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 10-11

When I got to Jesus’ parable about the Good Samaritan I realized something I do not remember anyone ever making note of: In yesterday’s passage we had an account of a Samaritan village which refused to welcome Jesus so strenuously that James and John wanted to call down fire from Heaven on them.  Which puts Jesus’ telling of this parable in a different context.  Despite having only a short time before having been rejected by a group of Samaritans, Jesus uses one of them as the person we should emulate in a story He told.

Having said that, let’s take a look at the three people who passed the man on the road.  First, we have a priest.  He would have been trained from childhood on up on the proper ways to worship God and it was his job to care for the spiritual welfare of the people.  However, he was also required to keep to a very high standard of ritual purity and if the beaten man were to die while the priest was touching him, he would be defiled and unable to fill his duties.  Well, then we have a Levite (the NLT translation says “Temple Assistant”, which for most understanding of this parable is good enough).  He would have had similar training to a priest, but would not have had quite as strict purity requirements.   However, neither of these men stopped to help the beaten man.  Finally a Samaritan, who did not even truly understand how to worship God, came along.  This Samaritan, who was despised by the Jews as someone who distorted God’s commands and who thought the same of the Jews, sacrificed his time and money to help the beaten man.  Jesus’ instructions to be like the Samaritan applies to more than just helping those in distress.  In this story, the priest and the Levite were more concerned with getting the ritual’s correct than with people.  The Samaritan’s only focus was on people.

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 6-7

Having previously caught flack from Pharisees over their rigorous interpretation of the Law regarding the Sabbath, Jesus took the initiative when He saw a man with a deformed hand in a synagogue on the Sabbath.  Instead of allowing them to set the terms of the discussion, He did so Himself.  The Law said, “Remember to observe the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. .. On that day no one in your household may do any work.”  The Pharisees focused on the second part which I quoted there.  Jesus moved the focus from that to the first part about keeping it holy.  He focused everyone’s attention on the fact that you do not keep the Sabbath holy by making those in need wait for another day before you help them.

Today’s passage also contains Luke’s account of the teachings which Matthew presents in the Sermon on the Mount.  I suspect that Jesus touched on these themes many times throughout His ministry.  In fact, these two slightly different accounts of these teachings may actually represent two different occasions (or perhaps more than two).  As a general rule, I prefer the more nuanced account given in Matthew.  However, I also find an appeal in the much more blunt way in which Luke relates the same teachings.  God blesses the poor and the hungry, while sorrow awaits the rich and prosperous.  Which puts a whole new light when Jesus says a few verses later that we should love our enemies and do good for those who hate us.  We need to think about what Jesus means when He says “give to anyone who asks” when we realize this follows Him telling us that the poor are blessed.  Of course, Jesus also tells us elsewhere to be as wise as serpents.

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.

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 2-3

To this day when I read Luke 2, I hear it in my father’s voice.  Every year on Christmas Eve we celebrated our family Christmas and that celebration started with my father reading Luke 2, all the way through the account of Anna. (We celebrated on Christmas Eve because we went to my uncle’s house on Christmas day for my Dad’s family Christmas dinner).  It seems clear to me that Luke’s source for this chapter is none other than Jesus’ mother, Mary.  All of the stories recorded in Luke 2 are the sort of thing that a mother remembers. 

I love the story of the angels announcing Jesus’ birth to the shepherds.  God did not send His angels to announce The Messiah’s birth to the Temple and the high priest, nor did He send them to the palace and the king.  God did not send His angels to announce Christ’s birth to the high and mighty.  He sent them to announce it to the nobodies in the field.  The shepherds weren’t the people with the “important” jobs.  They were doing a job about which most of their contemporaries would have said, “anybody can be a shepherd.”  That is who God thinks are important enough to announce the birth of Christ