Daily Liturgy and Scripture

When Jesus sent the lepers to the priests, he wasn’t just telling them to go to the doctor. A priest had to verify that someone was healed, and this allowed them to re-enter the community. Not only was Jesus giving them their healing, he was making them part of their families and synagogues again. Maybe they were so excited at that prospect, only the Samaritan bothered to come back and give glory where it belonged.

Jesus has a lot to say about the law to those who consider it the most important thing. First he affirms that he did not come to replace it. Then he tells the story of a wealthy man who was unable to use what the law and prophets offered to avoid Hell. Remember the audience: the Pharisees also had the law, and were deeply immersed in it. At the end, when Jesus finishes the story by saying, “Moses and the prophets have warned them, your brothers can read what they wrote,” there must have been an audible gasp. It was an insult. It was also necessary, because in his fulfillment of the law, it did nobody any good to avoid the Kingdom by continuing to attempt keeping the law on their own.

Remember where we left off yesterday? Luke 15 gave use two parables that show how God takes the initiative to bring back the lost. Today we have the story of the lost Son, and in this case the father doesn’t go out to get the boy. The boy starts out where he needs to be, but leaves. Remember who he’s talking to, though: the Pharisees and religious leaders who said Jesus was diminishing himself by being near the riffraff he spent time with. This is is last lesson to that group, he’s going to speak to someone else next. So what does he need to tell them? That they are the son who never left. They stayed at home, serving as they should, but they lost the love they should have had for others.

Jesus’ two stories about those who are lost work together. In one, the seeker is after something that is alive, a sheep that can run away. But in the other, the seeker is after an inanimate coin. This is intriguing. Certainly the sheep could be blamed for what he did, but the coin probably just got lost by circumstance. The important part is this: it is the seeker who matters. In both cases, the point is that God takes the initiative, seeks us, and does the work of finding.

You really must wonder if Jesus got invited to a lot of parties. It seems like he most often uses them as object lessons for the people who were probably most popular. Nonetheless, here he is, once again taking the opportunity to try and teach those around him what a servant’s heart looks like. Not promoting ourselves flies against so much of what seems natural. Yet our Savior, God himself, consistently chose the low seat. Not until he was exalted by the Father would enter his true majesty. In that moment, just as he describes to these party guests, he humbles himself to be exalted by another.

Jesus continually runs up against legalism. The synagogue leader wasn’t a total idiot, he was just doing his job. Probably, he was deeply concerned with reverence for the law. How does Jesus answer that? By reminding everyone of the value of people (“love your neighbor” had been around for a while too) and by showing what the Kingdom was like in illustrations. These parables use the image of very small things that produce something large, and indeed that was what happened with Jesus’ upside down Kingdom. It wasn’t happening from the top, those were the people who most often opposed him. It was a grassroots movement among those who had ears to hear.

There are some current (to Jesus' time) events that come into play for Luke's narrative that we don't know all the details concerning. It does seem that this was a series of events that caused the religious to guess at why the catastrophes befell the victims, with a likely conclusion being sin on the part of those who died. Jesus wishes to pull them away from that discussion, because something more important it breaking out in front of them: him. It's certainly a waste of time to guess who is the most holy when the very instrument of holiness is living among you. Jesus' invitation to the Kingdom didn't require any prerequisites, and his holiness was offered to all takers.

Pentecost! This is a very important day in the life of the church, because the Holy Spirit became part of the life of the whole church. The scripture for day is the spirit of Pentecost (especially what Jesus said would happen) rather than the actual story of the events, which you can read in Acts 1 and 2. But the reality is this: the spiritual life of the church would never be the same after this day, and we continue to live in that Spirit.

For Jesus to help us find the Kingdom, we must find a way to remove ourselves from the thinking that comes naturally by living in the world. We must learn to think like him, to act like him, to follow him. This is why he spends so much time talking about laying aside possessions. It isn’t that having things in itself is a problem, but that surrounding ourselves with too much of that blocks us from seeing the Kingdom. To avoid that, Jesus leads us to lay it all down and find him.

Jesus’ very presence of course means that God is among us. But it means something else too, as he points out to the teachers of religious law: with the law and prophets culminating him him, it is a much bigger deal to reject him than it was to reject Zechariah or Elijah. The nation of Israel had trained themselves well to ignore those predecessors. But all is not lost, and many Israelites followed him. There were even a few religious leaders, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea, who understood and played a critical role in the story of Jesus.