the work and teaching on my own prepared me to become a teacher in a way that just listening to lectures or reading books could never have done.
The Twelve have done little more since their calling to follow Jesus than walking with him and learning his way of life. They have listened, they have observed and absorbed, but that only takes one so far. It was certainly necessary for them to walk in the steps of Jesus and learn what the kingdom of God was and what it looked like to announce it to people that were locked in slavery to the many other competing kingdoms of the world. But the time had come for them to begin to share in the work. They had learned the importance of obeying Jesus and putting his word to work in their lives and they had witnessed his unbridled authority as it smashed in on the predictable reality of the physical world, but now they needed to take the next step in their apprenticeship. They needed to share in the work and get their first taste of what it would be like to carry on Jesus’ ministry on their own, the very thing that they would be called to do one day.
It is, I suppose, one thing to have a certain amount of authority or ability in and of yourself, but it is a whole different level of authority that one has when they can simply transfer their authority to someone else, whether in part or in whole. It demonstrates a complete authority over that particular area. Jesus has not only shown the authority and Spirit-driven power over the demonic world and diseases and illnesses but he also now will show that he can pass some of that authority on to his closest followers. They have seen Jesus declare and demonstrate the kingdom of God, as his miraculous actions confirmed and illustrated the power of his words, but now they were being called to share in the work. As they did so, they would learn some valuable lessons from the present mission that would carry over into invaluable experience in their mission to come.
The first thing Jesus expected of them was to change their mindset from the normal practice of traveling teachers of their day. They would not take supplies and they would not take anything with which they could collect money and support from others as they traveled and proclaimed the truth of the kingdom of God. They would trust in God and rely on nothing more than the unexpected hospitality of those who shared in their repentance and longing for the values of the age to come. Once they found like-minded people who would bring them in and treat them like members of the family, something that Jesus was continuing to show that the kingdom of God was, they should stay with those people. They should not be like the traveling teachers of their day and move from house to house, constantly looking for more and looking to move up into better accommodations. But if people rejected this message, they should not stay and waste time trying to convince them. They should simply shake the dust from their feet, a testimony against their rejection.
They were certainly sharing in Jesus’ mission, but we should note the fact that this seems to have been a specific mission that Jesus sent them out on. Nowhere in the book of Acts or anywhere in the life of the early church do we see this type of ministry approach duplicated or encouraged. They were sharing in the specific and urgent call for Israel to respond to the coming of the promised Messiah before being judged as a nation (an event that Jesus will speak of in detail in Luke 21 and which would take place with a crushing finality in AD 70). The actions were part of Jesus’ urgent call to Israel to repent and put their faith in him as the true Son of God but the principles of sharing in and declaring the authority of Jesus, trusting in God’s provision, and proclaiming the kingdom of God were things that they would need and would carry with them for the remainder of their lives.
One of the things that trainees and apprentices need to learn, however, is that not everything is always victories and positive things. Just as Jesus faced storms of all kinds, Luke reminds us that there was a storm brewing around Jesus and his followers as well. As they were out experiencing the first hand the power and authority of the kingdom of God and the ability to proclaim its coming, the dark cloud of Herod the tetrarch was growing blacker by the minute. Jesus’ ministry had gone firmly public now that the disciple were spreading out and declaring the message and it had made it all the way to Herod. The question that was brewing in Herod’s mind is the very question that Luke has been urging his readers to consider over and over again. Who is Jesus. The possibilities that were raised, John come back from the dead, Elijah, or one of the other prophets, all point to the fact that Jesus was no ordinary person. The very fact that he was so extraordinary help explain the level of threat that Herod felt in Jesus’ ministry. No one fears the ordinary but we do fear that which is obviously beyond our grasp or ability to explain.
After coming back to Jesus and reporting all that had happened to them, Jesus knew that it was time for them to hear further about the kingdom of God but also to have another opportunity to share in his work. They had another lesson to learn. Just has Jesus had commissioned them to spread the news about the kingdom, they also needed to continue to learn the dual lesson of taking part in Jesus’ ministry and authority while at the same time relying on the power of the Spirit as the true source of whatever they did.
As with so many other incidents in the life of Jesus as recorded by Luke, the miraculous feeding one is full of echoes that both look back to the Old Testament and look forward to the life of the church as well. This miracle certainly brings to mind the provision of God for his people through manna (Ex. 16:1-36) and quail (Num. 11). God’s people, because of their obedience, were in a position where they could not provide for themselves but had to rely on God’s provision. Those listening to Jesus were in the same situation. But there are also parallels with 2 Kings 4:42-44 where Elisha miraculously fed one hundred men with a less-than-adequate amount of bread saying “the LORD says: ‘They will eat and have some left over’” (2 Ki. 4:43). Those were mighty events where God invited his people to eat with him at his table of provision, but Jesus has now recapitulated and even surpassed those miracles. He has the very authority of God and has provided for his people in the wilderness just as God had so long ago. The Psalmist had asked: “Can God really spread a table in the wilderness . . . Can he supply meat for his people?" (Ps. 78:19-20). In this miracle, Jesus had answered “yes” just as God did for the Exodus generation. This is yet another picture of Jesus doing what only God can do.
But this wasn’t just another demonstration of Jesus’ power, authority, and provision for his people. Jesus invited his disciples to take part in this work. They would distribute the loaves of bread and fish to five thousand men which means, if we include women and children, that the crowd could have been as much as 20,000 or more. (Many commentators have tried to offer up logical explanations for this miracle but the fact is we don’t need logical explanations when it comes to God’s creative power breaking into the present age. The very point of miracles like this is that there is no logical explanation.) This was looking ahead to the time when these men would distribute the provision of God to his people throughout the world. They had learned the lesson that there was more need than they could possibly provide for on their own but if they would simply trust in Jesus, rely on God’s provision, and take part in the work, that the need would be met.
Certainly God would provide for his people and one of those means of continued provision is almost surely foreshadowed here in Jesus’ actions. As he gave thanks to God, took the bread, broke it, and distributed it, Jesus uses language that is highly reminiscent of his words as he instituted the Lord’s Supper (Lk. 22:19; see also 1 Cor. 11:23-24). The Lord’s Supper is the weekly reminder to God’s people that we are called to take part in his work but that we must remember him and first rely on his provision before we can possibly hope to feed a hungry world.
Devotional Thought
Do you ever feel, when God calls you to do something, like the disciples must have felt when they were staring at a crowd of 20,000 hungry people and only a few scraps to feed them with. John tells us a detail that Luke omits, which is that the five loaves and 2 fish that they had came from a young boy. It’s amazing what Jesus can do with so little when we turn it over to him. Turn over what little you might feel like you have today and see what God does with it.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Luke 8:40-56 Commentary
Jesus Raises a Dead Girl and Heals a Sick Woman
40 Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him, for they were all expecting him. 41 Then a man named Jairus, a synagogue leader, came and fell at Jesus' feet, pleading with him to come to his house 42 because his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying.
As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, [d] but no one could heal her. 44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.
45 "Who touched me?" Jesus asked.
When they all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you."
46 But Jesus said, "Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me."
47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace."
49 While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. "Your daughter is dead," he said. "Don't bother the teacher anymore."
50 Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, "Don't be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed."
51 When he arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child's father and mother. 52 Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. "Stop wailing," Jesus said. "She is not dead but asleep."
53 They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54 But he took her by the hand and said, "My child, get up!" 55 Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. 56 Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.
Dig Deeper
I had seen high diving before on television many times but I had never before seen a real 10 meter platform before in person until the day I walked into the Schroeder YMCA. Even standing from the pool deck and looking up at the platform, it didn’t seem that bad. It seemed very high, don’t get me wrong, but it certainly seemed like it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to jump off of it. So, I climbed up rung after run and passed by several lower platforms of this diving structure and finally arrived at the top level, the ten meter platform. I was the director of the teen camp for the summer at the YMCA and we were having a day at the indoor pool. Normally they didn’t allow people to dive off the platform but they had given only the teen camp special permission to jump off. As I made it to the end of the platform and looked down, I realized that it seemed a whole lot higher from up there than it had seemed from down on the deck. As I peered down, I began to reconsider the thought of actually jumping down. I could think of a whole litany of excuses but when it came down to it, it was fear that stopped me. Just then I looked behind me and climbing up onto the platform was a small seventh grade boy that was a great kid, but was considered a bit of a “nerd” by the other kids. He asked if he could jump and I said “sure, go ahead,” but I was sure that he would get scared and back down once he saw how high it was. Much to my dismay, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. He took a deep breath and ran to the edge and leaped off. I watched him hit the water, disappear for a few moments and then bob up to the surface and swim off. I knew right then, that this little guy had taught me a lesson in courage. I needed to simply take a deep breath, run to the edge, and jump off. He had shown me what I needed in that moment.
It’s amazing how often we are stopped from doing things because of fear. Fear, it seems, can often be the biggest obstacle to our faith in God. Fear of the unknown, fear of what might happen, fear of what others might think, fear of being wrong. Fear can come in many forms but it almost always stands as an obstacle to fully loving God by truly trusting in him. Yet, just as amazing as all that can be, it is equally amazing at how many times we can be inspired to overcome fear from the unlikeliest of sources. We are inspired to jump because a young teen did it. We are inspired to trust God with our finances because we see someone with far less than us doing it. We are inspired to share our faith in public because we hear of someone who is painfully shy has trusted in God and boldly proclaimed the word of God and brought someone into Christ. Or, maybe the inspiration to overcome fear could come from a woman who was ceremonially unclean and who had every reason to say on the outskirts of her society in fear, yet who had so much faith that she overcame her crushing fear. Maybe that one has never happened to you, but it happened for Jairus.
Jairus was, by almost every measurable standard, an important man in the daily life of his community. He was the man who oversaw all aspects of worship at the synagogue which was, in many respects, the center of any given local Jewish community at the time of Jesus. He was the one that would see to it that the laws of Moses and the proper worship of God were upheld. He would have been greatly respected by all of those in the community. He certainly would not have been the type of man that people would have expected to humble himself before Jesus. In fact, doing so to such a controversial figure could significantly lower his esteem in the community.
Yet, none of that seemed to matter much when his twelve year-old daughter lay in her bed, on the verge of dying. When you are afraid for your child almost all decorum seems to go out of the window. Things that you wouldn’t have considered doing before now seem to be rather reasonable. The only thing you can think of is getting them well again and most parents are willing to grasp at any straws in order for that to happen. For Jairus to go to Jesus to heal his daughter may have seemed like grasping at one of those straws, but the only thing that mattered now was saving his daughter. He was willing to throw himself at Jesus’ feet and humble himself if Jesus would only have mercy on his daughter.
Jesus immediately agreed, although Luke doesn’t tell us exactly what Jesus said, and they were on their way. Jairus had certainly shown a measure of faith in Jesus but little did he know that he still had one more lesson to lean before this was all said and done.
Put yourself in Jairus’ shoes and imagine his hopeful expectation as they made their way to his daughter. Would they get there in time? Would Jesus really be able to heal her? Was risking his reputation as synagogue leader by going to Jesus going to be worth it? He must have been filled with fearful hope. Continue to imagine, though, as they are stopped on their way by this woman who had been suffering from a bleeding problem for twelve years, the same amount of time his daughter had been alive. What would you feel at this moment? Would you be angry with her? Would you be frustrated with Jesus? Would the fear start to overtake the hope? Did this have to happen now? Couldn’t it wait? Why would Jesus stop at this moment when time was so much of the essence?
It must have taken great courage for this woman to even make her way into this crowd. She had been suffering from some unnamed problem for twelve years. She was not physically contagious but she was certainly ceremonially contagious (Lev. 15:25-30). Merely to touch her or have her touch you would leave you unclean. Yet she had such great faith that it was worth risking social ridicule and punishment just to touch the edge of Jesus’ garment. Perhaps it was a result of a common messianic belief among some Jews of Jesus’ day that the Messiah would have healing powers in the corners of his garment but that is just a bit of speculation. (This belief came from Malachi 4 which spoke of the Messiah rising with healing in his wings. The word “kanaf” or wings could also mean the “edge” of a garment and so many Jews believed that when the Messiah came one could be healed by simply touching his cloak.)
As she touched Jesus, she was healed physically through the power of the Spirit in Jesus and he knew immediately that someone had touched him in faith. It seemed ridiculous to inquire about who touched him with a pressing throng all around him but Jesus had a very intentional purpose. She had faith but wanted to remain unnoticed and in the background. This woman was unclean and isolated in society but Jesus knew that her quiet faith needed to be seen by others. Jairus needed to see it above all. This woman was surely afraid at being rebuked for touching Jesus and making him unclean but her desperate faith overcame over her fear. With Jesus asking who touched him, she had one more mountain of fear to climb. Her flickering faith needed to be fanned into a full blaze. Her faith in Jesus overcame her fear one more time and she stepped forward with every eye on her. As she did so, Jesus declared her fully healed for all to hear. She had been made whole by not only being healed physically but also by the fact that she could now be accepted back into her community as clean and healed. Now Jesus had completely restored her.
Surely, though, as this was happening, Jairus’ head was spinning and he must have been torn. This was all wonderful and touching but time was running out on his daughter. Then came the crushing news that it was too late, his daughter had died. It was even suggested that he could now leave Jesus alone and not bother him anymore. We can only imagine what he felt, but surely any seedling of faith that he might have had was flooded with a tsunami of fear that washed over him at that moment. He feared the worst and now it had apparently happened.
But at his worst moment, Jesus drew him immediately to what he had just seen. He was important in this community and the woman who had just delayed them getting to his daughter was nobody. She was unclean and marginalized, yet she had demonstrated an incredible amount of faith. She would have had every reason to give in to her fear and not reach out to Jesus, let alone to come forward after she was called out in public by Jesus, but she did it. She had exercised her faith over her fear and that is precisely what Jairus would need to do right now. This insignificant woman had shown him how. He needed more faith than fear. He needed to realize, as the old saying goes, “courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to overcome it.” He would overcome it with faith, the kind of faith he had just seen in that brave woman. This stop wasn’t an inconvenient delay but a necessary lesson. Now it was his turn to take the leap.
As Jesus arrived, the one thing that everyone there knew was that people do not come back from the dead. These people had no fear, but they had no faith either, so they wouldn’t be going in to see what was going to happen. Only those who had faith and needed it increased would accompany Jesus. Just as Jesus had calmed the storm at his word and it had obeyed, and just as the demons had obeyed Jesus at his word, so did death obey him at his word. There was no incantations or flashy ceremonies. It was simply a matter of his authoritative word being obeyed. As in many other previous instances, though, Jesus ordered them to keep quiet about what had happened, although surely word about a girl that was dead and was now alive was bound to leak out. Jesus, it seems, wanted the focus to be not on his miracles but on his teaching and the proclamation of the kingdom of God, a message which Jesus was about to make fully public (Lk. 9:2).
Devotional Thought
Can you identify with Jairus and the fear that he must have been feeling? When you are faced with fear what is your response? Do you return to Jesus and his word to increase your faith? What biblical examples (or even modern-day examples of faith) do you turn to for inspiration and encouragement when your faith is drowning in fear?
40 Now when Jesus returned, a crowd welcomed him, for they were all expecting him. 41 Then a man named Jairus, a synagogue leader, came and fell at Jesus' feet, pleading with him to come to his house 42 because his only daughter, a girl of about twelve, was dying.
As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, [d] but no one could heal her. 44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.
45 "Who touched me?" Jesus asked.
When they all denied it, Peter said, "Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you."
46 But Jesus said, "Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me."
47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, "Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace."
