Luke 18:31-43 Commentary

Jesus Predicts His Death a Third Time
31 Jesus took the Twelve aside and told them, "We are going up to Jerusalem, and everything that is written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. 32 He will be delivered over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him and spit on him; 33 they will flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again."
34 The disciples did not understand any of this. Its meaning was hidden from them, and they did not know what he was talking about.

A Blind Beggar Receives His Sight
35 As Jesus approached Jericho, a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging. 36 When he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening. 37 They told him, "Jesus of Nazareth is passing by."
38 He called out, "Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!"

39 Those who led the way rebuked him and told him to be quiet, but he shouted all the more, "Son of David, have mercy on me!"

40 Jesus stopped and ordered the man to be brought to him. When he came near, Jesus asked him, 41 "What do you want me to do for you?"
"Lord, I want to see," he replied.

42 Jesus said to him, "Receive your sight; your faith has healed you." 43 Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus, praising God. When all the people saw it, they also praised God.




Dig Deeper
I recently saw a post-apocalyptic movie called “The Book of Eli.” I was hoping that the movie would be as good as the previews looked but it was somewhat of a disappointment. The movie is set a generation or so after a terrible calamity and war of some type has destroyed the world as we would know it. It also alludes to some cryptic nuclear event that left almost all people who were alive at the time of the event blind. At the time that the movie is set nearly everyone is younger and can see, but they never lived through or know much about the world before the great destruction event. The handful of older people that were still alive knew what life used to be like and could be like but they are marginalized for the most part because of their blindness. Eli seems to be an older person that is an exception to that as he makes his way through this incredibly dangerous and violent world in an attempt to preserve what is perhaps the only surviving copy of the Bible. At the end of the movie, though, we are let in on a major twist that changes everything about the movie that you just watched. Eli was in fact blind as well. He lived, moved, and fought in a world of people who could see physically but who could not see the reality of the way things could be in any way that mattered. Eli was blind and yet he was the one person who seemed to be able to really see what was going on and what things could be like. It was a deeply ironic and profound element.

As we have followed Jesus along on the road to Jerusalem, it has gotten increasingly intense and we get the sense that things are coming to a boiling point soon. The journey has been filled with people who could not or did not want to see what Jesus was brining to bear in a lost and fallen world. God’s new creation, the reality of his future age, was actually breaking into the present age through the ministry and kingdom message of Jesus but most were too blind to see what was going on. Even Jesus’ disciples, although they wanted to see and understand, were having a hard time seeing everything that Jesus was up to. That is why it is so deeply interesting that Luke describes a scene here in which someone finally does seem to grasp important aspects of who Jesus is and what he is capable of doing. It would be one thing to have a description of one person who somehow seemed to fathom some of the depths of what was swirling about all around them, but it is deeply ironic and profound that the man who could see what almost no one else could, was blind. He could see what the sighted could not.

Jesus had been clear throughout his journey to Jerusalem that it was not going to end in the way that people thought. Messianic expectations were so ingrained to look for a conquering hero who would drive out the Romans and all of the pagans, who would re-establish God’s reign from Jerusalem over the whole world, and inaugurate the age to come, that it was next to impossible for them to fathom how him suffering shame, being rejected, and even killed could possibly fit into that. Even Jesus’ disciples were having a hard time reconciling Jesus’ vision of his vocation with what a Messiah should be in their minds. It was as confusing as if a great athlete declared that they were going to win a championship but first he must suffer terrible losses and be knocked from the playoffs. How can you win a championship if you’re knocked out of the playoffs? Jesus must have meant something other than the clear literal meaning, his disciples evidently thought, because it didn’t make sense. In the same way, how could the Messiah that was supposed to free Israel from her enemies be rejected and killed? The Messiah was supposed to be defeating Romans not dying a shameful death while under the complete control of those Romans. Jesus must have meant something else because this just didn’t make sense.

Yet, he tells them here as plainly as he could possibly do what would happen to him. He would be turned over to the Gentiles to be mocked, insulted, spat upon, flogged, and eventually killed. But he would rise on the third day. How could the meaning of this be hidden from them? How could they not understand such a clear statement? It was because it sounded like such a category mistake. The Messiah suffering and dying just did not fit with anything they knew.

As clear as it seems to us, the reference to rising on the third day might possibly have played into their thinking that perhaps Jesus was somehow speaking symbolically. Hosea 6:1-2 declared “Come, let us return to the LORD. He has torn us to pieces but he will heal us; he has injured us but he will bind up our wounds. After two days he will revive us; on the third day he will restore us, that we may live in his presence.” It seems that at least some Jews, if not most, saw the “third day” as a symbol for the time of the resurrection. Thus, when Jesus declared boldly that he would die and rise on the third day, the potential symbolism of such a statement combined with their complete lack of understanding of the true role of the Messiah, led to their complete inability to see the plain truth that Jesus was teaching them. They could understand him claiming to be the Messiah. They could even understand someone speaking of the fact that they would be rejected and killed, only to have part in the resurrection. But they simply could not imagine combining those two realities. They were just simply blind to who Jesus really was as the Messiah and what he could do.

Now that Luke has laid out a clear picture of well-meaning disciples who simply could not see what Jesus was about to do he brings us to a blind man outside the city of Jericho. The Gospel of Mark tells us, assuming that this is indeed the same man, that the blind man’s name was Bartimaeus. Like most blind people in that culture, he would have been on lower rungs of society, forced to beg for a living, and considered an obvious sinner by most, and a man whose blindness was a result of being cursed by God for his rampant sin. As Jesus approached, though, the blind man, like so many others that would have been considered to be outside of the normal and decent structure of society, took the bold step of going outside of his accepted arena and cried out to Jesus for mercy. A call for mercy in this situation could have been nothing more than a plea for alms, but based on the situation and the fact that he singled Jesus out, it seems that he had much more in mind. As he called out to Jesus he addressed him in extremely Messianic terms. He was, in fact, recognizing Jesus as the promised Son of David, the Messiah that would come and save Israel and indeed the world. What Luke doesn’t tell us is how this man knew this. What had he heard? What did he know that would enable him to have such insight? We don’t know why but we do know that he believed Jesus to be the Messiah and turned to him in utter humility and reliance. He called to him in the manner of a child just as Jesus had urged that his disciples would need to do(Lk. 18:17).

The response of the crowd to the insightful faith that the blind man was showing was to rebuke him and shut him up. Their response was probably less to do with his belief in Jesus as the promised Davidic Messiah and more to do with the danger that such a public proclamation could have incurred. To claim that someone was a Messiah meant to invoke all of the cherished beliefs about the Messiah including the fact that he would render all of the other kings of the world subserviant to him. This would not have been a popular idea in Herod’s courts, much less in Rome. This man wasn’t concerned with any of that, however.

Just like the woman that reached out to Jesus for healing despite the fear that should have overwhelmed an unclean person stepping into the realm of the clean (Lk. 8:43-48), this man had more faith than fear. Impressed by the man’s relentless faith, Jesus called him to be brought near. As Jesus asked him what the man wanted Jesus to do for him, we should stop and think again how much faith it took for the man to say what he did. He could have stopped short. He could have asked for money or a blessing, or almost anything else but he believed that Jesus was far greater than any of that and well worth the risk of ridicule from those around him. He had just one request, he wanted to see. He knew that he was blind and he somehow knew that the only way for him to see was to go to Jesus in persevering faith and ask for sight.

We can’t help but think that Luke wanted us to see that this is exactly what the disciples, the Pharisees, indeed all of Israel needed to do. They needed to recognize their inability to see, their spiritual blindness, and simply cry out to Jesus. If they did that, he would do the same for them that he did for this blind man. The man’s faith in Jesus became the channel through which he could receive his sight.

Jesus promised those that would really hold to his teachings (not our own watered-down versions of them but the real thing) would know the truth and be set free (Jn. 8:31-32). That promise is certainly as true today as the day Jesus gave it but there are still so many areas that we can be blind. We can slowly begin to think that we are something when we are not (cf. Rev. 3:17-18). We think we need God far less than we do. It is at those times that we need to be like the blind man here. We need to recognize that we are blind and that crying out to Jesus as a helpless child is the only thing that will bring us sight. We need to stop trusting ourselves and thinking we can see and just cry out to the Son of David. When we do, he will surely ask us what we want from him. If our humble response is simply to see, he will give us sight.


Devotional Thought
Spend some time praying today for God to reveal areas in your life where you have been blind spiritually. Turn to Jesus alone in faith and ask him for sight and he will surely answer that prayer, maybe not in the way or timing you would want, but he will answer.

Luke 18:15-30 Commentary

The Little Children and Jesus
15 People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. 16 But Jesus called the children to him and said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 17 Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it."

The Rich and the Kingdom of God
18 A certain ruler asked him, "Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?"
19 "Why do you call me good?" Jesus answered. "No one is good—except God alone. 20 You know the commandments: 'You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.' [a]"
21 "All these I have kept since I was a boy," he said.
22 When Jesus heard this, he said to him, "You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me."
23 When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. 24 Jesus looked at him and said, "How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! 25 Indeed, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for the rich to enter the kingdom of God."
26 Those who heard this asked, "Who then can be saved?"
27 Jesus replied, "What is impossible with human beings is possible with God."
28 Peter said to him, "We have left all we had to follow you!"
29 "Truly I tell you," Jesus said to them, "no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God 30 will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and in the age to come eternal life."



