Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 19-20.

I want to start by writing about Jesus going to Zacchaeus’  house.  We are not given much information about Zacchaeus, just that he was a short man, a tax collector, and wealthy.  We also know that Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus as He passed through Jericho.  W do not know why Zacchaeus wanted to see Jesus, did he hope to see Him perform a miracle, was he just curious what this man everybody was talking about looked like?  In any case, Jesus rewarded Zacchaeus for his curiosity by inviting Himself to Zacchaeus’ house, something which Zacchaeus would never have had the gall to do.  And I think this gives us a hint into Zacchaeus’ motive: he wanted to know more about Jesus, but “knew” that he, a terrible sinner, could never get close to this righteous man .  When people condemned Jesus for associating with someone like Zacchaeus, Zacchaeus was inspired to transform himself (or perhaps, was transformed).   Jesus pointedly acknowledged Zacchaeus’ transformation.  I believe that Luke is contrasting Zacchaeus’ reaction to Jesus to that of the ruler who had approached Him in the previous chapter; the ruler who was unwilling to give up his wealth to gain salvation.

Jesus followed up on Zacchaeus’ declaration by telling the parable of the ten minas.  This parable bears a close resemblance to the parable of the ten talents recounted by Matthew, but with a key difference I never noticed before today.  In Matthew, the ten talents were divided up among three servants and we were told what each did with their talents.  Here, each servant is given a mina (a coin) and we are only told what three of them accomplished with the mina they were given.  Many people believe that both parables are the same one, just remembered differently by the Gospel writers (or their sources).  However, it strikes me that the sum total of what the four Gospels report of what Jesus said is not very much for a man who taught regularly over a period of three years.  So, I suspect that the differences between Matthew and Luke stem from the fact that they were actually reporting different parables which Jesus taught at different times for somewhat different purposes.  In this parable all of the servants started out equal.  One worked really hard with what he was given and achieved great results, another worked hard and achieved good results, but one did not put in any effort and achieved nothing.  While the first received a greater reward for his hard work than the second, he was praised no more than the second.  Only the third who made no effort was reprimanded.  And it is worth noting that except for the mina which had originally been given to the third servant, most of the “reward” the first servant received was more work.  Being given cities meant he had to govern and manage those cities, meant a lot of work.  Our reward for working hard and obtaining good results from the resources God has given us is the expectation that we will work even harder with the greater resources He gives us.

The saying which I paraphrased in the title is often used as a cautionary tale.  If we truly understand what God has done for us, we should indeed consider being given more and harder tasks by God to be a reward.

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