49 While Jesus was still speaking, someone came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. "Your daughter is dead," he said. "Don't bother the teacher anymore."
50 Hearing this, Jesus said to Jairus, "Don't be afraid; just believe, and she will be healed."
51 When he arrived at the house of Jairus, he did not let anyone go in with him except Peter, John and James, and the child's father and mother. 52 Meanwhile, all the people were wailing and mourning for her. "Stop wailing," Jesus said. "She is not dead but asleep."
53 They laughed at him, knowing that she was dead. 54 But he took her by the hand and said, "My child, get up!" 55 Her spirit returned, and at once she stood up. Then Jesus told them to give her something to eat. 56 Her parents were astonished, but he ordered them not to tell anyone what had happened.
Dig Deeper
I had seen high diving before on television many times but I had never before seen a real 10 meter platform before in person until the day I walked into the Schroeder YMCA. Even standing from the pool deck and looking up at the platform, it didn’t seem that bad. It seemed very high, don’t get me wrong, but it certainly seemed like it wouldn’t be that big of a deal to jump off of it. So, I climbed up rung after run and passed by several lower platforms of this diving structure and finally arrived at the top level, the ten meter platform. I was the director of the teen camp for the summer at the YMCA and we were having a day at the indoor pool. Normally they didn’t allow people to dive off the platform but they had given only the teen camp special permission to jump off. As I made it to the end of the platform and looked down, I realized that it seemed a whole lot higher from up there than it had seemed from down on the deck. As I peered down, I began to reconsider the thought of actually jumping down. I could think of a whole litany of excuses but when it came down to it, it was fear that stopped me. Just then I looked behind me and climbing up onto the platform was a small seventh grade boy that was a great kid, but was considered a bit of a “nerd” by the other kids. He asked if he could jump and I said “sure, go ahead,” but I was sure that he would get scared and back down once he saw how high it was. Much to my dismay, he didn’t hesitate for a moment. He took a deep breath and ran to the edge and leaped off. I watched him hit the water, disappear for a few moments and then bob up to the surface and swim off. I knew right then, that this little guy had taught me a lesson in courage. I needed to simply take a deep breath, run to the edge, and jump off. He had shown me what I needed in that moment.
It’s amazing how often we are stopped from doing things because of fear. Fear, it seems, can often be the biggest obstacle to our faith in God. Fear of the unknown, fear of what might happen, fear of what others might think, fear of being wrong. Fear can come in many forms but it almost always stands as an obstacle to fully loving God by truly trusting in him. Yet, just as amazing as all that can be, it is equally amazing at how many times we can be inspired to overcome fear from the unlikeliest of sources. We are inspired to jump because a young teen did it. We are inspired to trust God with our finances because we see someone with far less than us doing it. We are inspired to share our faith in public because we hear of someone who is painfully shy has trusted in God and boldly proclaimed the word of God and brought someone into Christ. Or, maybe the inspiration to overcome fear could come from a woman who was ceremonially unclean and who had every reason to say on the outskirts of her society in fear, yet who had so much faith that she overcame her crushing fear. Maybe that one has never happened to you, but it happened for Jairus.
Jairus was, by almost every measurable standard, an important man in the daily life of his community. He was the man who oversaw all aspects of worship at the synagogue which was, in many respects, the center of any given local Jewish community at the time of Jesus. He was the one that would see to it that the laws of Moses and the proper worship of God were upheld. He would have been greatly respected by all of those in the community. He certainly would not have been the type of man that people would have expected to humble himself before Jesus. In fact, doing so to such a controversial figure could significantly lower his esteem in the community.
Yet, none of that seemed to matter much when his twelve year-old daughter lay in her bed, on the verge of dying. When you are afraid for your child almost all decorum seems to go out of the window. Things that you wouldn’t have considered doing before now seem to be rather reasonable. The only thing you can think of is getting them well again and most parents are willing to grasp at any straws in order for that to happen. For Jairus to go to Jesus to heal his daughter may have seemed like grasping at one of those straws, but the only thing that mattered now was saving his daughter. He was willing to throw himself at Jesus’ feet and humble himself if Jesus would only have mercy on his daughter.
Jesus immediately agreed, although Luke doesn’t tell us exactly what Jesus said, and they were on their way. Jairus had certainly shown a measure of faith in Jesus but little did he know that he still had one more lesson to lean before this was all said and done.
Put yourself in Jairus’ shoes and imagine his hopeful expectation as they made their way to his daughter. Would they get there in time? Would Jesus really be able to heal her? Was risking his reputation as synagogue leader by going to Jesus going to be worth it? He must have been filled with fearful hope. Continue to imagine, though, as they are stopped on their way by this woman who had been suffering from a bleeding problem for twelve years, the same amount of time his daughter had been alive. What would you feel at this moment? Would you be angry with her? Would you be frustrated with Jesus? Would the fear start to overtake the hope? Did this have to happen now? Couldn’t it wait? Why would Jesus stop at this moment when time was so much of the essence?
It must have taken great courage for this woman to even make her way into this crowd. She had been suffering from some unnamed problem for twelve years. She was not physically contagious but she was certainly ceremonially contagious (Lev. 15:25-30). Merely to touch her or have her touch you would leave you unclean. Yet she had such great faith that it was worth risking social ridicule and punishment just to touch the edge of Jesus’ garment. Perhaps it was a result of a common messianic belief among some Jews of Jesus’ day that the Messiah would have healing powers in the corners of his garment but that is just a bit of speculation. (This belief came from Malachi 4 which spoke of the Messiah rising with healing in his wings. The word “kanaf” or wings could also mean the “edge” of a garment and so many Jews believed that when the Messiah came one could be healed by simply touching his cloak.)
As she touched Jesus, she was healed physically through the power of the Spirit in Jesus and he knew immediately that someone had touched him in faith. It seemed ridiculous to inquire about who touched him with a pressing throng all around him but Jesus had a very intentional purpose. She had faith but wanted to remain unnoticed and in the background. This woman was unclean and isolated in society but Jesus knew that her quiet faith needed to be seen by others. Jairus needed to see it above all. This woman was surely afraid at being rebuked for touching Jesus and making him unclean but her desperate faith overcame over her fear. With Jesus asking who touched him, she had one more mountain of fear to climb. Her flickering faith needed to be fanned into a full blaze. Her faith in Jesus overcame her fear one more time and she stepped forward with every eye on her. As she did so, Jesus declared her fully healed for all to hear. She had been made whole by not only being healed physically but also by the fact that she could now be accepted back into her community as clean and healed. Now Jesus had completely restored her.
Surely, though, as this was happening, Jairus’ head was spinning and he must have been torn. This was all wonderful and touching but time was running out on his daughter. Then came the crushing news that it was too late, his daughter had died. It was even suggested that he could now leave Jesus alone and not bother him anymore. We can only imagine what he felt, but surely any seedling of faith that he might have had was flooded with a tsunami of fear that washed over him at that moment. He feared the worst and now it had apparently happened.
But at his worst moment, Jesus drew him immediately to what he had just seen. He was important in this community and the woman who had just delayed them getting to his daughter was nobody. She was unclean and marginalized, yet she had demonstrated an incredible amount of faith. She would have had every reason to give in to her fear and not reach out to Jesus, let alone to come forward after she was called out in public by Jesus, but she did it. She had exercised her faith over her fear and that is precisely what Jairus would need to do right now. This insignificant woman had shown him how. He needed more faith than fear. He needed to realize, as the old saying goes, “courage is not the absence of fear but the ability to overcome it.” He would overcome it with faith, the kind of faith he had just seen in that brave woman. This stop wasn’t an inconvenient delay but a necessary lesson. Now it was his turn to take the leap.
As Jesus arrived, the one thing that everyone there knew was that people do not come back from the dead. These people had no fear, but they had no faith either, so they wouldn’t be going in to see what was going to happen. Only those who had faith and needed it increased would accompany Jesus. Just as Jesus had calmed the storm at his word and it had obeyed, and just as the demons had obeyed Jesus at his word, so did death obey him at his word. There was no incantations or flashy ceremonies. It was simply a matter of his authoritative word being obeyed. As in many other previous instances, though, Jesus ordered them to keep quiet about what had happened, although surely word about a girl that was dead and was now alive was bound to leak out. Jesus, it seems, wanted the focus to be not on his miracles but on his teaching and the proclamation of the kingdom of God, a message which Jesus was about to make fully public (Lk. 9:2).
Devotional Thought
Can you identify with Jairus and the fear that he must have been feeling? When you are faced with fear what is your response? Do you return to Jesus and his word to increase your faith? What biblical examples (or even modern-day examples of faith) do you turn to for inspiration and encouragement when your faith is drowning in fear?
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Luke 8:26-39 Commentary
Jesus Restores a Demon-Possessed Man
26 They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes, [b] which is across the lake from Galilee. 27 When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me!" 29 For Jesus had commanded the evil [c] spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.
30 Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"
"Legion," he replied, because many demons had gone into him. 31 And they begged Jesus repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.
32 A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. 33 When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
34 When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, 35 and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 36 Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. 37 Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.
38 The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 "Return home and tell how much God has done for you." So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.
Dig Deeper
I don’t think you’ll ever meet a human being in your entire life that is more concerned with “fairness” than a six year-old. They are consumed with justice. If someone else got three cookies, you had better not give them two. If someone else got to play a video game for twenty minutes then they feel it is their God-given right to have an equal amount of time. If an older sibling gets to go to bed at a certain time, it is a constant struggle to get them to accept that they should have an earlier bed time. It seems nearly everything in their little lives comes down to a matter of justice and fair treatment. They just cannot seem to easily grasp the fact that “fairness” does not mean that everyone does everything in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. There are often times purposes for the difference in treatment that they may not see or understand but are perfectly legitimate and still quite fair. But it’s hard for them to see that.
This is one of those biblical accounts that can be confusing and distracting as Jesus confronts another case of demon possession. Yet, we have to be careful to not get caught up in the many questions we might have and in the fascination that so many people have with the demonic and focus on the important things that Luke wants us to see here. There are probably two important things that Luke wants his readers to see. The first has to do with the destructive power of evil. The second thing has to do, in some sense, with varying missions that Jesus calls people to. Jesus has a different mission for each person when it comes to following him, but those differing calls are fair for everyone. Some will be called to follow Jesus in one way, some will be called to follow him in other ways. The point is that whatever the call, we need to be ready to follow Jesus in whatever he calls us to do even if it is in a different way than someone else is called to follow him.
Luke tells us that Jesus and the disciples sailed to the region of the Gerasenes which has caused a bit of confusion. There was a town in Jesus’ day called Gerasa but that town was about 30 miles from Lake Gennesaret (Sea of Galilee) which is featured in this story. That means it would have been quite a marathon for the pigs that were sent into the lake. It seems that because of this difficulty, some scribes must have thought it a copying mistake and fixed it by changing the text to read either Gadara (which is only a few miles away) or Gergesa (which is right on the banks of Lake Gennesaret). But none of that was necessary when we read the text carefully because Luke did not say that Jesus was in the town of Gerasa but was in the wilderness in the region of Gerasa. The “region” of Gerasa, in Luke’s day, could easily have stretched as far away as the lake 30 miles away.
The important detail, though, is that Jesus has entered a region that had some Jews living there but was primarily a Gentile area. The fact that this was a Gentile region is further evidenced by the herd of swine. Jews saw pigs as an unclean animal according to the law of Moses and neither ate, handled, or kept the porky perpetrators in their midst.
Jesus had just shown his authority and power as he calmly faced a violent storm out on Lake Gennesaret and now he was about to face a demonic storm that was just as potentially dangerous. Almost immediately Jesus was met by a demon-possessed man that was living like an animal among the tombs of the death. In the Jewish mind (although it is unlikely that he was Jewish) this would have made him unclean on almost every level possible as even stepping on a tomb made one unclean (between demons, tombs, and pigs, you would have a difficult time inventing a more unclean scene for a Jew than this one). Again Luke does not feel it necessary to give any of the juicy details concerning demon possession that we might want but that is not his concern here. The demons seem to recognize the identity and authority of Jesus immediately just as the other demons that Jesus has encountered in Luke’s Gospel. The demonic force had tortured this young man, causing him to be violent to himself and to completely destroy any semblance of human dignity and behavior but still has the temerity to ask Jesus for the mercy of not being tortured itself.
As the demonic force had recognized Jesus and declared his identity, Jesus orders the identity of the demonic to be revealed. The response is not so much a name as a description. At the question of his name, the demonic force replies through the young man that it is “Legion” because they were many. A Roman legion could consists of as many as 5,600 soldiers but there is no telling how many demons were in this young man. They knew the authority of Jesus though, and again ask for the mercy of not being sent into the Abyss. The Abyss is apparently the place of destruction for demons (This contrasts the fate of Satan and his angels who, according to Matthew 25:41, will find their fate to be the eternal fire of Gehenna. Many people today think that the fallen angels and demons are one in the same but the early church was quite adamant that they were not the same). We should not lose sight in all of this, though, that Jesus has faced the storm of not just one demon, but an army of demons and has calmed them with the same authority with which he quelled the storm.
Many are confused about why the demons would ask to be sent into a herd of pigs and why Jesus would possibly grant such a request. There are further questions as to why the herd would immediately rush down the bank and into the water, and even more questions about what happened to the demons when the pigs drown. But as Luke does not answer these questions, we won’t attempt to speculate, as fun as that might be to do. In all likelihood, Jesus was making a point. The demons had asked to not be sent into the Abyss and Jesus granted that request but only so that he could demonstrate several things. Pigs were the classic symbol of unclean animals and unclean animals were an Old Testament symbol of sin. So Jesus sent the ultimate in evil forces into the ultimate symbol of sin. He then showed his authority over both as the herd of pigs immediately ran into the Sea of Galilee (Lake Gennesaret) and died. The sea was common Old Testament imagery. Going back to the dark abyss of pre-creation and the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, the sea became a symbol for evil and destruction. It was the place where evil came from or would be sent to be destroyed. (Isa. 17:12; Isa. 23:4, 11; Isa. 27:1; 42;10; 57:20; Jer. 6:23; 50:42; 51:42; Ezek. 26:3; 27:32-34; Dan. 7, etc.; See also Rev. where the Beast comes from the sea and things like the great millstone are cast into the sea to be destroyed.) Jesus has once again shown his authority; this time he has demonstrated his authority over evil and sin and the ability to completely destroy it. He may also have foreshadowed the ultimate destruction in the Abyss that the demons would face one day.
At its core, this is a scene of resurrection and new life for this young man. He had been completely dehumanized by the demonic and was truly among the dead, cut off from society in every way and separated from God. He is, in many respects, a picture of our own selves dead in sin and separated from God. But after encountering Jesus, we see him as the perfect picture of restoration. He was wild, naked, dangerous, and full of evil but after Jesus freed him he is clothed, docile, respectful and sitting at the feet of Jesus in the standard position of a learner and a disciple. He has been brought from sin and death among the tombs and been restored to life once again. This is what Jesus wants to do for everyone who will recognize his true identity (as ironically only the demons did in this incident). It doesn’t matter how sinful or evil someone might be, Jesus has the authority and power to release them. The other option is to remain in the power of evil and sin and to go the way of the pigs, a short run to destruction and death.
But now that this man has been freed, he wants to do what so many others had been called to do; he wanted to follow Jesus as his disciple and go with him. Many would be called to such a vocation but not this man. This was not his calling. But it’s not a matter of Jesus being unfair or punishing him. It was just not his role to be one of Jesus’ immediate followers. He would be given a different sort of way to follow Jesus. He would stay and go back home to tell people how much God had done for him through the work of Jesus (no doubt Luke intended for his readers to see that whatever Jesus was doing, God himself was doing).