Dig Deeper
I always enjoyed reading fables when I was growing up whether they were written by Aesop or someone else, or even were traditional fables with an unknown author. One of the most famous parables ever created, and one that has been duplicated and reworked hundreds of times, is the much loved fable of the monkey and the banana. The gist of that fable is that a monkey sees a jar full of bananas and greatly desires to have all of the bananas for himself. He sneaks up and plunges his hand into the jar and grasps onto a handful of delicious bananas. As he goes to jerk his hand out, he realizes a dire problem. His hand is stuck. He yanks and pulls and struggles but he cannot get his hand out of that jar. The ending of the story can vary but it usually doesn’t turn out well for the monkey. He is so focused on his desire for those bananas that he cannot escape the narrow neck of the jar. We, of course, know that he could be freed at any moment if he would just release his grip on his prize stash of bananas but he won’t. He has made a decision that the bananas are so important that he won’t ever consider letting them go. He doesn’t realize it, but the thing that he most desires is the very thing that is keeping him from his freedom.

At the heart of this short little snippet about children being brought to Jesus and a longer description of an exchange between Jesus and an important young man, and the ensuing discussion between Jesus and his disciples in response to that confrontation, we have a situation similar to that monkey and his bananas. It seems as if the most potent barriers to entering into the kingdom of God are those bananas that we can cling to. It might be our social expectations and biases, it might be out desire for wealth, or it might even be the aversion that some have to lose their individualism and self-focus in order to become part of God’s family in the way that he has described through his word. In both of these accounts the point is clear. One must drop their bananas to be freed from the old order of things and be able to truly escape and enter into the life of the kingdom of God. Those who continue to cling to their bananas will never be able to truly accept God’s kingdom.

It is possible that the specific reason that people were bringing their young children and babies to Jesus was part of the practice of bringing children to elders for special blessings on the eve of the Day of Atonement. Whatever the case, it seems obvious that Jesus’ disciples thought of this as trivial. Jesus was too busy with his kingdom announcement and had too many things swirling about him to bother with blessings for the most inconsequential social group in the land of Israel. Jesus had too much going on to be bothered with children who could do nothing to advance his cause. As usual, though, Jesus took advantage of the opportunity and the normal societal assumptions of the disciples to teach a larger truth about his kingdom.

Rather than ignoring the children or rebuking the parents for bothering him, Jesus offered a mild rebuke for his own disciples. It seems that they were trying to keep the children away because they viewed them as unimportant and unable to be of any value in this kingdom mission. But Jesus wanted them to see something extremely important. It was the Pharisees and those opposed to God who were into making value judgments about who was and who was not worthy to be part of the kingdom. Jesus wanted the children to come to him because they were a perfect example of what people needed to be like to receive the kingdom. Children are innocent and completely dependent on the provision of others. Why should Jesus’ time be taken up with children that were of such little importance? Because they were the perfect picture of what Jesus wanted to say. Anyone who wanted to truly receive the kingdom of God must do so with the innocence and lack of pretension of a small child. The children were a snapshot of what people needed to become to receive the kingdom. They needed to drop their social pretensions and what it meant to be important by the standards of the world and embrace the freedom that was reality of the life of the kingdom of God. They needed to let go of the bananas and pull their hand out of the jar.

We should note that some have misused this verse to argue for the salvation of babies but this cannot be the case based on a simple reading of this passage. Babies cannot repent (Acts 2:38), choose to die to themselves at baptism (Rom. 6:1-4; Gal. 2:20) or have faith (Heb. 11:6). Thus, it is obvious based on Jesus’ own words here that he was using babies and small children as an example and saying that people must receive the kingdom in a manner “like” a child who has no social expectations, he was not teaching that babies themselves can enter into the life of Christ.

Luke then transitions into another question of what it will require of people to enter into the kingdom. The question that the rich young ruler asked of Jesus needs a bit of explaining. He was not, as we tend to imagine in our time, asking what it would take for him to know that when he died one day he would go to heaven. The phrase that is translated “eternal life,” more appropriately means “the life of the age to come.” The age to come was the time when Jews believed that God would come and restore his once very good creation to its original intent (Matt. 19:28; Acts 3:21; Rom. 8:19-25). This would be the time of the resurrection, when God would bring heaven and earth together as one and he will dwell with his people forever (Eph. 1:10; Rev. 21:1-5).

The young man, then, wanted to know what he must do to be numbered among God’s people, those who were “worthy” of being included in the inheritance of that age. It seems, at every turn, though, that this young man thought rather well of himself. He began by calling Jesus the “good teacher,” a compliment that would have expected a reciprocating compliment in return. Jesus broke protocol, though, by not playing that game. Why call a teacher good when only God is good? Either this man needed to change his definition of “good” or he needed to realize that the one he was talking to was far greater than just the teacher that he imagined him to be.

If he wanted to receive the life of the coming age then the first point had to do with his diligence in holding to the five commandments that dealt with the relations between others in the community. How had he treated the people of God? The young man, no doubt, relished that question and felt that he had observed those commands without flaw. Surely, he expected the teacher to declare that the inheritance of eternal life was in his grasp and to receive a commendation from the teacher.

Yet, Jesus did not play into his hands and instead pointed out that he lacked one thing. The tension mounts here and we wonder how this young man will handle a challenge from the teacher that he has just called “good.” The expectation would have been that he would listen to and embrace whatever the “good” teacher pointed out. Jesus’ challenge was stiff and to the point. There was one thing that he was clinging to. It was his wealth and more particularly, his self-focus with that wealth. Would he be willing to sell all of his possessions and share with God’s people that were in need, the people that he was so proud of following commands that concerned them? Would he be willing to put the values of heaven, the place where God’s will is done perfectly (Matt. 6:10) ahead of the values of the present age? Would he put the welfare of the people of God ahead of his own personal status?

The response of the young man was decisive and seemingly final as he walked away. Jesus was making available right now the age of the life to come that he claimed to want. Surely it would come fully one day, but Jesus’ people needed to die to themselves and give up their grasp on the present age so that they could begin to grab hold of the eternal life right now (1 Tim. 6:12). But he couldn’t really be seeking the life of the coming age if he wouldn’t let go of the markers of the old one. He couldn’t give up his possessions. He just would not accept what Jesus was saying as a child would.

Jesus knew that there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with being rich but that those who are rich tend to be so shackled to the values of the present age that it would be easier for one of the largest of animals known at the time, the camel, to walk though the eye of a needle (some biblical commentators have claimed a quite fanciful tale of there being a gate at the Temple called the “Needle’s Eye” that travelers would have to pass through but those stories, as fascinating as they might be, are not based on historical fact). The statement would have been jarring to Jesus’ disciples that were thoroughly immersed in the Jewish view that wealth was a sign of God’s favor. Those who were wealthy, powerful, and important must have obviously, in their eyes, been accepted by God as special and worthy of blessing. Jesus blew a hole in that in a few short words. Salvation and being part of God’s family wasn’t about worldly signs of wealth or even clinging to the commandments. It was God alone who could provide salvation through the life of Christ.

If the wealthy weren’t automatically shown to be among God’s people, then who was? What did it mean to give up everything? Would the disciples pass that standard? This is why Peter throws out the statement that he does in verse 28. They had left everything to follow Jesus. They had left their families, their jobs, their status, and everything else. Was that enough? Jesus confirmed that it was. They had been willing to let go of the bananas of their family identity and status to mark them out as God’s people where the rich man would not let go of his banana. In giving up the things of the present age, including their family solidarity, they would not fail to be part of God’s new family and be blessed with many more spiritual mothers, brothers, and sisters. This would be the new family that would define their status as the people of God. They would be required to let go of everything, all of their bananas, but they would not fail to receive many more times that in God’s family in the present age (as the life of the age to come would break through into the present age through God’s kingdom people) and in the age to come.

This passage reminds us that we must let go of our grasp on the things of this age, whatever they may be, and give up everything to follow Jesus. Paul’s words put it succinctly and should continue to challenge us to ask if we have really given up everything to follow him: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).



Devotional Thought
Are there any bananas that you are still clinging to that keep your from fully embracing the life of the eternal age that God wants for his people? Will you listen to the Spirit’s prompting as he urges you to release your grip or will you be more like the rich young man and continue to cling to things of this age?

Luke 18:1-14 Commentary

The Parable of the Persistent Widow
1 Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2 He said: "In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, 'Grant me justice against my adversary.'
4 "For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, 'Even though I don't fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won't eventually come and attack me!' "
6 And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

The Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector
9 To some who were confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else, Jesus told this parable: 10 "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11 The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed: 'God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.'
13 "But the tax collector stood at a distance. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, 'God, have mercy on me, a sinner.'
14 "I tell you that this man, rather than the other, went home justified before God. For all those who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."


Dig Deeper
“But it’s my turn,” he whined. “He played forever and now it’s my turn and he won’t give me the controller so that I can play.” “No,” retorted his brother, “he had it for twenty minutes and I just started playing and now he’s trying to claim that it’s his turn again.” This was a recent and fairly reoccurring type of disagreement between my two sons. If your a parent perhaps you can relate to the principles behind the argument if not the cause for the argument itself. Whenever they have these sorts of disagreements, though, it doesn’t take long before they turn to me or my wife to play the role of judge. They get to a point where they cannot work things out on their own and so before long they come to us to arbitrate the case and decide who is in the right. They both present their cases, although not always as calmly and collectedly as we would like. Oftentimes, as they are laying out their cases it starts to become rather clear, based on the testimony, who is in the right, but that simply points to the final verdict. Things are not really settled until my wife or I make a decision in the case (although we often tell them to work it out on their own, but that part of it falls a little outside of the point of this analogy). Once we have declared one of them to be in the right, the situation is resolved and the other one realizes that they need to change their perspective and their actions if they want to align themselves with the side that has been declared to be in the right.

