Luke 12-- note v. 1 “the crowd gathered by the
thousands”. I wonder what it was like
for all those people to hear Jesus.
In the context of all the conversations about privacy
especially on the Internet, verse 3 seems important: “Therefore whatever you
have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered
behind closed doors will be proclaimed from the housetops.” If we are the sort of person who is
completely un-hypocritical and who treats everyone as of equal value, then
perhaps we would not fear for people to say things we’ve said in private.
12:4-7 are strange.
On the one hand we are told to “fear him who…has authority to cast into
hell” and on the other hand, we are told that God values us more than “many
sparrows.”
And here’s where Luke puts the language about blaspheming
the Holy Spirit (v. 10). Someone
helpfully said once that if you’re worried about whether you have ever done it,
you may be sure that you didn’t and that God forgives the sin you do commit.
And now beginning at 12:13, we have parables about
slaves/stewards who work for or manage for an Owner or Lord. These parables are kind of another approach
into the end times, into questions about what our lives are for, and how we are
to live as faithful slaves in the Kingdom of God.
Jesus sees what is coming next as challenging and
divisive. It’s as if the “thousands” of
the beginning of the chapter are threatened by the end.
Luke 13-- Parables of the Kingdom abound here! Including the open-ended one about the barren
fig tree that has a second chance and is not to be chopped down, but to
experience manure put all around it.
Hmmm….funny how that makes us grow! (vss. 6-9)
Then the parable of the mustard seed, the yeast, and the
narrow door.
And again the shadow of the cross starts to fall across
their path as Jesus puts the works he does in the context of what is coming and
weeps over Jerusalem: “And I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes
when you say, ‘Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord’” (13:35).
Luke 14-- Okay, so what is dropsy? “An old term for the swelling of soft tissues due to the
accumulation of excess water. In years gone by, a person might have been said
to have dropsy.” ( http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=13311
)
Jesus is emphasizing that the Sabbath is a day of blessing.
More parables about the way things work in the Kingdom of
God. Banquets and dinners! One of my favorite commentaries on the Gospel
of Luke is called The Hospitality of God.
(Brendan Byrne: Liturgical Press).
Meals are very, very important in the Gospel of Luke!
Now Jesus moves on in 14:25-33 to talk about what it costs to be
his disciple. It involves taking up
one’s cross. Those hearers could have
had no idea about how literally to take this teaching.
Luke 15-- More parables: the Lost Sheep, the Lost Coin. And people have commented many times about
how God’s behavior if it is like the behavior of the shepherd or the woman is
completely imprudent and irrational! God
is simply relentless in seeking out the lost!!!!!
And so we come to the centerpiece of the Gospel of Luke. Every Christian who speaks English should
sometime read Henri Nouwen’s magnificent little book: The Return of the Prodigal Son.
Recently there was an article by
Deanna A. Thompson in The Christian
Century about a book by Sharon Baker
called Executing God: Rethinking
Everything You’ve been Taught about Salvation and the Cross. It begins with this thought experiment:
And
what if Jesus said:
A man had two sons. The younger son demanded his inheritance from
his father, left home, squandered it, and returned home, admitting to his
father that he had sinned and begging for forgiveness.
The father responded, “I cannot simply
forgive you for what you have done. You
have insulted my honor by your wild living.
Simply to forgive would be to trivialize your sin. Justice, forgiveness, and reconciliation
cannot occur unless the penalty for your sin is paid. Either you must be punished or you must pay
back the honor you stole from me.
The older brother spoke up, telling his
father he would pay the debt of his younger brother. The brother worked day and night to pay the
debt until he died of exhaustion. The father’s wrath was finally placated
against the younger brother, and they lived happily until the end of their
days.
(Christian Century
April 30, 2014, p. 31)
But of course that is not how this story is told. And remember, it’s only told in Luke. What does it tell us about how Jesus
understood his role in bringing us freedom and salvation?
Luke 16-- More marvelous parables! Including the only parable where one of the
characters has a name: Lazarus, which is the Anglicized version of a Hebrew
name, “Eliezer,” which means “God helps.”
A wonderful way for us to remember that God helps the poorest of the
poor. Money is very hard to live with in
ways that don’t keep us from fully embracing the values of Kingdom of God or
its King!
Luke 17-- The
juxtaposition of the sayings in the beginning of this chapter about forgiveness
with the story of the ten men healed of leprosy, of whom only one returned,
reminds me of a little quotation attributed to Mother Teresa:
People are often unreasonable, illogical and
self centered;Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.
If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.
If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.
What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.
If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you've got anyway.
You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway.
[Reportedly inscribed on the wall of
Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta, and attributed to her. However, an article in the New
York Times has since reported (March 8, 2002) that the original version of
this poem was written by Kent M. Keith.]
Luke 18—More
parables!
· The Widow and
the unjust judge—the importance of perseverance in asking God for justice.
· The Pharisee
and the Tax Collector. There is a
wonderful painting in St. Mary's Cathedral, Edinburgh called “The Presence” by a not
particularly well known early 20th century painter called A.E.Borthwick. My parents had a lithograph
of it in the hallway of my childhood home, and I loved it. It has the same mood, though the painting is
of people contemporary to the painter.
It took me a long time to find it the last time I preached on this text,
but I just had to locate it. It shows Jesus comforting a very humble person praying in the back of St. Mary's Cathedral in a dark corner only illumined by His light, far from the brightly-lit and sumptuously appointed altar.
Jesus also has words again about the way wealth and possessions
can be a kind of security that we put in place of God’s security. The “rich young ruler” “goes away sorrowful”
(v. 23), but we don’t know whether he ever was able to do what Jesus asked him
and return joyful…
Note also, how in this chapter, Jesus explicitly predicts his
death and resurrection again.
Luke 19—The story of
Zacchaeus begins the chapter. We have a
baby boy in our congregation who is named Zacchaeus. He is not going to be the “wee little man”
that children sing about in the little chorus.
He’s already really tall for his age!
But he may, God willing, be a person who invites Jesus to come into his
house, and who will find then that “salvation has come to [his] house”
(19:9).
Then we have another parable:
The ten Pounds, given to stewards to trade with by an Owner who goes
away and will come back. Jesus has a LOT
to say about money, about stewardship, and about what happens while he is
“away,” doesn’t he?
And so at last we come, at 19:28, to Holy Week.
Triumphal entry, Jesus weeping over Jerusalem, Jesus cleansing
the temple… all in rapid succession
Luke 20 But then the dramatic speed of the
narrative slows way down while Jesus cleverly (perhaps wisely would be better) responds to the challenges of the religious
leaders of his day.
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