This was no easy task. The immediate response of the people was to be so fearful of the display of Jesus’ power and so closed to such a power that they didn’t want Jesus to stay among them. To add to that, it would have been a major challenge for this man to be accepted back into his society as a normal person that could be trusted. But that is likely the very reasons that he has been sent back by Jesus. If he left to follow Jesus, he would become little more than a legend, but in stayin,g the folks of his community would be awed and challenged each time they saw him and heard him speak of the incredible act of emancipation that God had brought into his life. His experience is not only a foreshadowing of the mission to proclaim the gospel to the Gentile people around the world but is also a stark reminder for us to not follow Jesus by closing ourselves off in church events all day, everyday. We must go back “home” and tell everyone about the freeing power of Jesus Christ in our life. We must be witnesses and tell people what Jesus has done for us.
Devotional Thought
There seemed to be no hint from this young man of feeling slighted or treated unfairly by Jesus because he told him to go back home. We can certainly feel that way at times, though, when God calls us somewhere or to do something and we’d rather do something else. Is there anything that God has called you to do that you feel is unfair or that you’d rather not do? What can you learn from this demon-possessed man for your situation?
26 They sailed to the region of the Gerasenes, [b] which is across the lake from Galilee. 27 When Jesus stepped ashore, he was met by a demon-possessed man from the town. For a long time this man had not worn clothes or lived in a house, but had lived in the tombs. 28 When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell at his feet, shouting at the top of his voice, "What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, don't torture me!" 29 For Jesus had commanded the evil [c] spirit to come out of the man. Many times it had seized him, and though he was chained hand and foot and kept under guard, he had broken his chains and had been driven by the demon into solitary places.
30 Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"
"Legion," he replied, because many demons had gone into him. 31 And they begged Jesus repeatedly not to order them to go into the Abyss.
32 A large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside. The demons begged Jesus to let them go into the pigs, and he gave them permission. 33 When the demons came out of the man, they went into the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned.
34 When those tending the pigs saw what had happened, they ran off and reported this in the town and countryside, 35 and the people went out to see what had happened. When they came to Jesus, they found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting at Jesus' feet, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. 36 Those who had seen it told the people how the demon-possessed man had been cured. 37 Then all the people of the region of the Gerasenes asked Jesus to leave them, because they were overcome with fear. So he got into the boat and left.
38 The man from whom the demons had gone out begged to go with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39 "Return home and tell how much God has done for you." So the man went away and told all over town how much Jesus had done for him.
Dig Deeper
I don’t think you’ll ever meet a human being in your entire life that is more concerned with “fairness” than a six year-old. They are consumed with justice. If someone else got three cookies, you had better not give them two. If someone else got to play a video game for twenty minutes then they feel it is their God-given right to have an equal amount of time. If an older sibling gets to go to bed at a certain time, it is a constant struggle to get them to accept that they should have an earlier bed time. It seems nearly everything in their little lives comes down to a matter of justice and fair treatment. They just cannot seem to easily grasp the fact that “fairness” does not mean that everyone does everything in exactly the same way at exactly the same time. There are often times purposes for the difference in treatment that they may not see or understand but are perfectly legitimate and still quite fair. But it’s hard for them to see that.
This is one of those biblical accounts that can be confusing and distracting as Jesus confronts another case of demon possession. Yet, we have to be careful to not get caught up in the many questions we might have and in the fascination that so many people have with the demonic and focus on the important things that Luke wants us to see here. There are probably two important things that Luke wants his readers to see. The first has to do with the destructive power of evil. The second thing has to do, in some sense, with varying missions that Jesus calls people to. Jesus has a different mission for each person when it comes to following him, but those differing calls are fair for everyone. Some will be called to follow Jesus in one way, some will be called to follow him in other ways. The point is that whatever the call, we need to be ready to follow Jesus in whatever he calls us to do even if it is in a different way than someone else is called to follow him.
Luke tells us that Jesus and the disciples sailed to the region of the Gerasenes which has caused a bit of confusion. There was a town in Jesus’ day called Gerasa but that town was about 30 miles from Lake Gennesaret (Sea of Galilee) which is featured in this story. That means it would have been quite a marathon for the pigs that were sent into the lake. It seems that because of this difficulty, some scribes must have thought it a copying mistake and fixed it by changing the text to read either Gadara (which is only a few miles away) or Gergesa (which is right on the banks of Lake Gennesaret). But none of that was necessary when we read the text carefully because Luke did not say that Jesus was in the town of Gerasa but was in the wilderness in the region of Gerasa. The “region” of Gerasa, in Luke’s day, could easily have stretched as far away as the lake 30 miles away.
The important detail, though, is that Jesus has entered a region that had some Jews living there but was primarily a Gentile area. The fact that this was a Gentile region is further evidenced by the herd of swine. Jews saw pigs as an unclean animal according to the law of Moses and neither ate, handled, or kept the porky perpetrators in their midst.
Jesus had just shown his authority and power as he calmly faced a violent storm out on Lake Gennesaret and now he was about to face a demonic storm that was just as potentially dangerous. Almost immediately Jesus was met by a demon-possessed man that was living like an animal among the tombs of the death. In the Jewish mind (although it is unlikely that he was Jewish) this would have made him unclean on almost every level possible as even stepping on a tomb made one unclean (between demons, tombs, and pigs, you would have a difficult time inventing a more unclean scene for a Jew than this one). Again Luke does not feel it necessary to give any of the juicy details concerning demon possession that we might want but that is not his concern here. The demons seem to recognize the identity and authority of Jesus immediately just as the other demons that Jesus has encountered in Luke’s Gospel. The demonic force had tortured this young man, causing him to be violent to himself and to completely destroy any semblance of human dignity and behavior but still has the temerity to ask Jesus for the mercy of not being tortured itself.
As the demonic force had recognized Jesus and declared his identity, Jesus orders the identity of the demonic to be revealed. The response is not so much a name as a description. At the question of his name, the demonic force replies through the young man that it is “Legion” because they were many. A Roman legion could consists of as many as 5,600 soldiers but there is no telling how many demons were in this young man. They knew the authority of Jesus though, and again ask for the mercy of not being sent into the Abyss. The Abyss is apparently the place of destruction for demons (This contrasts the fate of Satan and his angels who, according to Matthew 25:41, will find their fate to be the eternal fire of Gehenna. Many people today think that the fallen angels and demons are one in the same but the early church was quite adamant that they were not the same). We should not lose sight in all of this, though, that Jesus has faced the storm of not just one demon, but an army of demons and has calmed them with the same authority with which he quelled the storm.
Many are confused about why the demons would ask to be sent into a herd of pigs and why Jesus would possibly grant such a request. There are further questions as to why the herd would immediately rush down the bank and into the water, and even more questions about what happened to the demons when the pigs drown. But as Luke does not answer these questions, we won’t attempt to speculate, as fun as that might be to do. In all likelihood, Jesus was making a point. The demons had asked to not be sent into the Abyss and Jesus granted that request but only so that he could demonstrate several things. Pigs were the classic symbol of unclean animals and unclean animals were an Old Testament symbol of sin. So Jesus sent the ultimate in evil forces into the ultimate symbol of sin. He then showed his authority over both as the herd of pigs immediately ran into the Sea of Galilee (Lake Gennesaret) and died. The sea was common Old Testament imagery. Going back to the dark abyss of pre-creation and the Egyptians drowning in the Red Sea, the sea became a symbol for evil and destruction. It was the place where evil came from or would be sent to be destroyed. (Isa. 17:12; Isa. 23:4, 11; Isa. 27:1; 42;10; 57:20; Jer. 6:23; 50:42; 51:42; Ezek. 26:3; 27:32-34; Dan. 7, etc.; See also Rev. where the Beast comes from the sea and things like the great millstone are cast into the sea to be destroyed.) Jesus has once again shown his authority; this time he has demonstrated his authority over evil and sin and the ability to completely destroy it. He may also have foreshadowed the ultimate destruction in the Abyss that the demons would face one day.
At its core, this is a scene of resurrection and new life for this young man. He had been completely dehumanized by the demonic and was truly among the dead, cut off from society in every way and separated from God. He is, in many respects, a picture of our own selves dead in sin and separated from God. But after encountering Jesus, we see him as the perfect picture of restoration. He was wild, naked, dangerous, and full of evil but after Jesus freed him he is clothed, docile, respectful and sitting at the feet of Jesus in the standard position of a learner and a disciple. He has been brought from sin and death among the tombs and been restored to life once again. This is what Jesus wants to do for everyone who will recognize his true identity (as ironically only the demons did in this incident). It doesn’t matter how sinful or evil someone might be, Jesus has the authority and power to release them. The other option is to remain in the power of evil and sin and to go the way of the pigs, a short run to destruction and death.
But now that this man has been freed, he wants to do what so many others had been called to do; he wanted to follow Jesus as his disciple and go with him. Many would be called to such a vocation but not this man. This was not his calling. But it’s not a matter of Jesus being unfair or punishing him. It was just not his role to be one of Jesus’ immediate followers. He would be given a different sort of way to follow Jesus. He would stay and go back home to tell people how much God had done for him through the work of Jesus (no doubt Luke intended for his readers to see that whatever Jesus was doing, God himself was doing).
This was no easy task. The immediate response of the people was to be so fearful of the display of Jesus’ power and so closed to such a power that they didn’t want Jesus to stay among them. To add to that, it would have been a major challenge for this man to be accepted back into his society as a normal person that could be trusted. But that is likely the very reasons that he has been sent back by Jesus. If he left to follow Jesus, he would become little more than a legend, but in stayin,g the folks of his community would be awed and challenged each time they saw him and heard him speak of the incredible act of emancipation that God had brought into his life. His experience is not only a foreshadowing of the mission to proclaim the gospel to the Gentile people around the world but is also a stark reminder for us to not follow Jesus by closing ourselves off in church events all day, everyday. We must go back “home” and tell everyone about the freeing power of Jesus Christ in our life. We must be witnesses and tell people what Jesus has done for us.
Devotional Thought
There seemed to be no hint from this young man of feeling slighted or treated unfairly by Jesus because he told him to go back home. We can certainly feel that way at times, though, when God calls us somewhere or to do something and we’d rather do something else. Is there anything that God has called you to do that you feel is unfair or that you’d rather not do? What can you learn from this demon-possessed man for your situation?
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Luke 8:22-25 Commentary
Jesus Calms the Storm
22 One day Jesus said to his disciples, "Let us go over to the other side of the lake." So they got into a boat and set out. 23 As they sailed, he fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger.
24 The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Master, Master, we're going to drown!"
He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. 25 "Where is your faith?" he asked his disciples.
In fear and amazement they asked one another, "Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him."
Dig Deeper
One of the most well loved fairy tales of all time is that of Cinderella. I have heard and seen so many different versions of that classic tale that I don’t even know if I’ve read or heard the actual original story itself. I’ve see that tale told in movies, reworked for television shows, parodied in a rap song called “Cinderfella,” and even mimicked in a book by Disney characters, which was one of my favorites growing up. In all of the different versions, though, there are a couple of central tenets that all of them have in common. Cinderella has evil step sisters and a wicked step mother who are all very mean to her. The step mother decides that her two unattractive daughters will go to the ball where the Prince is looking for a bride. Cinderella is told that she will not be going to the ball but will help her sisters get ready. Just then a fairy godmother pops up and makes it possible, through some magic, for Cinderella to go to the ball.
When she goes she makes an instant connection with the Prince and dances with him but she has to dash out in the middle of their romantic and magical dance together because the fairy godmother told Cinderella that her beautiful dress and everything else that the fairy had transformed would turn back to their original states at midnight. As she leaves, she drops one of her beautiful glass slippers on the steps. The Prince was so enamored with her that he called every woman in his kingdom back to the palace the next day to try on the glass slipper. Every single girl wanted to marry the Prince and tried to pretend that they were the mysterious women from the night before but when it came to putting on the slipper, they were all proven frauds. The Prince finally sees Cinderella and has her put on the slipper and she, of course, fits right into the slipper and shows that she, not all the pretenders, was the real woman of his dreams.
The previous verses in chapter 8 had much to do with recognizing Jesus’ authority and responding properly to his word. But the question that continues to hang over all of Luke’s narratives is who exactly is Jesus. That’s certainly something that not even his own disciples quite grasped at this point. But the ability to demonstrate authority even over the natural elements of the wind and waves is a vital clue that Luke has given us as to Jesus’ identity. As we will discuss in a moment, there were many pretenders who claimed to have the power and authority to control the sea and the natural elements but only one that could truly do it. In controlling the most uncontrollable events of nature itself, Jesus, like Cinderella was showing that he was the real deal. He was the only person who could fit into the slipper.
Luke doesn’t tell us what size the boat was that Jesus was on in this incident and so we simply don’t know if just the Twelve were with him or if there were more people than than that. What is clear, though, is that Jesus and at least some of his disciples were traveling across Lake Genesarret (also known as the Sea of Galilee). The Lake is unique in that it sits 600-700 feet below sea level and is surrounded by hills and canyons which makes it susceptible to volatile weather patterns that can open up quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. These storms can be common and get quite severe but this must have been a particularly bad one because even the seasoned fishermen that many of Jesus’ disciples were, became extremely worried by this storm.
Jesus was quite exhausted and must have relished small opportunities like this to catch up on a little sleep, which believe it or not, has become the source of controversy and opened the door to many false teachers who wish to deny the deity of Christ. In Psalm 121:4-5, the Psalmist declares that “he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD watches over you—the LORD is your shade at your right hand.” Many of those who deny that Jesus is God, teachers like popular prosperity gospel mogul Creflo Dollar, use this passage to argue that it says that God cannot sleep and if Jesus is sleeping on the boat then he cannot be God. This is a spurious argument when it comes down to it. The New Testament teaching is clear that Jesus is fully divine in his nature (Phil. 2:6; Col. 2:9) but that he also is fully human (Phil. 2:7). The point that the Psalmist was making was that God never let up in caring for Israel. To tie that poetic point to the human Jesus is ridiculous. Jesus never ceased to be fully divine in his nature but he was fully human so he needed sleep, he needed to eat, and yet he never ceased to be God in his nature. The irony of using this passage to attempt to deny the deity of Jesus Christ is that, in Luke’s mind, this one of the events that clearly demonstrated that he was something far beyond what any of the disciples had grasped during Jesus’ lifetime. He was, in fact, Israel’s God in the flesh.
As he was sleeping, a violent storm came up. This one came on so suddenly and was so severe that it caused even seasoned fishermen to worry that they were going to drown. The disciples were wavering in their faith in Jesus and their full grasp of who he was. They did, however, have enough sense to run to Jesus and wake him up. We should not miss the echoes of the account of Jonah that run through this short little account. Jonah also fell asleep on a boat and was awakened in the midst of a terrible storm by a crew that thought they were going to die. But Jonah had to be thrown into the sea so that YHWH (the personal name of God in the Old Testament Hebrew) himself might quiet the storm. Jesus would do something quite different.