At the heart of these two parables is just that idea. Justice in the ancient world was not like the court systems that we have today. You didn’t have a government that would bring cases for people and prosecute on behalf of the people. All cases, whether they were property disputes or a case of murder or theft, involved one person taking another to court as a dispute. There would be a judge that would hear the case and then decide who was in the right. As the case wore on, it might become obvious who was in the right, but that merely anticipated the final verdict that the judge would make. Things weren’t resolved until he made his judgment. When he finally did declare someone to be in the right, that verdict was called the justification. One was justified, the other was shown to be in the wrong.

As we read these parables, then, we would do well to remember that parables were used by Jesus to teach a truth about his ministry and the coming of the kingdom of God. We also need to remember that perhaps the primary theme of this journey to Jerusalem section from Luke 9-19 has been the warnings to Israel about being replaced as the people of God by the faithful Messiah and those who would place their trust in him by dying to themselves and entering into his family. The old Temple, as it were, was facing a showdown with the New Temple and that meant that those who would cling to the old Temple would find themselves in dispute with the new Temple. Thus, God would be turned to by both parties to act as judge. The cases would be laid out and the judge would have to decide which group would be vindicated, which group would be justified.

It is also important to keep in mind that each of these parables has a specific point within the immediacy of Jesus’ ministry but a broader principle that can be applied as well. The truth is that with both of these parables most people jump right to the larger principle without ever even considering the primary original meaning of Jesus’ words within the larger Lukan context. Yet, as we consider that here, we don’t want to only focus on that and forget that there are larger principles at play as well that apply to all Christians everywhere.

The first parable was a common type situation in the first century. Jesus painted a picture of a widow who had been wronged by an un-described adversary. The only recourse that she had, though, was to appeal to a judge that was quite unwilling to hear her case. Jesus’ crafting of the characters makes the situation particularly urgent as widows were a common symbol for the weakest members of the society that were in the most need of compassion and care. The judge is not a godly man and cares little about justice. Eventually, though, he grants justice to the widow because she has persistently clamored to be treated fairly. The widow was relentless because she believed in her cause, she was desperate to be declared in the right, and she knew that the judge was the only one who could do that.

Luke says, in verse 1, that this parable was intended to teach the disciples about the need to be persistent in prayer, but verses 7-8 round out the context. They are to pray persistently in all things of course. That is certainly a universally true principle, but the specific topic that Jesus was urging them to pray about was concerning the coming judgment upon Israel and the vindication of the Son of Man (and thus, his people) that was the subject of the previous passage. They should continue to pray for God to declare in no uncertain terms that the Messiah was in the right and that his people were the ones who would be justified. If an unjust judge will grant justice because of the persistence of the woman, how much more will God? Thus, in a specific sense, Jesus seems to have cast his disciples in the role of the widow.

They might seem helpless and powerless in the world and the face of their adversaries, but they would need persistence in prayer to God. If they continued to believe in the Messiah alone, were desperate to be declared in the right, and know that God was the only one who could do so, then they would be persistent in prayer and God would justify them. The big question, however, was “would the Son of Man find faith when he returned”? The term “ge” which is translated “earth,” can mean “land,” ranging from a field to a specific area like a country, or it can hold the meaning of the “whole earth.” It is the context of the sentence that determines the meaning. It is just as possible then, that Jesus was specifically asking if he would find faith in the land of Israel when he returned, which would seem to fit even better with the context of the passage.

The second parable isn’t as obvious in it’s theme of justification but it is a continuation of that theme as is indicated by an “also” that is in the original language of verse 9 but has been removed from the TNIV for ease of reading (as in “Jesus also told this parable”). The issue of the second parable makes all the sense in the world if we understand the above discussed meaning of the first parable. If the issue that Jesus was discussing was the need for his people to cling to their future justification and vindication and to persistently ask God for it to come, then they would need to be reassured that the confidence of the people that clung to the old system was not something that should sway them.

It is human nature to be intimidated and even begin to doubt oneself in the face of a very confident adversary. This second parable in this passage warns against that. The Pharisee, who represents the entirety of the Jewish leadership and those opposed to Jesus are not in the right and they will not be vindicated. What are they like? They are like a self-righteous Pharisee who separated himself from all of the sinners and thanked God that he was not caught in the three nets that cursed the Jewish people (see commentary on 16:14-18 for a full explanation of the three nets of riches, blasphemy, and adultery). He was not like those folks in his own mind and according to his boastful declaration. No, he was not a sinner, but Jesus has already, in 16:14-18, made the case that the Pharisees were guilty of those precise sins. All of his self-righteousness, his looking down on others, and his extraordinary observance of the law did him no good. He would never be in God’s family with such an attitude.

God’s people would be like a tax collector. They were the people that were of no account in the culture. They were reviled and certainly not considered to be religious by any cultural standard. This tax collector didn’t bother to separate himself from others, in fact, he knew that there was nothing special about himself. He didn’t rely on his own righteousness or observance of the law as advance signs of what the final verdict would be. Jesus’ people would be those that, like this tax collector, threw themselves on the mercy of God as self-recognized sinners. It would not be those who remained with Israel, represented by the Pharisee, but those who were like the tax collector, Jesus’ people, that would find themselves justified before God. They would be the ones that were declared to be in the right and that would find themselves in the right family. What they needed to do, though was to be like the widow and cling to that goal of justification as their sole focus and at the heart of their prayers.

The principles of this, though, cannot just be limited to the first century issue of the true people of God being vindicated as the old Temple was replaced by the new Temple. These passages, once properly understood, do still offer rich principles of what Jesus’ people should look like. We are people who should take seriously the call to be God’s family that are vindicated in the eyes of God and our adversaries. This should be at the heart of our prayers. We need to consistently petition God for him to show us to be his people and to empower us to live like it. At the same time, we need to be like the humble tax collector. We need to constantly and actively remember that we are God’s people solely because of his mercy. We will never seek the justification of being declared to be in the Messiah’s family if we think we have things about us that cause us to be worthy of standing before God. We need to humble ourselves before God as sinners and know that, only then, will we be lifted up and justified.


Devotional Thought
Do you ever find yourself feeling a lot more like that Pharisee than the tax collector? Do you truly pray with the kind of persistence that the widow demonstrated? What can you learn from these two parables that causes you to specific action today?

Luke 17:20-37 Commentary

The Coming of the Kingdom of God
20 Once, having been asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, "The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, 21 nor will people say, 'Here it is,' or 'There it is,' because the kingdom of God is in your midst." [b]
22 Then he said to his disciples, "The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. 23 People will tell you, 'There he is!' or 'Here he is!' Do not go running off after them. 24 For the Son of Man in his day [c] will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. 25 But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.

26 "Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. 27 People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.

28 "It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. 29 But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.

30 "It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. 31 On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. 32 Remember Lot's wife! 33 Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it. 34 I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. 35-36 Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left."

37 "Where, Lord?" they asked.
He replied, "Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather."



Dig Deeper
A couple of years ago, the two term limits of the forty-third President of the United States, George W. Bush, came to an end. In the time leading up to that inevitability, new candidates rose up and campaigned for the office, making their case for why they should be the next President. There were many contenders but eventually it came down to two primary candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama. After nearly a year of contentious and nasty campaigning, the election day came and went and Barack Obama was declared to be the forty-fourth President of the Untied States. A few months after the traditional November Presidential elections, the United States typically holds an inauguration for the new President. At that time, the old President relinquishes his power and presidency to the new President. That all sounds very basic and obvious but there is a very real truth imbedded into that whole process. You cannot have two presidents of the United States at the same time. Once a new one has come the whole must go. That is, of course, a very peaceful process in the Untied States, but it’s not that way everywhere in the world. The sad reality is that in many places, an old president is only replaced by the new one after a bloody and violent war that was aimed at taking down the structure of the old president’s regime. In fact, occasionally a new and powerful leader will raise up in some country and offer a deal. If the old president will go peacefully then there will be no problem but if he continues to cling to his power and status then he will be destroyed and taken out.

The coming of God’s kingdom was a long-awaited event within Judaism. It was the time when God would finally establish his reign and rule on the earth and exalt Israel above all the other nations. When this kingdom would come they believed that God would do away with those who had persecuted his people and kept the kingdom from coming. Inherent to the coming of the new kingdom was the fact that the old ones must go. You cannot have two kingdoms that would rule over the earth. This much was clear and somewhat obvious. What the people of Jesus’ day missed, however, was the fact that he was sending the clear message that the real enemy was sin, not Rome, and in fact, that the kingdom that was most standing in the way of God’s kingdom, and setting herself up the most in opposition to the Messiah was Israel herself, as was most obviously represented by the Temple in Jerusalem. Yet that was the old kingdom and the old Temple. Luke has made it very clear for us that Jesus was the new Temple. So, the simple truth was going to apply. When the New Temple came, that meant that the old one had to go.

