[I accidentally never posted this lesson at the time it was due! It should have been posted right before the "Feeding 5,000 Listeners" lesson. Please read it now prior to reading about the Transfiguration. Sorry! And by the way, not only Scripture passages are underlined, but words like "Suffering Servant". Anything underlined is a hyperlink to other text. I do not use underlining for emphasis in this blog. It always indicates a link to something important elsewhere on the Web.]
Please read today's text here: Luke 9:1-9
Up to this point, at least in Luke’s gospel, there has been no mission of Jesus’ disciples separate from his own personal presence. Here is such a mission. As such, it is a kind of preview of what the apostles’ lives will be like after his ascension into Heaven. Yet, that the account is not a mere fiction—an unhistorical reading back of post-Easter missions into the story of Jesus—is evident from the differences. Only Luke uses the term “gospel” in describing the disciples’ message. Mark says merely that they urged people to “repent”, and Matthew says they preached “the Kingdom of Heaven”. As they went, they were to heal diseases, expel demons and raise the dead—activities that were not regular in the earliest post-Easter missions of the apostles, even if they occurred sporadically.
That Jesus in fact did send the Twelve out to preach without his accompaniment is undoubtedly historical. Aside from multiplying his own presence and message, such assignments were excellent training. The apostles learned from their successes and failures, and by identifying themselves thus with Jesus’ own public ministry it strengthened their ties to him and their faith in him. Mark (6:7) says they were sent out in pairs, which meant one could pray while the other preached.
They were not to take extra tunics or extra pairs of sandals or a purse. This was to teach them trust in God whose kingdom they were proclaiming, and in Jesus who sent them out. D. B. J. Campbell (The Synoptic Gospels: a Commentary, 67) thinks the purse refers to a “collecting wallet” used by beggars and argues that Jesus did not wish his disciples to be mendicants. J. Jeremias (Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, 112-13) suggested that, like the scribes of Jesus’ day, they were not to receive pay for their services, but could accept hospitality.
They were told to accept hospitality of food and lodging, and were not to shift their lodging from one house to another in the same village, lest they offend their original hosts there.
If a village rejected them, they were to shake off the very dust of the village from their sandals as a sign that by rejecting their message the village was rejecting God himself.
“His instruction about proper responses to unbelieving cities (Luke 9:5; 10:11) is carried out by the missionaries in Acts (13:51)” (L. T. Johnson, Writings of the NT 206).
Rejection of the Twelve was so serious, because—as Jesus said elsewhere in Matt 10:40, with variant versions in Mark 9:37; Luke 10:16— “whoever receives you, receives me, and whoever rejects you, rejects me” (so Bauckham, Eyewitnesses, 284).
In v. 6 Luke reports that they did as they were told and found success—going through the villages assigned to them, preaching the good news (“gospel”), and healing. The Apostle Paul, who apparently knew this account in its pre-written form, regarded it as the basis for his claim that the Christian mission involved miraculous healings, which of course he too performed (so David Wenham, “The Story of Jesus known to Paul” p. 308, in Green and Turner, 1994).
In vv. 7-9 Luke reports the reaction of Herod Antipas, the Jewish ruler of Galilee, to their mission. While public opinion had it that the miracles of Jesus and his disciples were Elijah or one of the prophets raised from the dead, Herod’s view was that it was John the Baptizer, whom he had beheaded, who had risen from the dead. Why do all three synoptic gospel writers record this reaction? Perhaps, first, to show Herod’s guilty conscience over his murder of John. But more importantly, to show that both Herod and most of the people entirely missed the point of these miracles. They saw only the supernatural element in the healings and exorcisms of Jesus and his disciples, not the way in which they pointed to a critical intervention of God in the course of history—the appearance of the Messiah and the offer of the repentance and forgiveness to God’s people.
We too can be dazzled by the displays of power and fail to notice the quiet lessons of Jesus’ miracles. What is he trying to say to you and to me in the narratives of his public ministry? Will we let the Savior make his personal offers to us of forgiveness and renewed godly living as we read?
No comments:
Post a Comment