That different action of Jesus is an interesting thread running through this passage that would have been much more apparent to first century readers than it is to us. In the Jewish mind it was YHWH, the God of Israel who had the power to control the sea (Ps. 65:7; 69:2-3, 15-16; 74:13-14; 89:9; 104:4-9; 106:9; 107:23-30). Only of YHWH could it be said that “You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them” (Ps. 89:9). But there were many pretenders to the throne that either claimed themselves to have the power to control the sea or others claimed that power for those they wished to worship. The Roman mythological god, Neptune, was said to be the ruler of the sea, and at least one Roman general, Sextus Pompey, claimed in the first century BC, to be the son of Neptune with the power to control everything in the sea. It became increasingly popular throughout the first century, as Roman emperors were more and more deified, to claim that one of the powers they had was to overcome the sea. The book of 2 Maccabees claims that Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes IV “had thought in his superhuman boastfulness he could command the waves of the sea” (2 Macc. 9:8). They all claimed the power that only YHWH held, but now Jesus had actually shown that he had that power. Here was yet another incident where Jesus had done what only YHWH could do. He had stilled the waves and ruled over the surging sea. The others had tried to fit the slipper and failed but Jesus has slipped it on effortlessly.
The immediate question on the minds of the disciples, then, was “who is he?” Who is it that could do what only YHWH could do? Luke is likely not contending that the disciples were slowly beginning to have suspicions that Jesus was Israel’s God in the flesh. It would take them much more revelation, thought, and reflection come to that conclusion but surely Luke expects their question to echo in the ears of his readers, and he no doubt expected us to begin to realize the full implications of that question.
Luke has been stressing the need to recognize Jesus’ authority and to fully grasp the need to hear and obey Jesus’ message. Now he has made clear that Jesus had the very authority of YHWH himself to still the storm. The underlying thought seems to be that if nature itself, including, the winds and waves, obey Jesus’ authority, who are we to not obey him? How silly would it be to deny the authority of the one who can rebuke nature?
For us, this scene can go beyond just a great reminder of the power that Jesus had during his earthly ministry. We can often identify with the disciples. We can often feel that we are going through a storm in life and that God is asleep and completely unaware of our problems. Jesus asked his disciples where their faith was and the same question should ring in our ears. Is the God who spoke the universe into existence not aware of or not capable of dealing with our trials? Being Jesus’ disciple and confessing Jesus as the Lord of our lives means that he is not just in control of nature but is also in control of our lives. He knows what is going on. He is there just waiting for us to turn to him. He is waiting for us to develop a faith that goes beyond the circumstances that are out of our control. He is waiting for us to see that all of the other pretenders, whether they claim have power over the sea or the power to bring us peace and satisfaction in our lives, are just that, pretenders.
Devotional Thought
What are the winds and waves that are kicking up in your life right now? Are you tempted to feel that God is somewhere sleeping or uninterested in your problems. Where is your faith? Do you believe that Jesus really does have authority to let you go through the trials that you need to go through but also has the power to stand up and calm those waves when you turn to him in faith? When we turn to him in faith he will usually amaze us just as much as the disciples were amazed when he calmed the storm.
22 One day Jesus said to his disciples, "Let us go over to the other side of the lake." So they got into a boat and set out. 23 As they sailed, he fell asleep. A squall came down on the lake, so that the boat was being swamped, and they were in great danger.
24 The disciples went and woke him, saying, "Master, Master, we're going to drown!"
He got up and rebuked the wind and the raging waters; the storm subsided, and all was calm. 25 "Where is your faith?" he asked his disciples.
In fear and amazement they asked one another, "Who is this? He commands even the winds and the water, and they obey him."
Dig Deeper
One of the most well loved fairy tales of all time is that of Cinderella. I have heard and seen so many different versions of that classic tale that I don’t even know if I’ve read or heard the actual original story itself. I’ve see that tale told in movies, reworked for television shows, parodied in a rap song called “Cinderfella,” and even mimicked in a book by Disney characters, which was one of my favorites growing up. In all of the different versions, though, there are a couple of central tenets that all of them have in common. Cinderella has evil step sisters and a wicked step mother who are all very mean to her. The step mother decides that her two unattractive daughters will go to the ball where the Prince is looking for a bride. Cinderella is told that she will not be going to the ball but will help her sisters get ready. Just then a fairy godmother pops up and makes it possible, through some magic, for Cinderella to go to the ball.
When she goes she makes an instant connection with the Prince and dances with him but she has to dash out in the middle of their romantic and magical dance together because the fairy godmother told Cinderella that her beautiful dress and everything else that the fairy had transformed would turn back to their original states at midnight. As she leaves, she drops one of her beautiful glass slippers on the steps. The Prince was so enamored with her that he called every woman in his kingdom back to the palace the next day to try on the glass slipper. Every single girl wanted to marry the Prince and tried to pretend that they were the mysterious women from the night before but when it came to putting on the slipper, they were all proven frauds. The Prince finally sees Cinderella and has her put on the slipper and she, of course, fits right into the slipper and shows that she, not all the pretenders, was the real woman of his dreams.
The previous verses in chapter 8 had much to do with recognizing Jesus’ authority and responding properly to his word. But the question that continues to hang over all of Luke’s narratives is who exactly is Jesus. That’s certainly something that not even his own disciples quite grasped at this point. But the ability to demonstrate authority even over the natural elements of the wind and waves is a vital clue that Luke has given us as to Jesus’ identity. As we will discuss in a moment, there were many pretenders who claimed to have the power and authority to control the sea and the natural elements but only one that could truly do it. In controlling the most uncontrollable events of nature itself, Jesus, like Cinderella was showing that he was the real deal. He was the only person who could fit into the slipper.
Luke doesn’t tell us what size the boat was that Jesus was on in this incident and so we simply don’t know if just the Twelve were with him or if there were more people than than that. What is clear, though, is that Jesus and at least some of his disciples were traveling across Lake Genesarret (also known as the Sea of Galilee). The Lake is unique in that it sits 600-700 feet below sea level and is surrounded by hills and canyons which makes it susceptible to volatile weather patterns that can open up quickly and seemingly out of nowhere. These storms can be common and get quite severe but this must have been a particularly bad one because even the seasoned fishermen that many of Jesus’ disciples were, became extremely worried by this storm.
Jesus was quite exhausted and must have relished small opportunities like this to catch up on a little sleep, which believe it or not, has become the source of controversy and opened the door to many false teachers who wish to deny the deity of Christ. In Psalm 121:4-5, the Psalmist declares that “he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. The LORD watches over you—the LORD is your shade at your right hand.” Many of those who deny that Jesus is God, teachers like popular prosperity gospel mogul Creflo Dollar, use this passage to argue that it says that God cannot sleep and if Jesus is sleeping on the boat then he cannot be God. This is a spurious argument when it comes down to it. The New Testament teaching is clear that Jesus is fully divine in his nature (Phil. 2:6; Col. 2:9) but that he also is fully human (Phil. 2:7). The point that the Psalmist was making was that God never let up in caring for Israel. To tie that poetic point to the human Jesus is ridiculous. Jesus never ceased to be fully divine in his nature but he was fully human so he needed sleep, he needed to eat, and yet he never ceased to be God in his nature. The irony of using this passage to attempt to deny the deity of Jesus Christ is that, in Luke’s mind, this one of the events that clearly demonstrated that he was something far beyond what any of the disciples had grasped during Jesus’ lifetime. He was, in fact, Israel’s God in the flesh.
As he was sleeping, a violent storm came up. This one came on so suddenly and was so severe that it caused even seasoned fishermen to worry that they were going to drown. The disciples were wavering in their faith in Jesus and their full grasp of who he was. They did, however, have enough sense to run to Jesus and wake him up. We should not miss the echoes of the account of Jonah that run through this short little account. Jonah also fell asleep on a boat and was awakened in the midst of a terrible storm by a crew that thought they were going to die. But Jonah had to be thrown into the sea so that YHWH (the personal name of God in the Old Testament Hebrew) himself might quiet the storm. Jesus would do something quite different.
That different action of Jesus is an interesting thread running through this passage that would have been much more apparent to first century readers than it is to us. In the Jewish mind it was YHWH, the God of Israel who had the power to control the sea (Ps. 65:7; 69:2-3, 15-16; 74:13-14; 89:9; 104:4-9; 106:9; 107:23-30). Only of YHWH could it be said that “You rule over the surging sea; when its waves mount up, you still them” (Ps. 89:9). But there were many pretenders to the throne that either claimed themselves to have the power to control the sea or others claimed that power for those they wished to worship. The Roman mythological god, Neptune, was said to be the ruler of the sea, and at least one Roman general, Sextus Pompey, claimed in the first century BC, to be the son of Neptune with the power to control everything in the sea. It became increasingly popular throughout the first century, as Roman emperors were more and more deified, to claim that one of the powers they had was to overcome the sea. The book of 2 Maccabees claims that Seleucid ruler Antiochus Epiphanes IV “had thought in his superhuman boastfulness he could command the waves of the sea” (2 Macc. 9:8). They all claimed the power that only YHWH held, but now Jesus had actually shown that he had that power. Here was yet another incident where Jesus had done what only YHWH could do. He had stilled the waves and ruled over the surging sea. The others had tried to fit the slipper and failed but Jesus has slipped it on effortlessly.
The immediate question on the minds of the disciples, then, was “who is he?” Who is it that could do what only YHWH could do? Luke is likely not contending that the disciples were slowly beginning to have suspicions that Jesus was Israel’s God in the flesh. It would take them much more revelation, thought, and reflection come to that conclusion but surely Luke expects their question to echo in the ears of his readers, and he no doubt expected us to begin to realize the full implications of that question.
Luke has been stressing the need to recognize Jesus’ authority and to fully grasp the need to hear and obey Jesus’ message. Now he has made clear that Jesus had the very authority of YHWH himself to still the storm. The underlying thought seems to be that if nature itself, including, the winds and waves, obey Jesus’ authority, who are we to not obey him? How silly would it be to deny the authority of the one who can rebuke nature?
For us, this scene can go beyond just a great reminder of the power that Jesus had during his earthly ministry. We can often identify with the disciples. We can often feel that we are going through a storm in life and that God is asleep and completely unaware of our problems. Jesus asked his disciples where their faith was and the same question should ring in our ears. Is the God who spoke the universe into existence not aware of or not capable of dealing with our trials? Being Jesus’ disciple and confessing Jesus as the Lord of our lives means that he is not just in control of nature but is also in control of our lives. He knows what is going on. He is there just waiting for us to turn to him. He is waiting for us to develop a faith that goes beyond the circumstances that are out of our control. He is waiting for us to see that all of the other pretenders, whether they claim have power over the sea or the power to bring us peace and satisfaction in our lives, are just that, pretenders.
Devotional Thought
What are the winds and waves that are kicking up in your life right now? Are you tempted to feel that God is somewhere sleeping or uninterested in your problems. Where is your faith? Do you believe that Jesus really does have authority to let you go through the trials that you need to go through but also has the power to stand up and calm those waves when you turn to him in faith? When we turn to him in faith he will usually amaze us just as much as the disciples were amazed when he calmed the storm.
Monday, March 22, 2010
Luke 8:16-21 Commentary
A Lamp on a Stand
16 "No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. 17 For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. 18 Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Those who have will be given more; as for those who do not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them."
Jesus' Mother and Brothers
19 Now Jesus' mother and brothers came to see him, but they were not able to get near him because of the crowd. 20 Someone told him, "Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you."
21 He replied, "My mother and brothers are those who hear God's word and put it into practice."
Dig Deeper
When I was coaching high school basketball I noticed one phenomenon that was quite common to so many of the great young men that I had the chance to work with. They came to the game of basketball with a fundamental flaw in their whole understanding of what the game was about and what the purpose of the game of basketball was. This flaw in their thinking was most often demonstrated by the fact that after games, whether win or lose, many of them would run over to the scorer’s table to see how points or rebounds they had. They did this because they usually came into our team thinking that the only thing that really mattered about basketball was their own success. For them being part of the team and winning games were secondary concerns. It took us a lot of talking and convincing to get them past the point where they would rather lose the game and score 20 points than have other guys score more than them and win. They failed to understand that the whole purpose of the game of basketball is to become part of a team. The desired goal is for five players to work together as one and forget their own individual interests in order to become one entity.
Surprisingly, I have seen a similar foundational flaw in the thinking of most Christians in our world today. We tend to think in terms of ourselves when it comes to our salvation and relationship with God. We think of salvation as an entirely individual endeavor with joining a church being a secondary endeavor. In that mindset then, the really important thing becomes my relationship with God which becomes an entirely separate affair from my connection with the body of believers. The sad part is that the whole point of Christianity is that we are to leave behind our individual mindset and become part of a family. This is the part that much of the evangelical Christian world has missed. The church is not a collection of a bunch of individually saved Christians who have decided to worship and follow Jesus together. The church is the family of God of which we become part when we choose to die to our selves and be born into this new family. Christianity, at its core is a family and it is vital that we learn to understand that so that we have a full understanding of all the good things that we have in Christ.
As a way of expounding the previous section of the importance of receiving the word of God, obeying it, and experiencing the crop that it produces in the lives of his disciples, Luke includes three separate quotes from Jesus. All of these quotes have to do with Jesus’ revelation of the word of God in one way or another. The first example is a humorous picture of someone lighting a lamp and then hiding it so that no one could actually see it. It was always God’s intention that his people would be a light for the world but Israel had turned that light inward and, in effect, put it under a jar. But Jesus’ call for his kingdom people is to be a people that take the word into their lives and allow others to see the effects that it has. Hiding in Christian circles and not shining brightly in the world is a mistake in every aspect of our lives, whether it be that we meet so often together that we never have time to evangelize and build relationships with non-Christians or we begin to create our own Christian community events, and stores, and websites so that we never have to engage with the culture around us. We are to be a light and a light has to be seen.
This may have seemed somewhat at odds with certain elements of Jesus’ ministry which he tried to downplay his identity and he repeatedly told people to keep quiet about who he was or what he had done. That was for a time and a specific purpose but would not be for long. Once Jesus had completed his work, culminating in his death on the cross, it would be time for everything about the kingdom of God to be announced to the whole world.
So, says Jesus, because it was vital to be a light that announced everything about the kingdom of God out in the open, it is important to listen to everything that Jesus taught. His real disciples, said Jesus in John 8:31, are those who hold tightly to his word and obey it. Those who constantly dig into the word of God, accept it, and then obey it will find that it consistently produces a crop in their life. As God promised through the prophet Isaiah, his word will never come back empty (Isa. 55:10-11). Those who take in the word and keep it will find that it is constantly productive while those who do not will find that even the little bit they had will be taken by Satan.
As Jesus’ mothers and brothers came to see him, Jesus does something extremely shocking to make his point about the importance of hearing and obeying the word of God. The cultural expectation would have been for Jesus to immediately go out and show respect to his mother and brothers but Jesus took the opportunity to teach one of the most central aspects of the kingdom of God. It was not a religion. It was not just a new set of ethical teachings. At its heart, the kingdom of God was a family.
God’s covenantal promise to Abraham was that he would make Abraham the father of a family that would consist of many nations and that through this family, the whole world would be blessed. The first step in the fulfillment of that promise was God’s firstborn son, Israel (Ex. 4:22). Paul makes the point in Romans 9 that the promise of being that covenant family always followed along the lines of God’s choice. Not every descendant of Abraham was part of that promised family (Rom. 9:7). Paul goes on in Romans 9 to argue that just as the promise of the covenant family passed to Abraham’s son Isaac but not his son Ishmael, and just as the promise passed to Jacob but not his brother Esau, so now, the covenant family would pass to Jesus and not his kinsmen, Israel.