The question on the lips of the Pharisees concerning the coming of the kingdom demonstrates a major misunderstanding on their part as to what the kingdom was. They thought that it was something that could be specifically watched for and marked by careful, scientific-style observation. What were the signs? In what order would they come? When would God take out the pagans and set up his rule on earth? The common expectation was that the kingdom’s coming would be part of the Day of the Lord, the great day of judgment on the pagan nations, and that specific cosmic signs would foretell it’s coming. But Jesus’ answer was a curve ball. The coming of the kingdom was not solely a cataclysmic, end-of-days-type event. Nor would it be marked with that type of coming. His point for the Pharisees was that the kingdom was being made available in the present. What is translated “in your midst,” is probably better understood as “in your grasp” or within your reach.” They were waiting for the wrong kind of kingdom in the wrong sort of way, all the while the hope of the kingdom was right there in front of them embodied by Jesus. As the last story showed, when the healed Samaritan returned and did at the feet of Jesus what one would normally do at the Temple, Jesus was the new Temple. He was the embodiment of the kingdom of God and he was unleashing God’s future reign of the age to come in the present lives and family communities of those who would reach out and grasp it. They didn’t need to look for the coming of the kingdom in the sky because it was already breaking into the present age. They had all the signs they needed.

Jesus then turned his attention towards his disciples, although the Pharisees were no doubt still within earshot. The time of the great crisis was coming. With the coming of the new, the old would have to be clearly done away with. When that process started, the disciples would long to see one of the days of the Son of man, but they would not see it immediately. The kingdom would come but they would have to wait, like a newly elected President waiting for his final inauguration, for the final vindication of the Son of Man.

It seems that what Jesus had in mind when he referred to the days of the Son of Man comes from Daniel 7. Theologian NT Wright best sums up this thought, saying, “’The days of the son of man’ seems to refer to the days when, as in the prophecy of Daniel (chapter 7), the ‘one like a son of man’ will be vindicated by God after suffering. The sign of this will be the destruction of the oppressor, the power that has opposed God’s people and God’s purpose. In Daniel, this power is the fourth ‘beast’, the greatest of the pagan armies. For Jesus, in one of the most dramatic twists of thinking, the force that has most directly opposed his teaching and his kingdom ministry is official Israel itself, focused on the Temple and its hierarchy, and the Pharisees whose thinking and practice derived from the Temple.” Wright goes on to say that Jesus time and again in Luke “warns of awful destruction coming upon his contemporaries for their failure to heed his message. Now he uses the ‘apocalyptic’ language of some Jewish prophecy to ram the same warnings home home. ‘The days of the son of man’ are the days in which this figure, representing God’s true people, is finally vindicated after his suffering.”

The big question is what form would that vindication take. The answer to that question seems to be the destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of the Temple (Luke will return to make this point even clearer in chapter 21). The people of the Temple had dug their feet in and refused to accept Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and that would seal their fate. They had become the enemy of God’s kingdom movement and God would one day soon vindicate the Son of Man by replacing the old Temple once-and-for-all with the new Temple, the body of the Messiah, which would consist of those who had entered into Christ by the time that the Temple was actually and finally destroyed in 70 AD.

This vindication event would not be an end-of-the-world event. Jesus was not talking about his final return and the time of the resurrection (Acts 1:11. Many Christians tend to read passages like this and assume immediately that we’re talking end-of-the-world here but that would be completely out of context with the larger context of the journey to Jerusalem and the mission to warn Israel of the coming disaster. Despite the fact that a lot of books have been sold in the last generation or two that have sensationalized passages like this (and chapter 21 as well), that just does not appear to be what this passage is about. There will be a time, of course, when Christ does return to restore all things (see, for instance, Matt. 19:28; Acts 3:21; Rev. 21:1-5), to break into the present age , and when judgment will come down disastrously on those who have ignored God’s call to join his kingdom.

This was all going to happen, though, to “this generation,” the people that would reject the Messiah would be the same generation to see him vindicated. The term “this generation” echoes Luke 7:31 as well as the people of the Exodus generation who were stubborn, stiff-necked, rebellious, and turned away from God’s purposes. They would be judged just as life was going on as it always had, just as the people of Noah’s day and the people of Sodom were when disastrous judgment befell them.

When that day came, Jesus’ disciples would need to maintain their focus on the kingdom of God and realize that what seemed like a national calamity at the hands of the mighty Roman army, was, in fact, the vindication of the Son of Man. Misplaced allegiance and looking back at one’s possessions or their life in Jerusalem would end in destruction, just as Lot’s wife looking back brought about her destruction. The tried and true reality of the Christian life, that whoever would lose their life would save it, would be realized during this event in a very real way. Choices needed to be be made and they would need to flee rather than trying to preserve the physical attachments of their lives in the present age. When this judgment came, loyalties would be revealed as one would be taken in judgment while others left. They had better know what was going on and not attach themselves to any sort of nationalistic feelings that would lead them to try to preserve Israel. This was not, in the reality of things, a disaster for God’s people but it was a simple vindication of the true Temple as the old one fell.

Verse 37 could be taken literally, which is pretty self-explanatory in that case. There is another possibility, however. The word “aetos” usually means “eagle,” but can also be translated “vulture.” Due to the reference of dead bodies, many translators have favored the rendering “vulture.” Yet, more likely in my opinion, is that “eagle” was the intended meaning of the phrase. The Roman legions used the eagle as the symbol on their imperial standards, so it is quite possible that Jesus was making a somewhat cryptic reference to Rome. Where would all this take place, the disciples wanted to know. The eagles of Rome would be swarming all over the corpse of the nation of Israel, would be the answer if this option is the correct one.

Just because this prophetic passage was warning of something that, for us, took place nearly two thousand years ago, when Jerusalem and her Temple were destroyed just as Jesus promised, does not mean that we should quickly slide by this passage thinking there is nothing in there for us. This coming judgment and vindication do point to the ultimate coming of Christ for which we all wait. God’s restoring and reconciling kingdom are within our grasp and waiting for us to take on the role of ambassadors. But for those who continue to reject him, a day of judgment is fast approaching.


Devotional Thought
Jesus here called for his disciples to stay focused on the kingdom of God even when circumstances around them got extremely difficult. They would need to have their loyalties to God’s kingdom set firmly above any national loyalties. Do you strive to have that same heart? Are your loyalties to God’s kingdom set firmly above your loyalties to anything else?

Luke 17:11-19 Commentary

Jesus Heals Ten Men With Leprosy
11 Now on his way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee. 12 As he was going into a village, ten men who had leprosy [a] met him. They stood at a distance 13 and called out in a loud voice, "Jesus, Master, have pity on us!"
14 When he saw them, he said, "Go, show yourselves to the priests." And as they went, they were cleansed.

15 One of them, when he saw he was healed, came back, praising God in a loud voice. 16 He threw himself at Jesus' feet and thanked him—and he was a Samaritan.

17 Jesus asked, "Were not all ten cleansed? Where are the other nine? 18 Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?" 19 Then he said to him, "Rise and go; your faith has made you well."


Dig Deeper
One of the most difficult things for my generation to comprehend about recent American history is the racial segregation that went on in the United States during the time period from the late 19th century all the way into the 1960’s. This was particularly a problem in the American South but it is still stunning to me to think that the people that are just a generation older than I, and those even older than that were alive and well at a time when there were actually public places that had signs indicating that they were for whites only or that there were things like water fountains and restrooms that were clearly marked for “whites” and “coloreds.” I recently saw one of those original signs in a museum and it was just disturbing. It’s difficult to imagine living in a world that was like that. It’s even more real for many of my dear friends that grew up in South Africa who lived under racial apartheid and saw that appalling reality come to an end less than twenty years ago. It is simply sad to live in a state where some people are not welcome in certain places solely for the color of their skin or some other superficial reason.

It is, in reality, a sign of a much deeper problem within a society. Separation of the nations in a manner like that is a symptom of sin that has shattered the unity of the human race going all the way back to the division-causing sin at the tower of Babel. One of the sure signs of sin is that fracturing of the family of humanity into separate pieces that exclude and hate one another. Of course, one might argue that Israel, under God’s direction, was exactly like that, with it’s exclusion of non-Jews. In one sense that is true as a result of sin, but in the fuller sense, God never intended to have things stay like that. He always pointed Israel to a time when things would be different. He promised Abraham a family that consisted of many nations and the prophets continually pointed to an Israel that would faithful to God’s purposes and would be a light to the nations, drawing them near to God. Israel had failed to be that light, though. They had begun to think of themselves as God’s special people that were almost entitled to their status. They wouldn’t say that, of course, but that was what the actions of the nation of Israel indicated. It was this mindset that made this next incident that Luke describes in the life of Jesus so subversive and shocking.

Luke had stopped us on the journey to Jerusalem for sometime as he detailed many of Jesus’ important teachings and response to questions about his ministry, but now he clearly signals that we are back on the road with Jesus on his way to Jerusalem, a trip that Jesus has clearly implied will end in his own glorifying death. As he was on his way, he took the familiar route for Jews which went around Samaria even though going through Samaria would have been a quicker trip. There are actually many details that Luke doesn’t give us in this account, and, in fact, he seems intent on keeping certain things intentionally vague. That doesn’t indicate that this was not an authentic account of something that happened in Jesus’ life, however, it seems that Luke has left things somewhat vague to give a more universal feel to the story so that he can make a larger point with this healing miracle and the response of the recipients.

As Jesus was going into a village, which we are not told whether it was a Jewish or Samaritan village, his attention was drawn to ten lepers who had, according to the law, stood at a distance so that they didn’t risk making anyone else unclean (see Lev. 13:45-46; Num. 5:2-3). Lepers were expected to isolate themselves and that is what they did. Thus, in a real sense, they represent all of those who were marginalized and isolated in the first century world. They seemed to know, although we’re not told how, that there was something special about Jesus. They called to him for pity. Apparently, they believed that he could heal them even from a distance.

