Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 10-11.

I find it interesting that in today’s passage Luke presents a sort of “second take” on some of the things which he described Jesus teaching earlier.  The passage starts with Jesus sending out seventy-two of His disciples to preach in places where He was going to go shortly, an expansion of when He had earlier sent out just the Twelve.  This gives us a kind of model for how ministry should work.  Jesus sent out twelve, then He sent out seventy-two.  Luke tells us that He sent the seventy-two our in pairs.  He did not send them out alone, but with someone to give them support.  In both cases, those who were sent out came and back and were debriefed.  That is they reported the results of their ministry and the lessons they had learned.   Jesus then helped them put their experience in perspective.  He told them that while He had given them power over spirits and had given them protection against danger, their joy should not be in the power they had, but in being citizens of heaven, citizens of God’s kingdom.

Further on in today’s passage, Luke recounts how Jesus said, “Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters.”  (Yesterday I quoted that from Matthew because I had forgotten that it was here)  As I said yesterday, this seems like a contradiction of what He told them in yesterday’s passage, but it is not.  This saying and the one from yesterday are two sides of the same coin.   In yesterday’s passage, the person who led Jesus to say, “whoever is not against you is for you,” was casting out demons in Jesus’ name.  In today’s passage, Jesus says that those who are not with Him are against Him when people accused Him of driving out demons with the power of demons.  In the previous case, someone had recognized, and was using, the power of Jesus’ name to accomplish good.  Here, people were claiming that the good Jesus was doing (driving out demons) was evidence that He was evil.

I was going to write about Jesus using the idea that no one lights a lamp in order to hide it in a different way in today’s passage, but I have run out of time to work on this.  So, perhaps another time, but I wanted to point out yet another place where Luke showed that Jesus revisited an earlier teaching with a different take on the lesson.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 6-7.

In today’s passage Luke recounts a sermon by Jesus which is very similar to the one recorded in  Matthew as the Sermon on the Mount.  Some people think see the differences between them as indicating contradictions between the Gospel of Luke and the Gospel of Matthew in a “Well, which way did Jesus say it? The way Luke recorded it or the way Matthew did?”  I see them as two different deliveries of the same basic sermon at different places and times, much like many public speakers deliver variations on the same speech to different audiences (I’ve done it myself).  I believe that Jesus delivered variations on this sermon multiple times throughout His three years of ministry.  In fact, I believe that this was probably the core of most of the sermons He preached.

Now, having said all of that, let’s get to what He actually said, as recorded by Luke.  Here the Beatitudes have a completely different slant.  Matthew recorded, “Blessed are the poor in spirit…”, Luke records, “Blessed are the poor…”  Matthew, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness…”, Luke, “Blessed are the hungry…”.  Luke adds a series of “Woes” after his list of Beatitudes.  They are the opposites of the blessings.  I think the one to which we need to pay the closest attention is the last one. “Woe to you when everyone speaks well of you, for that is how their ancestors treated the false prophets.”  That is a really tough one.  We all want people to speak well of us, but Jesus tells us that if everyone speaks well of us, we are probably guilty of misrepresenting God’s words when we speak.  From there I want to go into Luke’s account of what Jesus taught about the golden rule.  The context really makes it clear what Jesus meant when He told us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.  Jesus says that right after telling us to love our enemies and to pray for those who mistreat us.  You can’t get any further from this world’s take on the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as they do unto you.”  No, Jesus tells us that it is even more important to do nice things to those who treat us badly.  All too many of us think that being a nice person means being nice to those who are nice to us, but it’s OK to be rude to those who are rude to us.  Well, Jesus tells us that if we want credit for being nice we need to be nice to those who are mean to us. 

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 4-5.

Luke’s account says that after teaching and casting a demon out of a demon-possessed man in the synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus went to Simon’s house.  I find this interesting because Luke does not mention Simon, or anyone else, becoming Jesus’ disciple before this.  As I was thinking about this, I believe that Luke wrote it this way in order to communicate that he was not reporting the events from early in Jesus’ ministry necessarily in the order in which they occurred.  In order to explain why I reach this conclusion let me recount the order of events which Luke records here.

• Baptized by John in the Jordan River
• Fasted in the wilderness for 40 days
• Returned to Galilee and taught in the synagogues
• Taught in the synagogue in Nazareth and was rejected by the people there, after He said they would ask Him to perform miracles like those He performed in Capernaum.
• Taught in the synagogue in Capernaum and drove a demon out of a demon-possessed man.
• Went to Simon’s house, healed Simon’s mother-in-law, healed many others.
• Went to a solitary place where people from Capernaum found Him and begged Him to stay in Capernaum.
• Preached in synagogues in Judea
• Preached from Simon’s boat at the Lake of Gennesaret(also known as the Sea of Galilee)
• Called Simon, James, and John to be fishers of men (may have called others, including Andrew, here, but Luke’s wording is ambiguous).
• Jesus taught in other towns

Now, let’s look at that.  Luke records Jesus preaching in the synagogue in Nazareth before recording Him doing anything in Capernaum.  Yet, Jesus references what He did in Capernaum to the people of Nazareth.  Which suggests that the preaching Jesus did in Capernaum, that Luke records after he records Jesus experience in Nazareth, occurred before the events in Nazareth.  So, why does this matter?  It matters because many of the “contradictions” people point to in the Gospel accounts are about how the different Gospels place events in different orders, or, apparently, at different times.  Here Luke, the Gospel writer most obsessive about accuracy, communicates that he is not recording events in exactly the order they happened.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 2-3.

OK, again something I have never thought about before.  When the angel appeared to the shepherds, he told them that he was bringing good news, and that good news was that a Savior had been born, the Messiah.  That isn’t the new thought.  Then the angel told them he had a sign for them that what he had just said was true.  The sign was that they would find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger.  I have always read this, and hear it preached about as directions on where to find the baby, but that isn’t what the angel said.  The angel said that finding that baby would be a sign to them that his message. that the Messiah had been born, was true.  The angel was not telling them, “This is how you will know you have found the baby I am talking about.”  The angel was saying, “This is how you will know that the Messiah has been born.”  I am not sure what the implications are of this different perspective on what the angel said, but I think they are significant.

I also want to comment on something I noticed about Jesus staying in Jerusalem when He was twelve.  So, it says that Jesus’ parents found Him after three days of looking for Him in Jerusalem.  It occurred to me this morning that this was a foreshadowing of His death and resurrection.  In particular, it foreshadows the three days of anxiety which His mother, Mary, would experience after His crucifixion: anxiety which was relieved when He rose from the dead.  Again, I am not sure what the implications of that foreshadowing are, but they are worth thinking about.  Of course, this account has two very important implications.  The first being that Jesus is always doing His Father’s business.  The second, that when we look for Jesus, we should start in His Father’s House.  Combining the two, we find Jesus when we look at where God’s business is being done.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.