Because of the promise of the covenant family being the ones through whom the whole world would be blessed, Abraham’s physical descendants, Israel, held the concept of family to be one of the most important core components of their value system and their whole culture. So for Jesus to not show the proper respect to his biological family was absolutely scandalous. But Jesus was quite intentional about this. Throughout his ministry he made clear the fact that he was redefining the true concept of family, especially as it related to being the people of God. Jesus’ family, the family of God, was not about being a physical descendant of Abraham or part of the nation of Israel but would consist of those who heard “God’s word and put it into practice.” Jesus would make it clear that the way that this would happen would include dying to self and being born into God’s new family (Jn. 3:5) through baptism into his own life (Rom. 6:1-14). Those who entered into Christ would become part of the family of promise, God’s family. Paul stated this all concisely in Galatians 3:26-29: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
Jesus wanted his followers to know that to truly live the life of a disciple and find themselves as part of God’s family of promise, it would be necessary to redefine their family (this does not mean that they would not care for or love their biological families but was a matter of identity and priority). In Mark 10:28-30, Jesus told his disciples, who had given up everything for him, that they would receive, in return, families and homes a hundred times over, both in the present age and the age to come. His point was that when his followers mentally (and often physically) left their families as their source of identity and means of honoring God, they would receive a new family that would be a hundred times (metaphorically speaking) larger than their biological families. They would be in a new family.
Jesus sent another clear signal of this on the day of his death when he asked John to consider Mary as his mother and care for her. Mary had other sons that could have done this, but Jesus wanted to send a clear message to his followers that the Kingdom of God involved new boundaries and new definitions of what it meant to be in God’s family. This act would continue, throughout Mary’s life, to send a strong message to Christians, as early church tradition tells us that Mary did go with John, and eventually died in Ephesus many years later.
An important question, though, is whether or not the early church actually understood that they were to be the new family, the sons of God (Rom. 8;15; Gal. 4:6). We know from Acts 2:42-47, that the first Christians certainly began to act like a family. An often-missed detail from the first Jewish Christians, though, is that as part of their early practice they sold off land (Acts 4:34, 5:1). It would have been quite disturbing for traditional Jews to see an entire group like the followers of Christ selling off their lands. This would have been deeply concerning to Jews who saw their land as an inheritance from God (Psalm 135:12). Why would the early church have been so eager to sell their land? Certainly they wanted to be able to care for one another and give to those in need, but there is more to it than that. The land was a sign of their family inheritance and their status as the people of God. Selling that land was a strong statement to the rest of the Jewish world that they had rejected that standard of being God’s family and His people, and would, instead, embrace the new family of believers that Jesus created around himself.
We should not reduce all of this to mere theological chatter though. Being God’s family means something. It means that we need to start realizing that salvation is not merely an individual endeavor. True, we have to come to Christ on our own faith but when we enter into Christ we are baptized into his family, his body (1 Cor. 12:13). It is part of our identity as God’s sons and daughters in Christ to be those people who take the words of God and put them into practice. It is up to us to stop thinking as individuals and to realize that we have joined the family of promise. It is our call to begin to think and make decisions in light of that reality. Through Jesus, God fulfilled his ancient promises to Abraham to create a family of all nations and we have been given the grace and mercy of God to be part of that family. It is now up to us to work out in our churches what it truly means to be part of one family.
Devotional Thought
Do you view your brothers and sisters as Christ as your true, primary family? Do you see your Christian walk as being part of God’s family or have you been stuck in the mindset of seeing your Christianity as an individual thing? How does seeing the body of Christ as your true family change the way you think about it and the way you behave in it?
16 "No one lights a lamp and hides it in a clay jar or puts it under a bed. Instead, they put it on a stand, so that those who come in can see the light. 17 For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. 18 Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Those who have will be given more; as for those who do not have, even what they think they have will be taken from them."
Jesus' Mother and Brothers
19 Now Jesus' mother and brothers came to see him, but they were not able to get near him because of the crowd. 20 Someone told him, "Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to see you."
21 He replied, "My mother and brothers are those who hear God's word and put it into practice."
Dig Deeper
When I was coaching high school basketball I noticed one phenomenon that was quite common to so many of the great young men that I had the chance to work with. They came to the game of basketball with a fundamental flaw in their whole understanding of what the game was about and what the purpose of the game of basketball was. This flaw in their thinking was most often demonstrated by the fact that after games, whether win or lose, many of them would run over to the scorer’s table to see how points or rebounds they had. They did this because they usually came into our team thinking that the only thing that really mattered about basketball was their own success. For them being part of the team and winning games were secondary concerns. It took us a lot of talking and convincing to get them past the point where they would rather lose the game and score 20 points than have other guys score more than them and win. They failed to understand that the whole purpose of the game of basketball is to become part of a team. The desired goal is for five players to work together as one and forget their own individual interests in order to become one entity.
Surprisingly, I have seen a similar foundational flaw in the thinking of most Christians in our world today. We tend to think in terms of ourselves when it comes to our salvation and relationship with God. We think of salvation as an entirely individual endeavor with joining a church being a secondary endeavor. In that mindset then, the really important thing becomes my relationship with God which becomes an entirely separate affair from my connection with the body of believers. The sad part is that the whole point of Christianity is that we are to leave behind our individual mindset and become part of a family. This is the part that much of the evangelical Christian world has missed. The church is not a collection of a bunch of individually saved Christians who have decided to worship and follow Jesus together. The church is the family of God of which we become part when we choose to die to our selves and be born into this new family. Christianity, at its core is a family and it is vital that we learn to understand that so that we have a full understanding of all the good things that we have in Christ.
As a way of expounding the previous section of the importance of receiving the word of God, obeying it, and experiencing the crop that it produces in the lives of his disciples, Luke includes three separate quotes from Jesus. All of these quotes have to do with Jesus’ revelation of the word of God in one way or another. The first example is a humorous picture of someone lighting a lamp and then hiding it so that no one could actually see it. It was always God’s intention that his people would be a light for the world but Israel had turned that light inward and, in effect, put it under a jar. But Jesus’ call for his kingdom people is to be a people that take the word into their lives and allow others to see the effects that it has. Hiding in Christian circles and not shining brightly in the world is a mistake in every aspect of our lives, whether it be that we meet so often together that we never have time to evangelize and build relationships with non-Christians or we begin to create our own Christian community events, and stores, and websites so that we never have to engage with the culture around us. We are to be a light and a light has to be seen.
This may have seemed somewhat at odds with certain elements of Jesus’ ministry which he tried to downplay his identity and he repeatedly told people to keep quiet about who he was or what he had done. That was for a time and a specific purpose but would not be for long. Once Jesus had completed his work, culminating in his death on the cross, it would be time for everything about the kingdom of God to be announced to the whole world.
So, says Jesus, because it was vital to be a light that announced everything about the kingdom of God out in the open, it is important to listen to everything that Jesus taught. His real disciples, said Jesus in John 8:31, are those who hold tightly to his word and obey it. Those who constantly dig into the word of God, accept it, and then obey it will find that it consistently produces a crop in their life. As God promised through the prophet Isaiah, his word will never come back empty (Isa. 55:10-11). Those who take in the word and keep it will find that it is constantly productive while those who do not will find that even the little bit they had will be taken by Satan.
As Jesus’ mothers and brothers came to see him, Jesus does something extremely shocking to make his point about the importance of hearing and obeying the word of God. The cultural expectation would have been for Jesus to immediately go out and show respect to his mother and brothers but Jesus took the opportunity to teach one of the most central aspects of the kingdom of God. It was not a religion. It was not just a new set of ethical teachings. At its heart, the kingdom of God was a family.
God’s covenantal promise to Abraham was that he would make Abraham the father of a family that would consist of many nations and that through this family, the whole world would be blessed. The first step in the fulfillment of that promise was God’s firstborn son, Israel (Ex. 4:22). Paul makes the point in Romans 9 that the promise of being that covenant family always followed along the lines of God’s choice. Not every descendant of Abraham was part of that promised family (Rom. 9:7). Paul goes on in Romans 9 to argue that just as the promise of the covenant family passed to Abraham’s son Isaac but not his son Ishmael, and just as the promise passed to Jacob but not his brother Esau, so now, the covenant family would pass to Jesus and not his kinsmen, Israel.
Because of the promise of the covenant family being the ones through whom the whole world would be blessed, Abraham’s physical descendants, Israel, held the concept of family to be one of the most important core components of their value system and their whole culture. So for Jesus to not show the proper respect to his biological family was absolutely scandalous. But Jesus was quite intentional about this. Throughout his ministry he made clear the fact that he was redefining the true concept of family, especially as it related to being the people of God. Jesus’ family, the family of God, was not about being a physical descendant of Abraham or part of the nation of Israel but would consist of those who heard “God’s word and put it into practice.” Jesus would make it clear that the way that this would happen would include dying to self and being born into God’s new family (Jn. 3:5) through baptism into his own life (Rom. 6:1-14). Those who entered into Christ would become part of the family of promise, God’s family. Paul stated this all concisely in Galatians 3:26-29: “So in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith, for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. If you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's seed, and heirs according to the promise.”
Jesus wanted his followers to know that to truly live the life of a disciple and find themselves as part of God’s family of promise, it would be necessary to redefine their family (this does not mean that they would not care for or love their biological families but was a matter of identity and priority). In Mark 10:28-30, Jesus told his disciples, who had given up everything for him, that they would receive, in return, families and homes a hundred times over, both in the present age and the age to come. His point was that when his followers mentally (and often physically) left their families as their source of identity and means of honoring God, they would receive a new family that would be a hundred times (metaphorically speaking) larger than their biological families. They would be in a new family.
Jesus sent another clear signal of this on the day of his death when he asked John to consider Mary as his mother and care for her. Mary had other sons that could have done this, but Jesus wanted to send a clear message to his followers that the Kingdom of God involved new boundaries and new definitions of what it meant to be in God’s family. This act would continue, throughout Mary’s life, to send a strong message to Christians, as early church tradition tells us that Mary did go with John, and eventually died in Ephesus many years later.
An important question, though, is whether or not the early church actually understood that they were to be the new family, the sons of God (Rom. 8;15; Gal. 4:6). We know from Acts 2:42-47, that the first Christians certainly began to act like a family. An often-missed detail from the first Jewish Christians, though, is that as part of their early practice they sold off land (Acts 4:34, 5:1). It would have been quite disturbing for traditional Jews to see an entire group like the followers of Christ selling off their lands. This would have been deeply concerning to Jews who saw their land as an inheritance from God (Psalm 135:12). Why would the early church have been so eager to sell their land? Certainly they wanted to be able to care for one another and give to those in need, but there is more to it than that. The land was a sign of their family inheritance and their status as the people of God. Selling that land was a strong statement to the rest of the Jewish world that they had rejected that standard of being God’s family and His people, and would, instead, embrace the new family of believers that Jesus created around himself.
We should not reduce all of this to mere theological chatter though. Being God’s family means something. It means that we need to start realizing that salvation is not merely an individual endeavor. True, we have to come to Christ on our own faith but when we enter into Christ we are baptized into his family, his body (1 Cor. 12:13). It is part of our identity as God’s sons and daughters in Christ to be those people who take the words of God and put them into practice. It is up to us to stop thinking as individuals and to realize that we have joined the family of promise. It is our call to begin to think and make decisions in light of that reality. Through Jesus, God fulfilled his ancient promises to Abraham to create a family of all nations and we have been given the grace and mercy of God to be part of that family. It is now up to us to work out in our churches what it truly means to be part of one family.
Devotional Thought
Do you view your brothers and sisters as Christ as your true, primary family? Do you see your Christian walk as being part of God’s family or have you been stuck in the mindset of seeing your Christianity as an individual thing? How does seeing the body of Christ as your true family change the way you think about it and the way you behave in it?
Friday, March 19, 2010
Luke 8:1-15 Commentary
The Parable of the Sower
1 After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; 3 Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod's household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
4 While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: 5 "A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. 6 Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown."
When he said this, he called out, "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear."
9 His disciples asked him what this parable meant. 10 He said, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,
" 'though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.' [a]
11 "This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. 12 Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. 13 Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away. 14 The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. 15 But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.
Dig Deeper
I’m always amazed by the varying responses of Americans following a speech by the President, regardless of what President it is. As soon as the President gives a speech or lays out some new policy measure that he is proposing, the twenty-four hour news stations go abuzz with responses to the President’s ideas. It’s almost dizzying, though, to switch back and forth between channels with different political perspectives and hear the differing opinions on the same speech. From one perspective, the President’s speech was a masterful work of oratory skill and brilliant policies that would be so wonderful for the country. Then you switch the channel and another commentator from another perspective is saying that this is one of the worst and most diabolical things they have ever heard. Surely if the country follows this path, says the pundit, the country will be far worse off. One speaker is full of kind words and admiration while the other one is full of criticism and disgust. It makes you wonder if they were listening to the same speech from the same President. But of course it was the same speech. So what accounts for such differing perspectives on the same speech, the same policy, or even the same person? It really doesn’t have all that much to do with the speech or the speaker, it comes down to the listener. It is the perspective of the listener that causes the vastly different responses.
This truth is illustrated beautifully by a piece of chocolate and some muddy ground. If you go to a spot of muddy ground on a very hot and dry day and put a chocolate bar down right next to the mud, something amazing will happen. The very same sun that is shining equally on the mud and the chocolate will have completely different results. For the mud, the sun will be an agent of hardening. It will turn the mud into a dry and hard surface that will, over time, get nearly as hard as rock. But that same sun will serve as a melting agent for the chocolate. It will turn the chocolate into a melting mess of goo. How can the same agent cause such different results? It is because of the difference in the make-up of the mud and the chocolate. The substance of those items will determine what the sun causes them to do. The sun causes the mud to harden while it causes the chocolate to melt but its the same sun.
It is important to keep this in mind as Jesus discusses, through this parable, the effect that the word of God as it was coming through his kingdom announcing, would have on those that heard him and those that continued to hear his words through Luke’s Gospel. Jesus’ words would have very different effects on different hearers but that had everything to do with the soil, or the heart that the seeds of that word landed on. It wasn’t that Jesus was preaching different things in different places or that God had pre-determined that some people would not be able to have the privilege of responding to the gospel. It is just like the sun on that mud and chocolate. As the light of Jesus’ kingdom shone on the hearts of men, it would have very different effects based on the condition of their heart.
As Luke continues his description of Jesus’ kingdom announcing ministry in the outlying areas of Israel, he intentionally draws attention to the role of women in Jesus’ ministry, which should not be that surprising as Luke takes more care than any other Gospel writer to stress the importance of women in Jesus’ kingdom movement. By mentioning them this early in Jesus’ ministry, Luke likely wants to stress that these women didn’t just pop up at Jesus’ resurrection but they were integral to his ministry throughout. They not only traveled with Jesus quite often but they helped to support Jesus and the Twelve. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that having women travel with them and play such a vital role was unusual to the point of being scandalous in first-century Israel. With so many other elements of Jesus’ ministry, though, that pointed symbolically to important spiritual truths, this all pointed to the fact that women would be on the same ground as far as membership in the kingdom family as men would be (Gal. 3:26-28). These women weren’t just unnecessary bystanders but were vital to the development of Jesus’ church and women would continue to have equal status and esteem within the kingdom of God. Luke also ably reminds us that financial generosity is absolutely vital to the establishment and continuation of the ministry of the kingdom of God.
Jesus was simply a master teacher who was brilliant in his ability to take normal, everyday illustrations that the most common of listeners could understand and relate to. That is certainly the case here as he gives a parable that used the common concept of sowing seed, something that an agrarian society would have been quite familiar with. Jesus’ intent, though, is not to offer up a thorough and complete description of sowing practices and possible outcomes but to use generalizations to demonstrate something about his kingdom.