One striking feature here is that Luke does not tell us any distinguishing details about these ten men until verse 16 when we find that one of them is different from the rest. In the early part of the account, however, there is one thing that is clear. They are all equal in their leprosy. Just as sin does not discriminate between people whether they be Jew, Samaritan, or something else, neither does this leprosy discriminate. They were all equal before Jesus in their need to be healed.

The text doesn’t tell us when the men were healed, Jesus simply told them to go show themselves to the priests. We don’t know if they were healed instantly or along the way to see the priests, but it does seem that this story has echoes of Naaman’s healing in 2 Kings 5:1-19, where he is also told to take specific action before being healed. The reason for showing themselves to the priests was twofold. The first was that to do so would be in keeping with the law of Moses (Lev. 13:19; 14:1-11). The second was that being truly and fully healed from the skin disease of leprosy went far beyond just the clearing up of the skin condition. They needed to be made whole and be fully accepted and integrated back into the society. Only the priest could declare them ready to do that.

It seems that when they got to the priest, they were all healed. That should not surprise us. What is surprising is that only one came back to Jesus. What happened to the other nine? Luke now tells us, only at this juncture in the account, that the one who returned was a Samaritan, the implication being that the other nine were Jewish. This was of particular insult to the Jews as the Samaritans were a deeply reviled and hated group of people. What truly distinguished this man from the other nine, though, was not that he was Samaritan. If those differences didn’t matter when they all had leprosy and were in need of Jesus then it didn’t matter now. What set him apart was that he saw that he was healed and he knew who healed him.

The nine Jewish men didn’t return. We don’t know why and it really doesn’t matter. The only one who came to Jesus was a Samaritan. He threw himself at Jesus’ feet in the act of submission and acknowledgement of the authority of one greater than himself. He somehow knew that Jesus was the means through which the kingdom of God was breaking into the present age. He was, like the younger son in the parable of the lost son, dead in many ways, but Jesus had now brought him to life.

Who were those who might recognize that Jesus was God’s agent in creating his new family? The answer in this story is as shocking as it has been repeatedly throughout the Gospel of Luke. It was not the people that would have been expected. Everything about the man who returned was wrong. He was a Samaritan, and worse than that, he was a leprous Samaritan. He was a foreigner, meaning that he was from the wrong family, and would have been in the perpetual state of uncleanness that resulted from leprosy. Yet, he was the only one that saw that full restoration came through Jesus. The offer of healing and restoration was available to all who were in equal need before God (cf. Rom. 3:9), but only this outcast knew that Jesus was the way of full restoration and full reconciliation with God. He was the only one who knew that to properly praise God for his healing, he must go to Jesus. The nine Jews missed that point. They were no doubt praising God but they failed to see that the healing had come through Jesus and to praise God in true appreciation for his healing power, they must praise and worship Jesus.

It was apparently the nine who had not fully recognized the means through which they had been healed. They had failed to realize that the divine mercy had come from Jesus. He was the only one who recognized and came to honor Jesus as Lord. He was the one who came to worship God through Jesus. Thus, Luke pictures Jesus in the role that the Temple would normally play. The nine disappear, but the Samaritan, who would have never been allowed in the Temple in Jerusalem, had come to praise God at the feet of Jesus. The one who was born in the wrong family and who would have been denied access to the Temple was now the one who was behaving in the way that the true people of God should. He was coming to Jesus, the true Temple, and would find himself part of the true family of God.

In reaction to his proper response, Jesus tells him to “Get up and go on your way, your faith has made you well.” This seems like a rather run-of-the-mill response but there may be something more to Jesus’ response that Luke wanted his readers to see. The word “anistemi,” which is translated “get up” was a word that could just mean “to stand” or “rise up,” but it was also a word that the early Christian church used quite frequently as one of their popular words to denote the resurrection of those in Christ. It is quite possible that Luke would have expected for his early Christian readers to hear tones of that in Jesus’ word. This outcast, born into the wrong family and outside of the people of God, was now being restored in every way through Jesus Christ. He was being brought into the family of God and the great hope and promise of resurrection was his, just as it can belong to anyone who recognizes Christ as the path to God.


Devotional Thought
One thing that has been pointed out over the years about the Samaritan was that he returned with a heart of gratitude for what God had done for him while the others, if nothing else, failed to show gratitude to Jesus. Do you take time to show constant gratitude towards God for all that he has done for you in your life? If you haven’t done that for awhile, take some time to do it today.

Luke 17:1-10 Commentary

Sin, Faith, Duty
1 Jesus said to his disciples: "Things that cause people to stumble are bound to come, but woe to anyone through whom they come. 2 It would be better for you to be thrown into the sea with a millstone tied around your neck than for you to cause one of these little ones to stumble. 3 So watch yourselves.
"If a brother or sister sins against you, rebuke them; and if they repent, forgive them. 4 Even if they sin against you seven times in a day and seven times come back to you saying 'I repent,' you must forgive them."

5 The apostles said to the Lord, "Increase our faith!"

6 He replied, "If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mulberry tree, 'Be uprooted and planted in the sea,' and it will obey you.

7 "Suppose one of you has a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Will he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, 'Come along now and sit down to eat'? 8 Won't he rather say, 'Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink'? 9 Will he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? 10 So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.' "


Dig Deeper
My college education was full of classes about . . . well, education. I was a secondary social studies major in my undergraduate studies and I was going to school to be a history teacher. We were required to take a certain amount of history classes, of course, but I was surprised to find out that we had to take many more classes about education and educational theory than we took classes in our actual area of study. That was all well and fine and I threw myself into my studies and tried to learn the theories and philosophies behind the different aspects of education, planning, classroom management, and even discipline and motivation. But there was a certain point where, as good as the theories and teaching might have been, I had to learn how those things would work out in the real world of teaching. To simply sit in a laboratory, so to speak, and learn about what I should do when certain things happen, or to hear stories about what other teachers have done in certain situations, would only get me so far. In order for all of the teaching and theory to do any good I had to be able to take that information and put it to work in real situations that I would find myself. I would have to learn to apply it to my world and my teaching experiences.

The last two major parables described by Luke, that of the lost son and that of the rich man and Lazrus, were so powerful and so many-layered that they have continued to challenge, encourage, and inspire disciples for thousands of years. Yet, there is a reality that is true of every written or spoken lesson. It only goes so far. When Jesus told those parables, he was simply passing along information. Granted, it was powerful and timeless information, but information nonetheless. Those stories were pointed and sharp and intended to challenge the hearers with information that would move them to action. But information has to be applied. It has to be be able to be put into practice in the real lives and situations of those that receive the information. That’s what this little section seems to be all about; taking the teaching out of the world of parable and putting it into the real-world lives that the disciples would face as they formed the kind of communities and family to which Jesus was calling his people.

Directly on the heels of the charge against the Pharisees that they were like the brothers of the rich man in the parable who had so rejected the word of God that they wouldn’t listen or change their minds even if they saw someone raised from the dead, Jesus continued to teach his disciples. The focus of this teaching, as a whole, is simple, it is a call to not be like the Pharisees. As a way to put his teachings in real-world terms, Jesus expounded on the meaning of the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in verses 1-2. “Things that cause people to stumble” was a phrase that meant to literally “put up an impediment” in someone’s way. In a sense it referred to something that served like a shut door. The reality was that obstacles would come. That’s the way life is and Jesus never promised that it would be any different for his people.

Lazarus, from the parable, had many obstacles in his path, and the rich man was, in some ways, responsible for many of them. Following Jesus would not remove those kind of obstacles. His people still needed to be obedient to the life that Jesus has called his family. That is life. But that does not remove the responsibility from those who, like the rich man, think only of themselves with no regard to the needs of others. Jesus here was primarily focusing on those that would walk in such a way that they would put up obstacles to the faith of others. It would be better to have an extremely heavy and large millstone tied around your neck and thrown into the sea. In other words, instant death would be better for someone whose actions would drive someone away from their faith, than it would be to face God’s judgment for such an offense.

They should be a family and a community that takes sin and commitment to the truth seriously. They should watch out for such things and be committed to holiness but if a sinner were to repent then that should invoke the family’s forgiveness. The fact is that many grievances, which may or may not be as large as they seem in the moment, but are moments nonetheless that can cause people to stumble, would take place within the community of believers. They should take sin seriously but the heart of the community would be their forgiveness. They would be a people who worked out the kind of grace, love, and forgiveness that had been shown to them by God. They would be a people that embraced the parable of the lost son as their own community-creating and value-forming story.

In fact, if one of their brothers and sisters in the family formed in Christ sinned against them, they should deal with it and not ignore it but when they repent, it should be forgiven. Forgiveness, in the fullest sense, does hinge on the repentance of the offender but Jesus’ people should be a people that get rid of anger and bitterness even before the repentance of the other party so that they are able to forgive (see Eph. 4:31). They should be a community that forgives just as God forgave them (Eph. 4:32). There could be significance to the fact that Jesus seemed to have often tied forgiveness of his family to the number 7 (cf. Matt. 18:21). In Jewish thought seven was a number that was generally related to the days of creation and thus, became a symbol for the formation or creation of something. Similarly, in passages like Leviticus 26:21-28 described the curses of breaking the Covenant in terms of seven-fold curses that signaled de-creation. In connecting their forgiveness to the concepts of seven in Jewish thought, if that is indeed what Jesus was doing, then Jesus was sending the message that in becoming a community of forgiveness, Jesus’ people would be creating the new genuine humanity created in Christ to be what God intended for human communities to be.

