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 4-5.

When Peter saw Jesus’ power demonstrated, he recognized both his sin, and how undeserving he was to be near someone as holy as Jesus.  His response was to ask Jesus to leave him so that he, Peter, would not make Him, Jesus, unclean.  In the account of the man with leprosy, which comes next, the leper says, “Lord, if you are willing, you can make me clean.”  To which Jesus replies, “I am willing. Be clean.”  I believe that Luke put these two accounts next to each other in order to show us that Jesus offers to cleanse us of both our physical uncleanness and our sin.  When Peter saw Jesus’ holiness, he saw the only answer to be separating himself from Him.  However, the account of the leper* shows us that if we acknowledge our uncleanness, our sinfulness, God, through Jesus, will cleanse us if we want to be cleansed.  We need to echo both Peter and the man with leprosy.  First, we must acknowledge our sin.  Second, we must recognize that being cleansed of our sin, being forgiven, only happens because God is willing to make us clean.

*I like how Luke writes “a man…who was covered with leprosy”, rather than “a leper”.  It indicates that the thing which made the man unclean did not define who he was.  We should view people the same way.  God does not define us by our sins, and we should not define our fellow man that way either.

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.

When Jesus called Levi the tax collector to be one of His followers, Levi threw a lavish party which Jesus and His disciples attended.  The Pharisees asked Jesus’ disciples why they would associate with tax collectors and sinners.  I want to note that, in the context of the Gospels, tax collectors were those enriched themselves by collaborating with the enemy to the detriment of their countrymen.  To which Jesus replied, even though He had not been asked directly, that He had not come to call the righteous, but rather sinners, to repentance.  The Pharisees then asked Jesus why His disciples did not fast, contrasting their failure to fast with the fasting by the disciples of the various Pharisee teachers and even John the Baptist’s disciples.  Jesus replied with an interesting metaphor.  First, He says that no one puts new wine in old wineskins, because the new wine would burst the old wineskins.  That would seem fairly straightforward: Jesus’ ministry is a new thing and cannot be contained by the traditions and customs of the old thing which the Pharisees and even John the Baptist represent.  There is only one problem with that, Jesus follows up the comment about the wineskins by saying that once someone has drunk old wine they do not want to drink new wine.  So, there is a connection between Jesus’ answer about calling sinners, not the righteous and His answer about wine and wineskins, but I am not quite sure what it is.  There is also a connection between His comment about the friends of the bridegroom not fasting while he is with them, but that they will fast later, and His comment about not wanting to drink new wine after tasting old wine.  Again, I am not quite sure what that connection is.  I think part of what Jesus was saying was that His movement was a new and joyous thing, but it would get better as it aged.

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.

Years ago I came across a commentary on Jesus’ temptations in the wilderness which said that they represented shortcuts to bringing about social change, ways in which Jesus could change the world without going through the suffering which awaited Him.  The problem with these shortcuts is that they do not work.  In rejecting each of those “shortcuts” Jesus explained part of why they don’t work.   First, Satan offered Jesus the solution of changing things by meeting people’s material needs.  By changing stones to bread, Jesus could feed the world and no one would need to be hungry anymore.  Jesus’ answered that temptation by telling Satan that the problems of this world were more than a lack of food.  So, next Satan offered Jesus political power over the whole earth, all He had to do was worship Satan.  Jesus answered that temptation by telling Satan that his price was too high.  In order to acquire that much political power one must give up being a servant of God, one must give up one’s integrity.  An author I love had one of their characters say, “It does no good to obtain your heart’s desire if the price you pay is your heart.” (that is a paraphrase).  Finally, Satan offered Jesus the option of forcing God to prove Himself.  Jesus answered that temptation by telling Satan that God is not magic which we control.  Ultimately, Jesus’ answer to Satan’s temptation was that there are no shortcuts to the Kingdom of Heaven.  Many of the problems in our society result from people falling for one of these three temptations.

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

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 4-5

Every time I read the account of the temptations which Jesus faced in the wilderness I see them as representing the temptations by which everyone who sees the wrong in this world is tempted.  One of those temptations is the temptation to think that if we could just solve everyone’s material needs, all would be well.  Another temptation is the belief that if we just had the right people in positions of political power, they could fix what is wrong with our world.  The last temptation is in some ways the most insidious.  We are tempted to think that all we need to do is to get people to worship God correctly, all of their other problems would go away.

Each of these temptations fall short of what God wants from us.  Each of these temptations represent real problems in the world.  At different times to different people it will seem like the solution to these problems is just to work at whichever one most touches our soul.  Ultimately, none of these problems exists in isolation and, more importantly, we cannot fix them on our own.  We find in Jesus’ answers that the key to solving these problems is to realize that we cannot solve them.  And this is where I find trouble expressing the meaning this passage conveys to me.  So, let me give you Jesus’ answer to each of these temptations”

• “Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word which comes from the mouth of God.”
• “You must worship the Lord your God and serve only Him.”
• “You must not test the Lord your God.”

Do you see what each of them has in common?  That’s right.  When we seek to solve this world’s problems our first step needs to be to turn to God, and to point others to Him as well.  We want one-size-fits-all answers, and there is only one of those.  That answer is that of Jesus on the Cross.  Jesus was victorious because He was willing to die to get His message across.  We cannot make people serve God, they have to want to serve Him.  We can’t make people experience what is best for them, they have to accept God’s word for it.

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 4-5

Yesterday I wrote that Jesus’ mother was almost certainly Luke’s source for chapter 2.  Today’s passage was clearly based on the recollections of Jesus’ disciples, but not necessarily members of the Twelve (we know from Acts that there were others who followed Jesus from the beginning).  A careful reading shows us that while Luke did his best to put the stories he relates into the order they happened he was not entirely sure how stories he got from one set of sources matched up with those from other sources.  For example, it seems likely that Luke’s story about how Peter, James, and John came to follow Jesus, which appears at the beginning of chapter 5, preceded the end of chapter 4.

Speaking of Luke’s account of how Peter, James, and John came to follow Jesus (the fact that Andrew is not mentioned suggests that he is Luke’s source for this account) I want to point out something I never thought about before.  When Jesus was finished speaking from Peter’s boat, He told Peter to put back out and let down the nets.  Peter’s response was essentially, “We fished all night and did not catch anything.  There aren’t any fish out there, but I will humor you and put out the nets.”  The result was a catch so large that, even after he called James and John to bring their boat out to help, it almost sank the boat.  Then Jesus called them to follow Him and told them that from now on they would be fishing for people. The story makes the point that sometimes God will direct us to repeat something we did in the past that failed.  To put it another way, we should not give up trying to reach people for God just because they rejected our message in the past.