Up to this point, Jesus has had mixed results in announcing the coming of the kingdom of God. Despite the fact that he was the Son of God with authority over demons and illnesses and even the authority to forgive sins, his message was not universally embraced. Some, like those in the synagogue in Nazareth had the word sown to them but it was quickly trampled on and was gobbled up by their own preconceived notions of who God was and how he should be working. Some, like Pharisees who saw Jesus heal the man with the deformed hand, heard the word but it fell on the rocks of their own pride and messianic expectations and it withered away. Some, like Simon the Pharisee, heard the word and considered it, but then it was choked out by the thorns of his own cultural prejudices and refusal to embrace a new reality that recognized the humanity of all people. But others heard the word and believed it. Think of the Twelve who have left everything to follow Jesus, the men who in faith lowered paralytic friend through a roof, the centurion, and the grateful women who washed Jesus’ feet with her own tears. The word of God had found good soil and was producing a good crop.
This parable is all about the impact that Jesus and his word has on human beings. These truths are already on display in the hearts of those described in Luke’s Gospel but they are just as true in the lives and hearts of men and women that have been confronted with the word of God since then. The message of the gospel is the same for any human being, calling them to lay down their life and submit to the life of Christ in obedience to his word but the responses are varied. Just as with the chocolate and mud, the reactions to the gospel have everything to do with the heart of the one hearing the message. In that sense, the parables of Jesus were like the sun. He spoke in this somewhat enigmatic way so that those with humble and believing hearts would be able to grasp the truth of the message. But those who wanted to cling to their own expectations and trust in their ability to get themselves to God would find, just as Isaiah had declared (Isa. 6:9), that the word of God would not melt their hearts but actually make them harder. They would see but not really see; they would hear but never understand. Because of their pride, traditions, and indifference to God’s true reality they had hearts of mud that, when they came in contact with the warming sun of God’s love through the life of the Messiah, got dry, got hard, and cracked.
When we stand back at a distance of two millennia and look at this parable we often tend to think of it in terms of hearing the word for the first time and then deciding to become a Christian or not. The reality of this parable is that it does include the moment of initial decision, but that for Christians who have already made an initial response to the kingdom message, the far more pertinent point is that we must constantly examine ourselves according to the principles of this passage. How do we respond to the word of God on a day-in and day-out basis?
The first question we should ask ourselves is are we even sowing the wrod in our lives on a daily basis? If we’re not, that’s obviously a major problem. But if we do, what kind of heart soil does the seed of the word land on? Do we find ourselves listening to the schemes and temptations of the devil and allowing him to steal the word before it can ever take root? Do we take the word in a surface level, perhaps only at church or in shallow devotional times, only to find that when the hard times come we fall back on our own wisdom or will rather than God’s? Do we take the word into our lives but neglect to pull out the weeds of being drawn to the things of the world and allow those thorns to choke out the part of us that wants to do God’s will? Or are we that good soil? Are we constantly taking steps to ensure that when the word of God hits our hearts it will find good soil that is ready and willing to be obedient to God’s word? If our hearts remain soft to God’s word, constantly prepared to seek it out and be melted by it, we will find that it will continually produce a crop in our lives. When we bury the word deep in our hearts, we can’t help but find that after a time, the radical love and mercy of God will begin to burst forth from our lives and make themselves evident to the world around us.
Devotional Thought
Spend some time really reflecting on what kind of heart soil you have had lately. Is the word still consistently producing a crop in your life or has it found less-than-ideal soil lately? But don’t just examine yourself. Ask others who are very close to you what they see. Do they see consistent humility and growth in your life?
1 After this, Jesus traveled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; 3 Joanna the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod's household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means.
4 While a large crowd was gathering and people were coming to Jesus from town after town, he told this parable: 5 "A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path; it was trampled on, and the birds ate it up. 6 Some fell on rock, and when it came up, the plants withered because they had no moisture. 7 Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up with it and choked the plants. 8 Still other seed fell on good soil. It came up and yielded a crop, a hundred times more than was sown."
When he said this, he called out, "Whoever has ears to hear, let them hear."
9 His disciples asked him what this parable meant. 10 He said, "The knowledge of the secrets of the kingdom of God has been given to you, but to others I speak in parables, so that,
" 'though seeing, they may not see;
though hearing, they may not understand.' [a]
11 "This is the meaning of the parable: The seed is the word of God. 12 Those along the path are the ones who hear, and then the devil comes and takes away the word from their hearts, so that they may not believe and be saved. 13 Those on the rock are the ones who receive the word with joy when they hear it, but they have no root. They believe for a while, but in the time of testing they fall away. 14 The seed that fell among thorns stands for those who hear, but as they go on their way they are choked by life's worries, riches and pleasures, and they do not mature. 15 But the seed on good soil stands for those with a noble and good heart, who hear the word, retain it, and by persevering produce a crop.
Dig Deeper
I’m always amazed by the varying responses of Americans following a speech by the President, regardless of what President it is. As soon as the President gives a speech or lays out some new policy measure that he is proposing, the twenty-four hour news stations go abuzz with responses to the President’s ideas. It’s almost dizzying, though, to switch back and forth between channels with different political perspectives and hear the differing opinions on the same speech. From one perspective, the President’s speech was a masterful work of oratory skill and brilliant policies that would be so wonderful for the country. Then you switch the channel and another commentator from another perspective is saying that this is one of the worst and most diabolical things they have ever heard. Surely if the country follows this path, says the pundit, the country will be far worse off. One speaker is full of kind words and admiration while the other one is full of criticism and disgust. It makes you wonder if they were listening to the same speech from the same President. But of course it was the same speech. So what accounts for such differing perspectives on the same speech, the same policy, or even the same person? It really doesn’t have all that much to do with the speech or the speaker, it comes down to the listener. It is the perspective of the listener that causes the vastly different responses.
This truth is illustrated beautifully by a piece of chocolate and some muddy ground. If you go to a spot of muddy ground on a very hot and dry day and put a chocolate bar down right next to the mud, something amazing will happen. The very same sun that is shining equally on the mud and the chocolate will have completely different results. For the mud, the sun will be an agent of hardening. It will turn the mud into a dry and hard surface that will, over time, get nearly as hard as rock. But that same sun will serve as a melting agent for the chocolate. It will turn the chocolate into a melting mess of goo. How can the same agent cause such different results? It is because of the difference in the make-up of the mud and the chocolate. The substance of those items will determine what the sun causes them to do. The sun causes the mud to harden while it causes the chocolate to melt but its the same sun.
It is important to keep this in mind as Jesus discusses, through this parable, the effect that the word of God as it was coming through his kingdom announcing, would have on those that heard him and those that continued to hear his words through Luke’s Gospel. Jesus’ words would have very different effects on different hearers but that had everything to do with the soil, or the heart that the seeds of that word landed on. It wasn’t that Jesus was preaching different things in different places or that God had pre-determined that some people would not be able to have the privilege of responding to the gospel. It is just like the sun on that mud and chocolate. As the light of Jesus’ kingdom shone on the hearts of men, it would have very different effects based on the condition of their heart.
As Luke continues his description of Jesus’ kingdom announcing ministry in the outlying areas of Israel, he intentionally draws attention to the role of women in Jesus’ ministry, which should not be that surprising as Luke takes more care than any other Gospel writer to stress the importance of women in Jesus’ kingdom movement. By mentioning them this early in Jesus’ ministry, Luke likely wants to stress that these women didn’t just pop up at Jesus’ resurrection but they were integral to his ministry throughout. They not only traveled with Jesus quite often but they helped to support Jesus and the Twelve. We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that having women travel with them and play such a vital role was unusual to the point of being scandalous in first-century Israel. With so many other elements of Jesus’ ministry, though, that pointed symbolically to important spiritual truths, this all pointed to the fact that women would be on the same ground as far as membership in the kingdom family as men would be (Gal. 3:26-28). These women weren’t just unnecessary bystanders but were vital to the development of Jesus’ church and women would continue to have equal status and esteem within the kingdom of God. Luke also ably reminds us that financial generosity is absolutely vital to the establishment and continuation of the ministry of the kingdom of God.
Jesus was simply a master teacher who was brilliant in his ability to take normal, everyday illustrations that the most common of listeners could understand and relate to. That is certainly the case here as he gives a parable that used the common concept of sowing seed, something that an agrarian society would have been quite familiar with. Jesus’ intent, though, is not to offer up a thorough and complete description of sowing practices and possible outcomes but to use generalizations to demonstrate something about his kingdom.
Up to this point, Jesus has had mixed results in announcing the coming of the kingdom of God. Despite the fact that he was the Son of God with authority over demons and illnesses and even the authority to forgive sins, his message was not universally embraced. Some, like those in the synagogue in Nazareth had the word sown to them but it was quickly trampled on and was gobbled up by their own preconceived notions of who God was and how he should be working. Some, like Pharisees who saw Jesus heal the man with the deformed hand, heard the word but it fell on the rocks of their own pride and messianic expectations and it withered away. Some, like Simon the Pharisee, heard the word and considered it, but then it was choked out by the thorns of his own cultural prejudices and refusal to embrace a new reality that recognized the humanity of all people. But others heard the word and believed it. Think of the Twelve who have left everything to follow Jesus, the men who in faith lowered paralytic friend through a roof, the centurion, and the grateful women who washed Jesus’ feet with her own tears. The word of God had found good soil and was producing a good crop.
This parable is all about the impact that Jesus and his word has on human beings. These truths are already on display in the hearts of those described in Luke’s Gospel but they are just as true in the lives and hearts of men and women that have been confronted with the word of God since then. The message of the gospel is the same for any human being, calling them to lay down their life and submit to the life of Christ in obedience to his word but the responses are varied. Just as with the chocolate and mud, the reactions to the gospel have everything to do with the heart of the one hearing the message. In that sense, the parables of Jesus were like the sun. He spoke in this somewhat enigmatic way so that those with humble and believing hearts would be able to grasp the truth of the message. But those who wanted to cling to their own expectations and trust in their ability to get themselves to God would find, just as Isaiah had declared (Isa. 6:9), that the word of God would not melt their hearts but actually make them harder. They would see but not really see; they would hear but never understand. Because of their pride, traditions, and indifference to God’s true reality they had hearts of mud that, when they came in contact with the warming sun of God’s love through the life of the Messiah, got dry, got hard, and cracked.
When we stand back at a distance of two millennia and look at this parable we often tend to think of it in terms of hearing the word for the first time and then deciding to become a Christian or not. The reality of this parable is that it does include the moment of initial decision, but that for Christians who have already made an initial response to the kingdom message, the far more pertinent point is that we must constantly examine ourselves according to the principles of this passage. How do we respond to the word of God on a day-in and day-out basis?
The first question we should ask ourselves is are we even sowing the wrod in our lives on a daily basis? If we’re not, that’s obviously a major problem. But if we do, what kind of heart soil does the seed of the word land on? Do we find ourselves listening to the schemes and temptations of the devil and allowing him to steal the word before it can ever take root? Do we take the word in a surface level, perhaps only at church or in shallow devotional times, only to find that when the hard times come we fall back on our own wisdom or will rather than God’s? Do we take the word into our lives but neglect to pull out the weeds of being drawn to the things of the world and allow those thorns to choke out the part of us that wants to do God’s will? Or are we that good soil? Are we constantly taking steps to ensure that when the word of God hits our hearts it will find good soil that is ready and willing to be obedient to God’s word? If our hearts remain soft to God’s word, constantly prepared to seek it out and be melted by it, we will find that it will continually produce a crop in our lives. When we bury the word deep in our hearts, we can’t help but find that after a time, the radical love and mercy of God will begin to burst forth from our lives and make themselves evident to the world around us.
Devotional Thought
Spend some time really reflecting on what kind of heart soil you have had lately. Is the word still consistently producing a crop in your life or has it found less-than-ideal soil lately? But don’t just examine yourself. Ask others who are very close to you what they see. Do they see consistent humility and growth in your life?
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Luke 7:36-50 Commentary
Jesus Anointed by a Sinful Woman
36 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."
40 Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."
"Tell me, teacher," he said.
41 "Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, [c] and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
43 Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven."
"You have judged correctly," Jesus said.
44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little."
48 Then Jesus said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."
49 The other guests began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?"
50 Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."
Dig Deeper
I was recently reading a book about a man who was trying to learn to be a better missionary and servant to all kinds of people. He recounted one experience that had stayed with him since the moment in his life when it first happened, and it has stayed with me since reading it. He had gone to spend a week working with an inner-city mission group in a large American city. This particular group walked the streets of this major metropolis during the hours of 10 PM and 3 AM every single day. They wanted to talk to people, meet people, help those in need, and just be seen regularly so that they would be trusted and known. The man had to learn certain aspects of their work that would keep them as safe as possible as well. He said that on the first night that he actually went out with the program director they passed by a young lady who was dressed quite scantily and provocatively. He waited until they passed by and were out of hearing range and then asked the director if that woman was a prostitute. He recalled in his book that it seemed like such an obvious thing that he was quite surprised that the program director took several seconds to answer. When he finally did answer, his response was shocking to the author. He said quite firmly and with even a little bit of rebuking tone, “No, she is not a prostitute. She is a human being that is currently in prostitution.” That night the author learned how quick he was to categorize and, therefore dehumanize human beings who have been created to be God’s image bearers. Lord forgive me for doing the same thing far too often.
When we categorize people we really do dehumanize them. Once we’ve categorized them, you see, we don’t actually have to deal with them on a personal basis. We can accept them or reject them based on the nice, neat categories that we have created. In fact, studies in the US show that the average American has completely sized up and made a value judgment on other human beings within five seconds of meeting them. This is exactly what we see happening in this scene. Simon was so quick to dehumanize this woman by putting her into a category so that he didn’t have to actually deal with her. In doing so, though, he will find that he has not so much dehumanized her as he has dehumanized himself and removed himself the very category into which he would have confidently placed himself.
At the outset, this whole scene seems a bit confusing to those of us who are well removed from a culture like this. The whole idea of privacy and the like was quite a bit different than we maintain now. When someone was hosting a dinner, especially with a public figure like Jesus, it would have not been that unusual to have it out in the open or to leave the doors open so that people could come in and observe the goings on. That was all well and fine providing that they kept their distance and did not intrude themselves inappropriately into the proceedings themselves. So, it is not actually that unusual that this woman would have had access to see what was going on. What she did do, though, that was so shocking and upsetting for Simon was that she didn’t stay in the background. She didn’t stay put in her place where she belonged.
In fact, as the men were reclining at the table, she inserted herself right into the meal itself. The men would likely have been lying on their stomachs and propping themselves up on their left elbows. They would have been facing a u-shaped table with their feet down away from the table. But this woman did not know her place. She was not of the right quality of personhood to be coming out from the shadows and coming right up into the table area. To make matters worse, that wasn’t the only social custom that she broke. She was well known as a sinner, meaning likely that she was either a prostitute or something similar, yet she boldly came into the house and table fellowship area of a Pharisee. What was worse than that was that she, overcome by emotion, she washed Jesus’ feet with her own tears and dried them with her own hair before anointing his feet with expensive perfume. Taking one’s hair down in public was about as socially acceptable in their society as a woman taking off her shirt and drying off someone’s feet with nothing but her bra on would be in ours.
Everything she did, in the eyes of Simon demonstrated two things. The first was a confirmation of his judgment of her. She was a sinner. She shouldn’t be around them. Simply her presence could defile them and make them look bad in the eyes of others. She needed to be removed from the situation. Perhaps if she could somehow radically clean herself up and change her life, but then that wasn’t really possible because even if she did do that, to change her perception in the community would have been almost impossible.