In response to being this kind of people, a community that ran on the fuel of forgiveness, the disciples realized how impossible this seemed. The only response that they could muster was a call for increased faith. If they were going to be a people that were faithful to this kind of model, then they realized that they were going to need help to realize that and to even believe that it could be accomplished. Jesus affirms for them, however, that with even a small measure of faith they could realize this. It’s not the size of faith that disciples have but the size of the God in whom our faith rests. In my living room, I have a large picture window and a row of small windows above that that look out into the front yard and the neighborhood. As long as I am up close to those windows, it doesn’t matter how big the window is. I can see the same thing looking out the large window as I can looking out the small windows. The view is the same regardless of the window. It’s similar with faith and God. As long as we’re close to God, we will see and experience the same God even if our faith starts out very small. With just a little faith, even faith that is as small as a mustard seed, the large mulberry tree could be uprooted (The mulberry tree was a type of sycamore tree that held figs and fig trees were an occasional OT symbol for Israel. This means that it’s possible that Jesus was hinting that the kingdom kind of faith would eventually supplant and send the old nation of Israel to the symbolic place of destruction, the sea. Matthew uses a similar saying from Jesus in Matt. 21:21 and, in the overall context, much more focuses on the destruction of the Old Covenant system angle).

The last small parable in verses 7-10 seem to also draw from one of the teaching points of the parable of the lost son. It hinges on the understanding that in this culture to “thank” a servant did not refer to a verbal expression of appreciation but rather meant that the master would be in the servant’s debt as though he had done something special for the master. A slave might go plow the fields, and tend the sheep but wouldn’t that just be his job? Wouldn’t he only be doing what he was supposed to do? In a society where doing something for someone would put them in your debt, it would be absurd to put such a situation in that category. A slave who engaged in such work and then began to think that the master somehow was in his debt or owed him one would be a slave who was in for severe disappointment. It would be simply ridiculous to even imagine such a thing. The master would be under no obligation to reward his slave in some way for such normal and expected behavior. It was not above and beyond the call of duty.

The older son in the parable of the lost son had acted just like the Pharisees were acting. They had begun to think that they were owed something by the master. The eldest son seems to have thought that his obedience somehow earned him honor and gave him the right to a reward. Disciples should not ever think like that. Yes, they would become a community that held to a level of obedience that was challenging and could be impressive by some standards. They would be communities that took sin seriously and held to the truth, while at the same time had radical forgiveness at the heart and soul of their existence. They would be the new humanity of the new creation as the family of God. They would have faith that would, through the power of God, accomplish great things, but at the end of the day, they were nothing more than slaves doing what they were called to do. That was all basic level discipleship and their response should be continuous joy and appreciation, and a commitment to never take on the entitlement attitude of the oldest son, the one that became so entitled that he turned his back on the father.


Devotional Thought
How are you doing in the area of forgiving others? Do you quickly deal with hurts and disappointments and then quickly forgive your spouse, co-workers, fellow Christian brothers and sisters? Do you have faith that you really can be part of a Christian community that breathes on the air of forgiveness or do you, like the disciples, need to go to Jesus and request an increase in your faith. If you do, you will realize, just like they did, that the issue is not how much faith you have but in the realization that you have faith in a big God.

Luke 16:19-31 Commentary

The Rich Man and Lazarus
19"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. 20At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores 21and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.

22"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried. 23In hell,[c] where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. 24So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'

25"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. 26And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'

27"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, 28for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.'

29"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'

30" 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'

31"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' "


Dig Deeper
Over the years I have had many religious conversations with people that had different beliefs or opinions than I did. I have changed the mind of some of those folks and I have learned some things along the way as well. It can be quite pleasant to sit down and respectfully have a dialogue with someone who is genuinely open to the truth and ready to change their mind if it can be demonstrated that they have not been believing what is actually true. I have always tried to strike that balance between being firm in my convictions and beliefs while at the same time being open to being wrong from time to time and needing to adjust my understanding or beliefs. I have been amazed over the years, however, at how many people are just not open to the truth. They know what they know and will not be persuaded away from that regardless of how illogical or how based on experience or something other than facts their beliefs really are. It’s always amazing to me when someone can look at great biblical truths like the deity of Christ, the resurrection, or the truth of our need to be baptized into into Christ, and yet reject the clear facts in favor of what they just “know” or what someone they value has taught them, or something else along those lines. In fact, beliefs that are rooted in our emotions rather than those that are rooted in the facts can be dangerous because we are so much more unlikely to be open to the truth if it contradicts our emotionally based beliefs.

There has been much debate and speculation over the years as to what the primary meaning or purpose of this passage actually is. Is it about the great reversal of fortune that will be a reality in the kingdom of God? Is it about the dangers of the wealthy who refuse mercy and justice to the poor and downtrodden? Is it designed to teach us about the set-up of the afterlife? Is it’s primary point to teach that once we die, our destinations are sealed and cannot be changed? I suppose, from one angle or another, there are elements of all of those things within this passage, but none of those really seem to be the heart of the story. The core of this story is summed up, in fact, in the last verse of this chapter. This story, at it’s most fundamental level, is about being convinced. It was a warning from Jesus to take honest stock in your beliefs and who you were aligning yourself with and to consider whether you were open to being convinced by the truth of Jesus’ ministry or whether you were going to cling to your beliefs so tightly that nothing about the truth would ever convince you differently?

One question that often arises immediately with this account is whether it is a parable or not. It certainly appears that everything about this story point to it being a very specific type of parable like that of the “Good Samaritan” or even the parable of the “Lost Son.” It is remarkable among parables because it is the only one that uses a specific name, but we’ll examine why that might have been shortly. All signs point to this being a parable which means that it was a tool for Jesus to teach something about the kingdom of God as was being made manifest through his ministry. Some people tend to define parables as earthly stories that teach spiritual truths, but this definition is not satisfactory. Parables have specifically to due with Jesus’ ministry and the in-breaking of the kingdom of God.

There is one that is very clear about this parable. The contrast between the rich man and Lazarus could not be any more distinct. The rich man was covered in purple and fine linen, things often associated with royalty and the priesthood in ancient Israel. On the other hand, Lazarus was covered with sores, something that would have left him ceremonially unclean and a relative outcast. The rich man lived in a large house in the lap of luxury while Lazarus could only be carried by members of his community to beg at the gate of the rich man. This would have meant that those who laid him there could not help him with his needs beyond doing what they could, which was taking him to the gate of a rich man who could help but chose not to. The rich man ate the best of foods while Lazarus longed just to eat the scraps from his table. The rich man would have held large banquets with many important friends but Lazarus was left at the mercy of a mangy pack of stray dogs who came and licked up his sores, cementing his ongoing state of ceremonial uncleanness. When the rich died he was buried, no doubt in a lavish and pricey manner. But no mention is made of Lazarus being buried at all. Not being buried would have been the final insult to a man that had nothing to show for his life in the present age.

In death, everything has reversed. Once they enter into the realm of Hades and Abraham’s side, everything has dramatically reversed. The rich man, who had everything by the standards of the present age, finds himself in eternal torment. Lazarus, though, finds himself in paradise in the very presence of Abraham. (Many have debated the accuracy of the picture of the afterlife given here since it is a parable but Jesus always described accurate situations and then stylized them to make a point in his parable, so it seems quite likely that what he pictures was quite accurate. Before the resurrection of Christ the righteous did enter into paradise which was in proximity to the torment of Hades, separated by the bottomless Abyss. The Scriptures seem to point to the fact, however, that now those in Christ enter into heaven with the Lord and await resurrection). What is quite clear is that their positions are fixed once they enter into death.

The rich man demonstrates, despite the reversal of fortunes, that he still has not changed his perspective on Lazarus. He still views him as someone who can be sent off at his convenience. Could Lazarus come and comfort him? No, says Abraham. But perhaps he could be dispatched to go warn his five brothers to repent of a similar lifestyle that has landed him in eternal torment.

In the larger Lukan context, it would seem odd that Luke included this story to give some valuable information about the layout of the afterlife. Certainly there are some themes running through this story that deal with the ideas of the great upheaval that was being brought about by the coming of the kingdom of God. The rich man had everything in the present age but that is all that he cared about or pursued. He constantly and consistently did his own will and settled into a lifestyle that systematically ignored the will of God to care for the downtrodden. All the while, the rich man would have likely saw his good fortune and vast wealth as signs that God was blessing him. This, then, is a cautionary tale of the dangers of looking at “signs” for God’s approval rather than actually looking at God’s will and his word. Lazarus, on the other hand, had nothing in the present age but found himself part of the eternal inheritance that was due to God’s people.

If the point of this parable was simply about the dangers of wealth, though, then it would almost seem that Lazarus finds himself among the righteous for the sole reason that he was poor in the present age. But the true meaning of this parable goes beyond that as there is no inherent value to just being poor in the present age when it comes to one’s status in the family of God. At it’s heart, this is a story about Jesus’ ministry and the coming kingdom. In the previous chapter, Jesus told three parables that explained why he dined with and welcomed sinners into his ministry. In the early verses of chapter 16, Jesus challenged the Pharisees to the idea of sacrificing in the present with an eye on the eternal. Here, he clearly lays out why that is such an important decision.

