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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 9.

    We often view the ministries of Jesus and John the Baptist as being very different. This is largely based on Jesus’ contrast between Himself and John where He said that John was criticized for abstaining from things and He was criticized for partaking in those same things. However, here Luke tells us that many people thought of Jesus’ ministry as an extension of John’s, to the point where some thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead. This tells us that while Jesus may have been stylistically very different from John, their message and their actions must have been very similar. It strikes me that the reason Matthew, Mark, and Luke all made note of Herod’s confusion was in part to communicate to us that some of us will be called to lives of self-denial and sacrifice of physical comfort while others will be called to befriend sinners and illustrate to them that God intends for us to experience joy. Even those called to asceticism are intended to experience joy.

    Luke revisited the confusion which people had about Jesus just a few verses later, after recounting the feeding of the 5,000. After asking the disciples who the crowds thought He was, and receiving their answers, Jesus asked them who they thought He was. Peter responded for the disciples by saying that He was the Messiah. Immediately after this Jesus began teaching them that He would be put to death and then be resurrected. As part of that Jesus also taught the disciples that they needed to be prepared to sacrifice themselves to be His followers. It seems to me that Jesus started to teach about His death and the suffering His disciples would face at this point in order to begin to change His disciples expectations about what the Messiah would bring. An important point Jesus makes here is that getting every possible material good will do us no good if we lose ourselves in the process. An author I enjoy reading placed a paraphrase of this in the mouth of one of her characters, “It does you no good to gain your heart’s desire if it costs your heart to get it.” The character in question made this statement when they surrendered the opportunity to gain something they had spent their whole life working towards when they realized the next step in their plan to get it involved compromising their principles.