The second thing her behavior accomplished in Simon’s eyes, was to confirm that Jesus was no prophet. Luke has already made clear that some Pharisees had rejected Jesus outright and already passed judgment on him. Others would hold off on their judgment, as Simon had apparently done. Yet, even though he invited Jesus to his home, it was obvious that he had not treated him with full respect, although Luke doesn’t clearly define how he failed to treat Jesus with the proper social respect. But Jesus’ reaction to this woman showed Simon that he didn’t need to treat Jesus with any special honor. How could a prophet not know what kind of woman this was? How could a man of God allow this woman to be in his presence? How could Jesus not immediately rebuke this woman and send her away?
The irony in all of this is that as Simon is busy categorizing Jesus as someone that is not worth his time because he does not have the ability to correctly judge people, Jesus knew exactly who this woman was and he knew exactly what was in Simon’s heart. Simon was judging him to be less than a prophet while Jesus was about to show that he was far more than just a prophet.
In operating from the old reality of a world embroiled in sin and death, perhaps Simon was right. Maybe this woman was just a sinner, but Jesus has made it clear that he is playing by different rules. Simon, and those like him, expected people to effect change in their lives before being worthy of being accepted. But when you play by those standards, worthiness is always judged by other human begins and can be elusive at best. The reality is that system always benefits those that are already on the top and it tends to oppress those on the bottom to keep them there. Jesus has already announced that the values of his kingdom were going to turn the world on its head and this is a living, breathing, example of that. Rather than operating by the old standards, Jesus is signaling that his kingdom is about fishing for people. It means going out and pursuing sinners. It means showing people that they are human beings that are valued by God and showing them God’s transforming love. When people are shown this kind of love it is that very love that will change them. They don’t have to change to earn the acceptance of others, they will be given the radically transforming love of the gospel message and be truly transformed from within by it.
Jesus’ parable has a sharp point to it, and although Simon got the surface point, he seems to have failed to see the deeper truth. The debtor who owed about 20 month’s salary was just as forgiven as the one who owed about 2 month’s salary. But the one with the larger debt understood that they were a serious debtor that had just had something wonderful done for them for which they could truly never earn or repay. The other person, though, didn’t see the greatness of the forgiveness because they thought that their debt was small. Simon understood that the one with the larger debt would be the most grateful and willing to lavish love on the master.
What he failed to see was that Jesus’ point was not that this woman was the one with the larger debt while he was the one with the smaller debt. Many people read this passage and make that same mistake that Simon made. I don’t believe that this was Jesus’ point. His point was that they both owed the greater debt but that the woman realized that was her debt while Simon thought he had just a very small debt to God. Jesus’ ministry was about forgiveness and canceling debts. It was about pursuing sinners, but Simon failed to see that he was the sinner that Jesus was pursuing as he told that parable.
The woman had understood what Jesus brought into her life and was overwhelmed with joy and emotion. She was humble and knew that she needed Jesus and when he accepted her by allowing her to wash his feet, she broke down with gratitude. Simon, however, failed to treat Jesus with respect and proper honor because he didn’t think he was a debtor. She was not the one who truly broke any proper customs because her actions were understandable. It was Simon who by his arrogance and judgmental behavior had behaved improperly.
Verses 48 and 50 can seem a little confusing when placed together with the woman’s actions in this scene unless we read them in context of verse 49. Why would she have been showing such joy and gratitude if Jesus had yet to forgive her and accept her? Was she anticipating his action? No, Jesus had already accepted this woman based on her faith in him and her desire to see herself as a sinner in need of him to change. Jesus was not declaring that under the Old Covenant her sins had been forgiven and that she was accepted into his kingdom movement, that had already happened. She had already been forgiven and acted appropriately in response to her new state of freedom but others were not willing to accept her as anything more than a sinner. She didn’t need forgiveness from God but she did need recognition of her new state among those in her community. Rather than the onus being put on her to prove herself changed, Jesus was trying to change the worldview of Simon and his guests by showing that she was already forgiven. The responsibility to change wasn’t on her. The responsibility to change their thinking and accept Jesus as one who had the power to forgive sins and bring God’s kingdom to bear in the present age was on them. It didn’t come down to her worthiness but their faith in Jesus. That’s what it always comes down to.
Devotional Thought
Are you ever guilty of categorizing and, thus, dehumanizing people? Are there any times when you find yourself thinking more like Simon than you’d care to admit? Have you come to terms with the depths of your own heart and allowed God’s radical love to come into your own heart, and then into the lives of others?
36 When one of the Pharisees invited Jesus to have dinner with him, he went to the Pharisee's house and reclined at the table. 37 A woman in that town who lived a sinful life learned that Jesus was eating at the Pharisee's house, so she came there with an alabaster jar of perfume. 38 As she stood behind him at his feet weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears. Then she wiped them with her hair, kissed them and poured perfume on them.
39 When the Pharisee who had invited him saw this, he said to himself, "If this man were a prophet, he would know who is touching him and what kind of woman she is—that she is a sinner."
40 Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."
"Tell me, teacher," he said.
41 "Two people owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, [c] and the other fifty. 42 Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he forgave the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
43 Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt forgiven."
"You have judged correctly," Jesus said.
44 Then he turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. 45 You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. 46 You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. 47 Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven—as her great love has shown. But whoever has been forgiven little loves little."
48 Then Jesus said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."
49 The other guests began to say among themselves, "Who is this who even forgives sins?"
50 Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace."
Dig Deeper
I was recently reading a book about a man who was trying to learn to be a better missionary and servant to all kinds of people. He recounted one experience that had stayed with him since the moment in his life when it first happened, and it has stayed with me since reading it. He had gone to spend a week working with an inner-city mission group in a large American city. This particular group walked the streets of this major metropolis during the hours of 10 PM and 3 AM every single day. They wanted to talk to people, meet people, help those in need, and just be seen regularly so that they would be trusted and known. The man had to learn certain aspects of their work that would keep them as safe as possible as well. He said that on the first night that he actually went out with the program director they passed by a young lady who was dressed quite scantily and provocatively. He waited until they passed by and were out of hearing range and then asked the director if that woman was a prostitute. He recalled in his book that it seemed like such an obvious thing that he was quite surprised that the program director took several seconds to answer. When he finally did answer, his response was shocking to the author. He said quite firmly and with even a little bit of rebuking tone, “No, she is not a prostitute. She is a human being that is currently in prostitution.” That night the author learned how quick he was to categorize and, therefore dehumanize human beings who have been created to be God’s image bearers. Lord forgive me for doing the same thing far too often.
When we categorize people we really do dehumanize them. Once we’ve categorized them, you see, we don’t actually have to deal with them on a personal basis. We can accept them or reject them based on the nice, neat categories that we have created. In fact, studies in the US show that the average American has completely sized up and made a value judgment on other human beings within five seconds of meeting them. This is exactly what we see happening in this scene. Simon was so quick to dehumanize this woman by putting her into a category so that he didn’t have to actually deal with her. In doing so, though, he will find that he has not so much dehumanized her as he has dehumanized himself and removed himself the very category into which he would have confidently placed himself.
At the outset, this whole scene seems a bit confusing to those of us who are well removed from a culture like this. The whole idea of privacy and the like was quite a bit different than we maintain now. When someone was hosting a dinner, especially with a public figure like Jesus, it would have not been that unusual to have it out in the open or to leave the doors open so that people could come in and observe the goings on. That was all well and fine providing that they kept their distance and did not intrude themselves inappropriately into the proceedings themselves. So, it is not actually that unusual that this woman would have had access to see what was going on. What she did do, though, that was so shocking and upsetting for Simon was that she didn’t stay in the background. She didn’t stay put in her place where she belonged.
In fact, as the men were reclining at the table, she inserted herself right into the meal itself. The men would likely have been lying on their stomachs and propping themselves up on their left elbows. They would have been facing a u-shaped table with their feet down away from the table. But this woman did not know her place. She was not of the right quality of personhood to be coming out from the shadows and coming right up into the table area. To make matters worse, that wasn’t the only social custom that she broke. She was well known as a sinner, meaning likely that she was either a prostitute or something similar, yet she boldly came into the house and table fellowship area of a Pharisee. What was worse than that was that she, overcome by emotion, she washed Jesus’ feet with her own tears and dried them with her own hair before anointing his feet with expensive perfume. Taking one’s hair down in public was about as socially acceptable in their society as a woman taking off her shirt and drying off someone’s feet with nothing but her bra on would be in ours.
Everything she did, in the eyes of Simon demonstrated two things. The first was a confirmation of his judgment of her. She was a sinner. She shouldn’t be around them. Simply her presence could defile them and make them look bad in the eyes of others. She needed to be removed from the situation. Perhaps if she could somehow radically clean herself up and change her life, but then that wasn’t really possible because even if she did do that, to change her perception in the community would have been almost impossible.
The second thing her behavior accomplished in Simon’s eyes, was to confirm that Jesus was no prophet. Luke has already made clear that some Pharisees had rejected Jesus outright and already passed judgment on him. Others would hold off on their judgment, as Simon had apparently done. Yet, even though he invited Jesus to his home, it was obvious that he had not treated him with full respect, although Luke doesn’t clearly define how he failed to treat Jesus with the proper social respect. But Jesus’ reaction to this woman showed Simon that he didn’t need to treat Jesus with any special honor. How could a prophet not know what kind of woman this was? How could a man of God allow this woman to be in his presence? How could Jesus not immediately rebuke this woman and send her away?
The irony in all of this is that as Simon is busy categorizing Jesus as someone that is not worth his time because he does not have the ability to correctly judge people, Jesus knew exactly who this woman was and he knew exactly what was in Simon’s heart. Simon was judging him to be less than a prophet while Jesus was about to show that he was far more than just a prophet.
In operating from the old reality of a world embroiled in sin and death, perhaps Simon was right. Maybe this woman was just a sinner, but Jesus has made it clear that he is playing by different rules. Simon, and those like him, expected people to effect change in their lives before being worthy of being accepted. But when you play by those standards, worthiness is always judged by other human begins and can be elusive at best. The reality is that system always benefits those that are already on the top and it tends to oppress those on the bottom to keep them there. Jesus has already announced that the values of his kingdom were going to turn the world on its head and this is a living, breathing, example of that. Rather than operating by the old standards, Jesus is signaling that his kingdom is about fishing for people. It means going out and pursuing sinners. It means showing people that they are human beings that are valued by God and showing them God’s transforming love. When people are shown this kind of love it is that very love that will change them. They don’t have to change to earn the acceptance of others, they will be given the radically transforming love of the gospel message and be truly transformed from within by it.
Jesus’ parable has a sharp point to it, and although Simon got the surface point, he seems to have failed to see the deeper truth. The debtor who owed about 20 month’s salary was just as forgiven as the one who owed about 2 month’s salary. But the one with the larger debt understood that they were a serious debtor that had just had something wonderful done for them for which they could truly never earn or repay. The other person, though, didn’t see the greatness of the forgiveness because they thought that their debt was small. Simon understood that the one with the larger debt would be the most grateful and willing to lavish love on the master.
What he failed to see was that Jesus’ point was not that this woman was the one with the larger debt while he was the one with the smaller debt. Many people read this passage and make that same mistake that Simon made. I don’t believe that this was Jesus’ point. His point was that they both owed the greater debt but that the woman realized that was her debt while Simon thought he had just a very small debt to God. Jesus’ ministry was about forgiveness and canceling debts. It was about pursuing sinners, but Simon failed to see that he was the sinner that Jesus was pursuing as he told that parable.
The woman had understood what Jesus brought into her life and was overwhelmed with joy and emotion. She was humble and knew that she needed Jesus and when he accepted her by allowing her to wash his feet, she broke down with gratitude. Simon, however, failed to treat Jesus with respect and proper honor because he didn’t think he was a debtor. She was not the one who truly broke any proper customs because her actions were understandable. It was Simon who by his arrogance and judgmental behavior had behaved improperly.
Verses 48 and 50 can seem a little confusing when placed together with the woman’s actions in this scene unless we read them in context of verse 49. Why would she have been showing such joy and gratitude if Jesus had yet to forgive her and accept her? Was she anticipating his action? No, Jesus had already accepted this woman based on her faith in him and her desire to see herself as a sinner in need of him to change. Jesus was not declaring that under the Old Covenant her sins had been forgiven and that she was accepted into his kingdom movement, that had already happened. She had already been forgiven and acted appropriately in response to her new state of freedom but others were not willing to accept her as anything more than a sinner. She didn’t need forgiveness from God but she did need recognition of her new state among those in her community. Rather than the onus being put on her to prove herself changed, Jesus was trying to change the worldview of Simon and his guests by showing that she was already forgiven. The responsibility to change wasn’t on her. The responsibility to change their thinking and accept Jesus as one who had the power to forgive sins and bring God’s kingdom to bear in the present age was on them. It didn’t come down to her worthiness but their faith in Jesus. That’s what it always comes down to.
Devotional Thought
Are you ever guilty of categorizing and, thus, dehumanizing people? Are there any times when you find yourself thinking more like Simon than you’d care to admit? Have you come to terms with the depths of your own heart and allowed God’s radical love to come into your own heart, and then into the lives of others?
Monday, March 15, 2010
Luke 7:18-35 Commentary
Jesus and John the Baptist
18 John's disciples told him about all these things. Calling two of them, 19 he sent them to the Lord to ask, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?"
20 When the men came to Jesus, they said, "John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, 'Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?' "
21 At that very time Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind. 22 So he replied to the messengers, "Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy [a] are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. 23 Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me."
24 After John's messengers left, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 25 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear expensive clothes and indulge in luxury are in palaces. 26 But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 27 This is the one about whom it is written:
" 'I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.' [b]
28 I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
29 (All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus' words, acknowledged that God's way was right, because they had been baptized by John. 30 But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.)
31 Jesus went on to say, "To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? 32 They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other:
" 'We played the pipe for you,
and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
and you did not cry.'
33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' 34 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' 35 But wisdom is proved right by all her children."
Dig Deeper
In a recent post, I described my reluctance to switch over to DVD’s when they began to be popular. I had a huge collection of history documentaries and video on VHS tapes and simply did not want to switch over. To add to that I just don’t tend to like new things very much. I eventually did give in and get a DVD player and we have a few DVD’s now. In fact, I no longer have a working VCR and my tape collection sits in my basement collecting dust. But just as I began to get used to the whole DVD thing, albeit a few years after most people, I began to notice something new coming out called Blu-ray. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it and thought it would go away. When it didn’t and more and more people began to talk about Blu-ray, I thought I might take a look at one. So, one day I was at a store and I picked up a box and looked at it. It looked just like a DVD to me and so I assumed that it was just another type of DVD that was perhaps a little clearer. I didn’t understand that it was entirely new technology and that you had to have an entirely different player for it. Blu-ray is not, in fact, just another type of DVD. It is something completely new, a whole new world of technology and you simply cannot cross over one to the other. Blu-ray discs won’t play on a DVD player and DVD’s will not do anything on a Blu-ray player. But once I finally watched a movie on Blu-ray I realized that these things really were incredible. They were a whole different thing than DVD’s and despite the fact that DVD’s were pretty good, not even the best DVD could come anywhere close to the technology and quality of picture that a Blue-ray can give.
This is something of Jesus’ point here as the attention turns back to John the Baptist for the first time since his arrest in chapter 3. John has been in prison for an undetermined amount of time and he apparently was beginning to have some questions and maybe even worries about Jesus and whether or not he really was the Messiah. His behavior was so different from what John was expecting that he was having trouble reconciling things. It all comes down to grasping that an entirely new reality was breaking into the present age. It was God’s new reality, his kingdom. But this new reality simply wasn’t compatible with the old age and could never be understood by using the old expectations and worldview. Even John would have to realize that the old ways of thinking wouldn’t work in this new world if one really wanted to understand and be part of what was going on.