In a very real sense, then, the rich man, dressed in the colors of royalty and the priesthood, was a representative of Israel, specifically the religious leaders of Israel. Lazarus was a representative of those sinners and outcasts that the Pharisees so badly wanted to do away with, but whom Jesus was so eager to bring under his wings. Israel was ignoring those who most needed the light of the kingdom of God and in doing so, were showing that they didn’t have the light of God themselves. They were sure that they were God’s people, but their treatment of the “sinners” were showing that they did not have God’s will in mind at all. They were in very real danger of finding themselves in the position of the rich man, permanently locked out of the kingdom of God, while those that they had so looked down upon were coming to Jesus’ kingdom in droves. But they had one advantage over the rich man’s brothers. They were receiving a warning before it was too late in the very form of this story.

But I would like to propose something else that adds a layer to this story. It seems curious that this would be the only parable that does have a proper name in it. It would seem to me that there was a purpose behind this. When Jesus told this story, it probably wouldn’t have registered much with his hearers. But the gospel of John tells us that a little while later Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the grave. This was a sign that was not part of the great and promised resurrection but certainly was a sample of and pointed to it in some ways. Many see verse 31 as a reference to Jesus’ coming resurrection but I don’t think that this was Jesus’ primary reference. Imagine the jaw-dropping power of putting together this story with the actual raising from the dead of Lazarus from John 11.

I would put forth the speculation that part of the point of this passage for Jesus was a subtle prophecy and a stern warning for those who would later read his words in Luke’s gospel. The Law and the prophets had long pointed to coming of the Messiah and to the one family of many nations and that was truly being fulfilled in Jesus. But most were so committed to their own vision that they refused to be convinced by anything Jesus did. Even if there was a Lazarus who really did come back from the dead, they wouldn’t be convinced because they weren’t really clinging to the Scriptures. They were clinging to what they wanted the Scriptures to say. So was Jesus correct? What was the response of the Jewish religious leadership when they saw that Jesus had quite publicly raised someone from the dead, someone named Lazarus no less? They demonstrated the truth that they were more afraid of Rome than God as they worried that if they “let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and then the Romans will come and take away both our temple and our nation” (Jn. 11:48). They decided to kill Jesus because “ it is better for you that one man die for the people than that the whole nation perish” (Jn. 11:50). Someone had risen from the dead to warn them and they would not listen because they had no interest in listening to God’s word.

This serves as a final reminder to how powerful Jesus believed the word of God to be. He saw the Law and the Prophets as even more able to change a heart and direct someone to the truth than even seeing someone raised from the dead. We can tend to think that there are so many important factors in brining someone to faith in Christ, but the reality is, nothing is more vital or more powerful than the word of God. We must always remember that and put the word of God first so that it might do it’s work.


Devotional Thought
Do you have as much reverence for the power of the word of God as Jesus did? Are there any areas of your life that you have had trouble in changing or someone that you would like to help become a disciple but have had trouble? Have you really put the word of God to use as your primary weapon?

Luke 16:14-18 Commentary

14 The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus. 15 He said to them, "You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God's sight.

Additional Teachings
16 "The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John. Since that time, the good news of the kingdom of God is being preached, and people are forcing their way into it. 17 It is easier for heaven and earth to disappear than for the least stroke of a pen to drop out of the Law.

18 "Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and the man who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.



Dig Deeper
There is, in the United States these days, a growing chasm between people with large differences in their political and philosophical ideologies. At one time, it seems like the differences between different sides of the American spectrum were not that wide but they are growing day-by-day now. These two side are often characterized by the terms “liberal” and “conservative.” America is unique, though, in the larger swath of the world, because most political disagreements in America don’t come down to what is best for the country (although that is what both sides claim to want) but they usually come down to what is Constitutional (a phrase in America that has come to mean something that is in keeping with the principles of both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence). One of the great themes in American life that was put into our DNA as a country from the Declaration of Independence has been the right that every American citizen has to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. We are familiar with those items and place great value on them while vehemently opposing anyone who we might perceive as trying to impinge upon those things. One American issue that has really brought out this topic is the reforms in healthcare. Opponents of this reform have charged that those in favor of healthcare want to institute an aspect of healthcare reform that would encourage older Americans to end their life. They then have charged them with favoring socialistic policies that would infringe on people’s personal freedoms to make decisions for themselves like whether or not to have healthcare coverage. All of this reform, they argue, will ultimately destroy the American economy and cause, for the first time, a generation of young people who cannot hope to do better than their parents.

At the heart of this, in the American mind, is not really a debate over those specific issues. Wise Americans understand that those three arguments are, in many senses, an appeal back to the Declaration and the very ideas of what it means to be American. The hope of those who take those positions is that Americans will hear those three arguments and put it together that those are all aspects of what it means to be a “Constitutional” American: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Their hope is that people will come to share their point of view that those who favor a certain type of healthcare reform are actually embracing un-American ideas.

Because those arguments are all concerning healthcare, it is easy to see the connection. But when we look at passages like this one in Luke, it seems like Luke has given three rather different and unconnected topics. It’s quite probable, granted, that Jesus didn’t put these exact three thoughts together, one after the other like this, but that Luke has taken three different quotations from Jesus and put them together. One of the great mysteries that puzzles many commentators is how these three topics (the love of money, the coming of the kingdom as it relates to the Law, and divorce) come together. I believe, in agreement with scholars like Joel Green and others, that the best way to understand the connection of these passages is to see that Luke has put together these three aspects of Jesus’ teaching to appeal to a common Jewish belief that there were three “nets” in which Israel was snared (this is described, for instance, in the Qumranic text, the Damascus Rule, which was part of the Dead Sea Scrolls). These “nets” were the love of riches, profaning God’s word and the Temple, and fornication. It is quite possible that it is to these three abominations that Luke is appealing here.

The first charge mentioned by Luke against the Pharisees is in response to the fact that they have now devolved into full out ridicule of Jesus. They were apparently listening as Jesus charged his disciples with giving up their present ideas of wealth and the like to make friends in the eternal sense. Rather than being lovers of the eternal reality though, the Pharisees were lovers of money and the things of the present age. In the biblical times, the advantage of wealth went beyond it’s buying power and was seen as having the double value in the currency of status and honor. The more wealth one had, the more honored and the higher status they were. Thus, it was common in Luke’s day to use phrases like “loved money” to refer to idea that loving money was really loving self. They were caught up in the worldly system that they would have been so quick to denounce.

Jesus pointed out that rather than finding their status as God’s people, being justified, in God’s sight, they sought it out in the eyes of men. This is clearly demonstrated in passages like Matthew 12:45-46 in which we are told that the Pharisees wanted to arrest Jesus but didn’t because of their fear of the crowds. God was not their priority. What people thought of them was their true priority. If they really did think that Jesus was a blasphemer and that obeying God was all that mattered, then they should have sought to have him arrested regardless of what the crowds wanted or thought. They were caught up in being shown to be God’s people according to the values of man rather than valuing what God truly valued. They were clearly, Luke wants us to see, ensnared in the net of riches. That was strike one.

The second charge against the Pharisees, then, has to due with their lack of discernment and commitment to God’s will and covenant as found in his kingdom. Just as they were guilty of idolatry in serving money and the things of their own will rather than God’s will, they were equally guilty of idolatry in seeking their own version of the kingdom. All of the Scriptures, referred to as the Law and the Prophets, were proclaimed right up until the coming of John. John was the threshold of change, though. The Law and the Prophets pointed to and promised something new and it had now come. As the prophet Jeremiah had promised, “’The time is coming,’ declares the LORD, ‘when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their forefathers. . . . I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. No longer will a man teach his neighbor, or a man his brother, saying, 'Know the LORD,' because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest” (Jer. 31:31-34).

The time of that promise had come, but people were trying to force their way into God’s kingdom rather than being justified into God’s family according to the promises that God had always promised through the Law and the prophets. The Scriptures had always pointed to the fulfillment of the scriptural promises and the new thing that God would do. It would be easier for heaven and earth to pass away (this was a common figure of speech that did not imply the actual passing away of heaven or earth but spoke of the ridiculousness of the thought that the thing being referred to could actually pass away) than for God’s promises in the law to pass away. Those who turn to this verse (and it’s parallel in Matthew 5:17-18) as a proof text to bolster their claim that the Old Testament Law is still binding in the New Covenant miss the point of Jesus’ words. His point was that the promises of God as found in the Old Covenant Scriptures were being fulfilled in his ministry. Not one of those promises were being dropped out and they never would be.

They were ones that were misinterpreting, or abolishing (the figure of speech used in Matthew 5) the law. Jesus’ ministry was fulfilling the Scriptures. The Law and the prophets shouldn’t be thought of as having no relevance or simply passing away, rather that they should be interpreted and understood in light of Jesus’ new kingdom announcement and ministry. In clinging to their own version of how God should work, the Pharisees were the ones who were misinterpreting, and thus profaning, the word of God and his new Temple, Jesus Christ. That was strike two.

They were guilty, declared Jesus, of loving riches and profaning God but what about fornication? From one angle, their idolatry of self could have justified the charge of spiritual fornication, but Luke drives the point home further by demonstrating one example of their loose interpretation of Scriptures and how that act of profaning God’s word had actually led them into fornication.