Even the best of us can have days of doubt and disillusionment. John’s experience in prison is probably a good reminder of that. Many people have tried to come up with alternate explanations for John’s apparent confusion from prison but I don’t think we need to try to do any of that. The reality is that John was an incredible man of God, a prophet, but he was still just a man. He was weak, limited, and prone to his own preconceptions, even though he did have the Holy Spirit upon him, guiding and leading him. He was certainly capable of being led by the Spirit to speak more than he understood on his own terms. John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, had spoken rightly of Jesus as the coming Messiah, but that doesn’t mean that he completely understood fully what Jesus would be doing. John had spoken of the coming judgment of the Messiah (Lk. 3:17) but he likely had his own preconceived notions of what that would look like. His disciples had come to him in the prison and told him of Jesus’ incredible authority, but also that he was using that authority to minister to those on the fringes of the society. John surely was confused by this. Wasn’t this a time for the winnowing fork to come out? Wasn’t this the time to be cleansing Israel and bringing about a day of vengeance? Where was the ax that would be bringing down the tree (Lk. 3:9)? John doesn’t question whether Jesus was really sent from God or not. He needed reassuring of Jesus’ specific role. Was Jesus the Messiah or was he not? John’s problem was not with Jesus but with his expectations of what the Messiah would do. His conceptions were quite similar to the audience in the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk. 4:28-29). He had called for repentance and for people to prepare for God’s purging of the unrighteous. He simply couldn’t see how Jesus’ actions were related to that end.
Jesus’ response is somewhat cryptic but also very clear when we stop and look at his response carefully. He was far too wise to come up and say directly that he was the Messiah. This would have opened him up to all the misconceptions that people had about the Messiah but would also ramp up the intensity of those opposed to him before his time had come to go to his death. His response was a symphony of notes from different passages of Isaiah (35:5-6; 26:19; 29:18-19; 61:1). His ministry was to the blind, the lame, the ill and outcast, the deaf, and the dead. His ministry, in other words, was the one spoken of all throughout Isaiah, especially Isaiah 61. He was delivering and bringing judgment upon those who rejected him, but just not the way that John might have expected. John was still thinking in terms of the old world and was not seeing that this was God’s new reality breaking into the present. He simply could not grasp that Jesus’ ministry was pointing to God’s age to come when those who trusted in the life of Christ would be transformed and made completely whole. He could not comprehend that Jesus was calling people to embrace that future by giving out samples of what that would look like and then calling people to begin to live by the values of that age right now in the present.
John needed to change his categories and enter into the worldview of the new age and so did those standing there listening to Jesus. That was Jesus’ point in verses 24-28. What did they go out to see when they went into the wilderness? Jesus’ reference to a reed swayed by the wind could simply mean that they didn’t go to see someone who went along with the winds of public opinion but a more likely reference was to Herod Antipas, whose personal symbol that he had printed on coins was a reed. They didn’t go out to see just another reed, another man in fine clothes like Herod did they? No, they went out there to hear a prophet. But he was more than just a prophet. He was the one who would prepare the way for Jesus. If they went out there to hear something new from God, then they shouldn’t be surprised that they got much more than they bargained for. The new kingdom that they were getting simply far surpassed what they could expect under the old order of things. Jesus made this point clear by stressing that John was indeed more than a prophet, there was no one greater in the entire Old Testament than he as far as his vocation was concerned. Yet, even with all of that, Jesus makes the point that even the least in the kingdom of God is superior to John because he is of the old order. He would not live long enough to enter into the kingdom himself. The fact that the chief of the prophets would have less than anyone in the kingdom of God doesn’t speak to John’s deficiency but to the incredible access to God and privilege that those in Christ would have.
Luke adds the note onto Jesus’ exaltation of the new era that was dawning and the incredible grace that would be poured out to those in the kingdom by stressing that crowd that was gathered around, including even the reviled and lowly tax collectors knew that God’s way was right. But the leaders, the experts, and the Pharisees rejected it. They were too concerned with consolidating and keeping their own privilege and power in the present age and so would not accept John’s message of repentance and preparation for God’s new work. In rejecting John’s symbolic baptism, they would surely also reject true baptism into the life of Christ.
Jesus, as he often did, gave a descriptive example to show what that generation was like. The children’s song that he cited may have been a common folk song like a nursery rhyme or the like that would have been quite familiar to all of his listeners, although no one can say for certain where the song came from. The more important question, though, is what does it mean? This has been an oft debated and discussed topic through the years among biblical commentators and experts but the clue to the meaning of the little ditty is likely hinted at in the verses immediately following the lyrics in question. Jesus’ point was that many of the people, or at least those who considered themselves the religious leaders, were never satisfied. They were so beholden to their own expectations that they criticized and rejected whatever God sent. It was a classic case of the old saying, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” John came “singing a dirge” about the wickedness of Israel and their need to repent before God judged the whole nation, but they rejected John’s serious and fiery message, claiming that he was demonic. So the message of condemnation didn’t work for the religious leaders but surely they would accept a more positive approach. Yet, Jesus came “playing the pipe” and they would not dance. He introduced the kingdom of God as a celebration and something that should be received with joy, singing, dancing, eating, and drinking. But that approach didn’t work with them either. The excuse became that he accepted sinners and those that should not be accepted and that he was acting like this was all a big party and thus demeaned the kingdom of God.
The fact is, “wisdom is proved right by all her children.” In other words, the discerning eye could see that these men weren’t going to accept anything other than their own will. John and Jesus’ message would be shown to be right in time. God would vindicate them and their message but the game of the religious leaders had been exposed. They were not going to accept God’s messengers regardless of what they said. They had decided that they would continue to follow their own blind guidance (Lk. 6:39).
Devotional Thought
Can you ever be like the religious leaders of this passage? Do you ever get so attached to how you want God to work that no matter what he does, you will reject it? It is so easy to pre-determine what you want God to do in your life and then sit back and miss the many things he sends into your life because it doesn’t match up with what you want. Are you refusing to dance to the pipe’s tune or cry at the dirge? Are you really open to God’s will?
18 John's disciples told him about all these things. Calling two of them, 19 he sent them to the Lord to ask, "Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?"
20 When the men came to Jesus, they said, "John the Baptist sent us to you to ask, 'Are you the one who was to come, or should we expect someone else?' "
21 At that very time Jesus cured many who had diseases, sicknesses and evil spirits, and gave sight to many who were blind. 22 So he replied to the messengers, "Go back and report to John what you have seen and heard: The blind receive sight, the lame walk, those who have leprosy [a] are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the good news is proclaimed to the poor. 23 Blessed is anyone who does not stumble on account of me."
24 After John's messengers left, Jesus began to speak to the crowd about John: "What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed swayed by the wind? 25 If not, what did you go out to see? A man dressed in fine clothes? No, those who wear expensive clothes and indulge in luxury are in palaces. 26 But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 27 This is the one about whom it is written:
" 'I will send my messenger ahead of you,
who will prepare your way before you.' [b]
28 I tell you, among those born of women there is no one greater than John; yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he."
29 (All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus' words, acknowledged that God's way was right, because they had been baptized by John. 30 But the Pharisees and the experts in the law rejected God's purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptized by John.)
31 Jesus went on to say, "To what, then, can I compare the people of this generation? What are they like? 32 They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling out to each other:
" 'We played the pipe for you,
and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
and you did not cry.'
33 For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, 'He has a demon.' 34 The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and you say, 'Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.' 35 But wisdom is proved right by all her children."
Dig Deeper
In a recent post, I described my reluctance to switch over to DVD’s when they began to be popular. I had a huge collection of history documentaries and video on VHS tapes and simply did not want to switch over. To add to that I just don’t tend to like new things very much. I eventually did give in and get a DVD player and we have a few DVD’s now. In fact, I no longer have a working VCR and my tape collection sits in my basement collecting dust. But just as I began to get used to the whole DVD thing, albeit a few years after most people, I began to notice something new coming out called Blu-ray. At first, I didn’t pay any attention to it and thought it would go away. When it didn’t and more and more people began to talk about Blu-ray, I thought I might take a look at one. So, one day I was at a store and I picked up a box and looked at it. It looked just like a DVD to me and so I assumed that it was just another type of DVD that was perhaps a little clearer. I didn’t understand that it was entirely new technology and that you had to have an entirely different player for it. Blu-ray is not, in fact, just another type of DVD. It is something completely new, a whole new world of technology and you simply cannot cross over one to the other. Blu-ray discs won’t play on a DVD player and DVD’s will not do anything on a Blu-ray player. But once I finally watched a movie on Blu-ray I realized that these things really were incredible. They were a whole different thing than DVD’s and despite the fact that DVD’s were pretty good, not even the best DVD could come anywhere close to the technology and quality of picture that a Blue-ray can give.
This is something of Jesus’ point here as the attention turns back to John the Baptist for the first time since his arrest in chapter 3. John has been in prison for an undetermined amount of time and he apparently was beginning to have some questions and maybe even worries about Jesus and whether or not he really was the Messiah. His behavior was so different from what John was expecting that he was having trouble reconciling things. It all comes down to grasping that an entirely new reality was breaking into the present age. It was God’s new reality, his kingdom. But this new reality simply wasn’t compatible with the old age and could never be understood by using the old expectations and worldview. Even John would have to realize that the old ways of thinking wouldn’t work in this new world if one really wanted to understand and be part of what was going on.
Even the best of us can have days of doubt and disillusionment. John’s experience in prison is probably a good reminder of that. Many people have tried to come up with alternate explanations for John’s apparent confusion from prison but I don’t think we need to try to do any of that. The reality is that John was an incredible man of God, a prophet, but he was still just a man. He was weak, limited, and prone to his own preconceptions, even though he did have the Holy Spirit upon him, guiding and leading him. He was certainly capable of being led by the Spirit to speak more than he understood on his own terms. John, inspired by the Holy Spirit, had spoken rightly of Jesus as the coming Messiah, but that doesn’t mean that he completely understood fully what Jesus would be doing. John had spoken of the coming judgment of the Messiah (Lk. 3:17) but he likely had his own preconceived notions of what that would look like. His disciples had come to him in the prison and told him of Jesus’ incredible authority, but also that he was using that authority to minister to those on the fringes of the society. John surely was confused by this. Wasn’t this a time for the winnowing fork to come out? Wasn’t this the time to be cleansing Israel and bringing about a day of vengeance? Where was the ax that would be bringing down the tree (Lk. 3:9)? John doesn’t question whether Jesus was really sent from God or not. He needed reassuring of Jesus’ specific role. Was Jesus the Messiah or was he not? John’s problem was not with Jesus but with his expectations of what the Messiah would do. His conceptions were quite similar to the audience in the synagogue in Nazareth (Lk. 4:28-29). He had called for repentance and for people to prepare for God’s purging of the unrighteous. He simply couldn’t see how Jesus’ actions were related to that end.
Jesus’ response is somewhat cryptic but also very clear when we stop and look at his response carefully. He was far too wise to come up and say directly that he was the Messiah. This would have opened him up to all the misconceptions that people had about the Messiah but would also ramp up the intensity of those opposed to him before his time had come to go to his death. His response was a symphony of notes from different passages of Isaiah (35:5-6; 26:19; 29:18-19; 61:1). His ministry was to the blind, the lame, the ill and outcast, the deaf, and the dead. His ministry, in other words, was the one spoken of all throughout Isaiah, especially Isaiah 61. He was delivering and bringing judgment upon those who rejected him, but just not the way that John might have expected. John was still thinking in terms of the old world and was not seeing that this was God’s new reality breaking into the present. He simply could not grasp that Jesus’ ministry was pointing to God’s age to come when those who trusted in the life of Christ would be transformed and made completely whole. He could not comprehend that Jesus was calling people to embrace that future by giving out samples of what that would look like and then calling people to begin to live by the values of that age right now in the present.
John needed to change his categories and enter into the worldview of the new age and so did those standing there listening to Jesus. That was Jesus’ point in verses 24-28. What did they go out to see when they went into the wilderness? Jesus’ reference to a reed swayed by the wind could simply mean that they didn’t go to see someone who went along with the winds of public opinion but a more likely reference was to Herod Antipas, whose personal symbol that he had printed on coins was a reed. They didn’t go out to see just another reed, another man in fine clothes like Herod did they? No, they went out there to hear a prophet. But he was more than just a prophet. He was the one who would prepare the way for Jesus. If they went out there to hear something new from God, then they shouldn’t be surprised that they got much more than they bargained for. The new kingdom that they were getting simply far surpassed what they could expect under the old order of things. Jesus made this point clear by stressing that John was indeed more than a prophet, there was no one greater in the entire Old Testament than he as far as his vocation was concerned. Yet, even with all of that, Jesus makes the point that even the least in the kingdom of God is superior to John because he is of the old order. He would not live long enough to enter into the kingdom himself. The fact that the chief of the prophets would have less than anyone in the kingdom of God doesn’t speak to John’s deficiency but to the incredible access to God and privilege that those in Christ would have.
Luke adds the note onto Jesus’ exaltation of the new era that was dawning and the incredible grace that would be poured out to those in the kingdom by stressing that crowd that was gathered around, including even the reviled and lowly tax collectors knew that God’s way was right. But the leaders, the experts, and the Pharisees rejected it. They were too concerned with consolidating and keeping their own privilege and power in the present age and so would not accept John’s message of repentance and preparation for God’s new work. In rejecting John’s symbolic baptism, they would surely also reject true baptism into the life of Christ.
Jesus, as he often did, gave a descriptive example to show what that generation was like. The children’s song that he cited may have been a common folk song like a nursery rhyme or the like that would have been quite familiar to all of his listeners, although no one can say for certain where the song came from. The more important question, though, is what does it mean? This has been an oft debated and discussed topic through the years among biblical commentators and experts but the clue to the meaning of the little ditty is likely hinted at in the verses immediately following the lyrics in question. Jesus’ point was that many of the people, or at least those who considered themselves the religious leaders, were never satisfied. They were so beholden to their own expectations that they criticized and rejected whatever God sent. It was a classic case of the old saying, “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” John came “singing a dirge” about the wickedness of Israel and their need to repent before God judged the whole nation, but they rejected John’s serious and fiery message, claiming that he was demonic. So the message of condemnation didn’t work for the religious leaders but surely they would accept a more positive approach. Yet, Jesus came “playing the pipe” and they would not dance. He introduced the kingdom of God as a celebration and something that should be received with joy, singing, dancing, eating, and drinking. But that approach didn’t work with them either. The excuse became that he accepted sinners and those that should not be accepted and that he was acting like this was all a big party and thus demeaned the kingdom of God.
The fact is, “wisdom is proved right by all her children.” In other words, the discerning eye could see that these men weren’t going to accept anything other than their own will. John and Jesus’ message would be shown to be right in time. God would vindicate them and their message but the game of the religious leaders had been exposed. They were not going to accept God’s messengers regardless of what they said. They had decided that they would continue to follow their own blind guidance (Lk. 6:39).
Devotional Thought
Can you ever be like the religious leaders of this passage? Do you ever get so attached to how you want God to work that no matter what he does, you will reject it? It is so easy to pre-determine what you want God to do in your life and then sit back and miss the many things he sends into your life because it doesn’t match up with what you want. Are you refusing to dance to the pipe’s tune or cry at the dirge? Are you really open to God’s will?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)