Anyone who divorced his wife, said Jesus, for the purpose of marrying another woman was guilty of adultery, which was a form of fornication. The commitment among God’s people to stay married was a commitment to stay married. To break that commitment was to engage in adultery. (this was not to say that anyone who has ever divorced and remarried cannot be forgiven and brought into God’s kingdom as a full member of his family, rather Jesus’ point had to do with their acceptance and embracing of divorce as a viable option despite the fact that this was contrary to God’s word).

As Luke has made clear, the Pharisees in their commitment to the idolatry of money and self, their profaning and rejection of God’s word, and divorce were actually distancing themselves from the very word they claimed to uphold. Luke will drive this irony home even further in 18:9-14 when he depicts a Pharisee standing up to pray to thank God that he was not like other men, a robber, an evildoer, or an adulterer. The very thing that they claimed to not be, is precisely what they were.

The unifying theme throughout this whole section, going back to the beginning of the chapter, is a matter of being loyal to God’s kingdom over the kingdom of self and the world. The Pharisees, as a representative group, had made their choice and rejected God’s truth as was evidenced by their actions. In the eyes of Jesus’ contemporaries they were firmly ensnared in the net of the world. The warning for us is to ensure that we avoid those nets and are people who are firmly committed to reflecting God’s image to the world around us.


Devotional Thought
We have seen that the three “nets” of the Jewish people were riches, profaning the word and the Temple, and adultery. If we were to create three “nets” for the people of your country or culture what would they be? How is your church family doing in casting off those nets and then helping others in your culture to escape them as well? What are some things that you all could be doing to better help people escape those particular nets?

Luke 16:1-13 Commentary

The Parable of the Shrewd Manager
1Jesus told his disciples: "There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. 2So he called him in and asked him, 'What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.'
3"The manager said to himself, 'What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I'm not strong enough to dig, and I'm ashamed to beg— 4I know what I'll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.'

5"So he called in each one of his master's debtors. He asked the first, 'How much do you owe my master?'

6" 'Eight hundred gallons[a] of olive oil,' he replied.
"The manager told him, 'Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.'

7"Then he asked the second, 'And how much do you owe?'
" 'A thousand bushels[b] of wheat,' he replied.
"He told him, 'Take your bill and make it eight hundred.'

8"The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light. 9I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.

10"Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much. 11So if you have not been trustworthy in handling worldly wealth, who will trust you with true riches? 12And if you have not been trustworthy with someone else's property, who will give you property of your own?

13"No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money."


Dig Deeper
Anyone who has been over to our house in the last three years knows that we have a rather energetic young terrier named Johnny Cash. Johnny is a lovable and good-natured dog, but one (with all apologies to my wife) who is just not the sharpest knife in the drawer. In other words, he is a good dog but he’s just not very smart. He loves to play, though. In fact, he is always read for a good game of catch, tug, or chase. One of his favorite games is to chase anything that you throw, even if it is not something that you really wanted him to go get and bring back to you. One of the funniest things that he does though happens when you throw two things at him. Like I said, he is not the brightest bulb, and throwing two things at once confuses him. He hilariously jumps back and forth between the two items, trying to pick them both up with his mouth at the same time. He goes back and forth between the two items, trying to figure out how to carry both of them at a more and more frantic pace. If you feign like you are going to take one of his items away, then he really gets crazy, moving his mouth quickly back and forth, picking up one item, then dropping it to pick up the other. He does this quickly and repeatedly but one thing never changes. The canine genius simply cannot carry two things at once, he must choose one or the other.

Jesus has been systematically redefining, through the pages of Luke’s gospel, what his family of disciples would look like. He has redefined what it means to follow God and be part of that family, and he has drastically redrawn the lines of who would be welcomed into that family. He has shown that his brothers and sisters in that family needed to think and act in dramatically different ways than the culture in which they found themselves, wherever that might be. In chapter 15, Jesus told of the shocking grace and love that the Father was willing to shower on those who would but recognize that they had squandered what God had given, would admit that they were lost, and would do nothing more than to allow the Father to find them. But to experience that, a clear choice has to be made. Who will your master be? Will it be your possessions, your wealth, and ultimately your own will, or will it be God? Above all, Jesus knew that to truly abandon one’s own agenda and follow him meant that we must be willing to give up any thoughts of our plans and advancement, and trust in God alone.

Virtually every commentator and biblical teacher will agree, if on nothing else, that this is one of Jesus’ most difficult parables to understand and interpret. There are, in fact, so many different potential interpretations of this passage, that we simply do not have the space to consider all of the possibilities. When a passage is so difficult, though, it usually is a signal that there are some cultural explanations or usage of figures of speech that are difficult for us, who are separated by a vast cultural gap and time gap, to understand. The keys, I believe, in understanding this complicated passage, are to understand a bit of the cultural example that Jesus gives along with our continued consideration of the larger context of this new Exodus passage that stretches from Luke 9-19.

One of the clues to better understanding this parable is to recognize that it comes on the heals, at least in Luke’s ordering of things, of the parable of the lost son. He has now turned to his disciples to specifically teach them something important about decisions that must be made to turn away from the Israel that the religious leaders and Pharisees were calling people to, and to turn to the true Israel that Jesus was calling them to.

Another important clue is to give consideration to the fact that this is indeed a parable. Parables were short stories that used common, everyday occurrences to demonstrate some truth about the kingdom of God. As a general rule, the intent of the parable was not to expound upon the actual topic of the parable, although it may at time shed some moral light on the subject area of the example. But, for instance, the main thrust of Jesus’ parable about the man who threw a great banquet (Lk. 14:16-23) did not have to do with what one should do if they throw a party and no one comes. Nor was the main point of his parable of the ten virgins (Matthew 25:1-13) meant to be sage advice on how virgins should prepare for a wedding. And certainly the purpose of the parable of the sower (Lk. 8:1-15) was not an examination of good farming techniques. In the same way, although there may be some valuable principles for how one handles money, the parable and the subsequent explanation that we have in this passage have much more to do with a truth of the kingdom of God and what it means to follow Jesus.

In general, it was a safe assumption in first century Israel that if someone told a story of this nature about a manager and a master that the master was generally representative of God and the manager was Israel. Although, there are differing ways to interpret this parable, I believe that this is probably the best explanation. Jesus describes a manager that is about to lose his position due to poor behavior which leaves him with a choice of what to do. He looks at the inevitability of the situation and makes the decision to take care of his future rather than clinging to his practices of the past. Biblical scholar Duncan Derret has ably demonstrated that what the manager did to soften the blow of the situation he was in, was to forgo the commission that a manager in this situation would have received, which would have been a significant amount. Continuing in his previously dishonest practices would have done him no good so he needed to abandon them and do something to create good will. His gesture would have put the clients in his debt and ensured that they would treat him kindly when he was eventually fired by the master. He took advantage of the time that he had to turn away from his dishonesty and to give up what he might have had coming in the present to put himself in a better situation in the long run. The master admired the fact that the manager had created good will for himself by acting shrewdly in a way that softened the blow for him but did not further cheat the master.

As we have seen, a large portion of the content of Jesus’ teachings had to do with the warnings to Israel for her failure as a nation to be God’s light to the world. The time was running short for them to embrace the Messiah as the true identity of the people of God. Israel was about to permanently lose their position as God’s manager of his creation. In the face of that impending removal, what should they do? Well, they should learn from an example of a shrewd and worldly person. They should start thinking long term rather than short term. They should start to think more about their position in the eternal age to come rather than clinging to how they had always done things. That time was coming to an end. To follow Jesus meant to think of one’s position in light of the eternity of the resurrection age and to give up what might seem like profitable things in the present age (things such as land, money, inheritance, and family status) so as to live a life that was preparing them for that future age.

The manager had finally shown that he was ready to give up the dishonesty that cost him the job and he turned to a solution that meant giving up a little profit in the present for a long-term solution, one that was not built on dishonesty or ripping off the master. He had learned the true priorities and what it took to provide for himself in the long run.

Apparently, most of Israel was not that wise yet. They were not thinking about their long-term status but were instead clinging to every little drop of their own commission in the present that they could squeeze out. If they were going to cling to the present ideas of status before God rather than the values of the age to come, as was evidenced by the importance they placed on wealth, inheritance, and land, then they would never be able to embrace the values of being God’s true people. They had poorly handled the affairs that God had given them and they were unwilling to change in light of their inevitable dismissal.

Why would God give his true inheritance to a people that had squandered what they had been given? Maybe Israel was behaving more like the younger son of the previous parable then they would care to admit. They had wasted the possessions and advantages that had been given them as God’s people (Luke uses the exact same phrase in 16:1 that he used in 15:13 to describe the younger son’s squandering of his possessions) so why would they be given more?

When it came down to it for Israel, or for anyone who would take up the challenge of the life of Christ, it was a matter of which master was going to be served. Would it be the master of self and making weak and futile attempts to provide for self by clinging to the practices of the past? Or would they have the shrewdness and wisdom to read the signs and see that things were changing radically. Either we drop the idea of temporary gain and think from the perspective of God’s coming future age or we will find ourselves with nothing at all. It is a choice of masters. We embrace one and sever ties with the other, plain and simple. We can’t have two masters anymore than my little dog can carry two balls in his mouth at once. It must either be the master of self and thinking of the present, as most visibly characterized by money, or the master of God. The choice must be made decisively.


Devotional Thought
Take a long, hard look at your life. Can you truly say that you serve only one master or do you sometimes find yourself acting like a dog trying to carry two balls at the same time? Many of us have made that decision and are serving God as best we can, but some of us haven’t, perhaps, ever fully made that choice.