Father Stephen De Young: We’re in the Gospel according to St. Luke, chapter 12 and we’re going to be picking up with verse 35. I will do my usual routine if you want to hear the…. even though I’ve done it many times for Luke’s Gospel because we’ve been here a while, I would like to again hear my introduction to the Gospel According to St. Luke. You can do so on the website to your heart’s content. You can listen to it before every single Bible study if you want to, just to make sure you’re ready to go.

And then in terms of getting us sort of caught up, quickly, to where we were. We are, again, we’re sort of past, we’ve talked before a couple of times about how there’s this transition point sort of in the middle of the Gospel According to St. Luke where we shift from Jesus’s ministry in Galilee to his journey to and arrival in Jerusalem and Judea. And so, we’re past that point. So Jesus is actually now in Judea. He has not yet come into Jerusalem itself, but he has already, as we saw last time, encountered some Pharisees, encountered some of the folks of Judea and some of the folks who come out from Jerusalem and conflict has been escalating, shall we say.

While Jesus seems to have been mostly, at least the impression we get from Luke’s Gospel is that Jesus was mostly well received in the villages in Galilee, he has not been so well received in Judea where there are sort of different power structures in place. It’s particularly the people of those power structures, particularly so far the religious power structures who are not overly fond of Jesus because he’s been not only questioning sort of the basic underpinnings of their teachings and what gives them power, but he’s been, as we saw last time, sort of directly attacking and criticizing them personally, not just what they teach being wrong.

In fact, he hasn’t really said that what they teach is wrong. The main criticism we saw last time so far was Jesus criticizing them for being hypocrites. So it’s not that they weren’t teaching and saying the right things, it’s that they weren’t doing the right things. They were teaching and saying the right things and then not following through on them themselves and claiming that they understood the Torah and were experts on it, understood God’s law, that they were the holy people, the righteous people. And yet they’ve shown that they have no understanding of what God’s law was supposed to be about. And that’s a key issue and why they now can’t accept and can’t recognize Jesus now that God has come to them in the flesh.

So, unless anybody had any questions or inquiries or diatribes left over from last time, we’ll go ahead and get started in chapter 12, verse 35.

Now, immediately before this, remember Jesus had talked to them after the whole issue with the Pharisees. He had talked to them about specifically the message about not worrying about their material welfare, that they should be concerned with their spiritual welfare, with spiritual things, and not focus completely on what they were going to eat, what they were going to wear, the things of this world. And he’s told them that their focus needed to be heavenward, not earthward. He’s still speaking in that context. You’ll notice verse 35 does not start with any kind of conjunction. There’s no “then he said” or “later he said” or, as we’ve seen elsewhere in Luke’s Gospel, “and it happened” or “and it came to pass”, right? There’s no transition here. So, what he’s about to say is continuous with what he was saying last time when he told them not to worry and not to be focused on the things of this world. He begins in verse 35

“Let your waist be girded and your lamps burning; and you yourselves be like men who wait for their master, when he will return from the wedding, that when he comes and knocks they may open to him immediately. Blessed are those servants whom the master, when he comes, will find watching. Assuredly, I say to you that he will gird himself and have them sit down to eat and will come and serve them.”

So, this passage that we’re beginning now is important to provide balance because we could take what we heard Jesus saying last time out of context and take it to mean, “Don’t worry about anything, right? Don’t worry about anything just coast through life, right? Your Heavenly Father is taking care of you, right? Just don’t worry about anything.”

But now Jesus has shifted from “don’t worry about these material things” to “be watchful for something else.” So there is something they need to worry about, there is something they need to be concerned about. It’s just not the thing that they’ve been concerned about up to this point primarily. So he uses this example, when it talks about returning from a wedding. Wedding feast would often go on since we’re talking about a master who has servants, this is a wealthy person, right? So wealthy people’s wedding feasts at this time in history would go on for a week or more, certain times of celebrating. It was sort of wedding/honeymoon sort of all rolled into one. It wasn’t sort of we have the wedding one day and then you go off on the honeymoon. It was the whole family and community gets together and celebrates the wedding for a week.

This will be important background when we get into St. John’s Gospel next, when we talk about the wedding at Cana, right? And the steward says, “Why did you bring out the good wine last? Everybody else brings out the good wine first and then when everybody’s drunk, and then they bring out the bad stuff because nobody will notice, bring out the cheap stuff because everybody’s already sloshed,” right? But so, this wasn’t just sort of a two-hour wedding reception. These festivities would go on for some time, and especially if you were a wealthy person, sort of a mark of your status, as today wealthy families will spend a huge amount of money on weddings. Same thing, then. Being able to have this huge feast that goes on for days for all your friends and relatives of the community was also sort of a way of displaying how wealthy you were and how well you were doing to the world.

So, the example he’s using is of servants who are at their master’s house. The master has gone to one of these wedding feasts, so he’s going to be gone some indeterminate number of days, right? We don’t know exactly when he’s going to come back, but the servant’s job while he’s gone is to keep the household running. Since this is a wealthy person, we’re not just talking about like a maid or a butler. I mean, we’re talking about, this is an agrarian economy, so we’re talking about household servants who would be supervising other servants who work to the fields. We’re talking about deliveries. I mean, you can’t just harvest a bunch of food and then let it sit there for a week. You got to take it to market, right? So their job was to keep everything running as if he was there.

A more modern example might be you’re at your job, the boss is off on a business trip and he’s trusting the employees, particularly the managers below him, to keep everything running smoothly until he gets back. And if he gets back, things aren’t running smoothly, he gets back and everybody’s been loafing, if he gets back and nobody’s been doing anything, people have been slack, not going to be happy.

So the goal is, especially when he arrives, you want to look like you’re busy, right? The boss walks into the office, you want to look like you’re working. You don’t want them to catch you taking a nap. So that’s the idea. They want to be there so that when he comes back, walks up to the door, doesn’t even get a chance to knock, you open the door for him, welcome home.

And then this idea that he will serve them is that he’ll be so happy. He’ll be so happy when he gets back from this party. He’ll be so happy with the job you did, that his happiness with you will sort of overflow to him doing good things for you. He’ll give you a bonus because he did such a good job while he was gone and he wasn’t watching you.

And so, that’s the “Blessed are those servants who the master, when he comes, will find watching.”

And if he should come in the second watch, or come in the third watch, and find them so, blessed are those servants.

So remember, they didn’t have clocks. They didn’t have sort of concrete measures of time, 8:45, like we do, with that precision. So, as we’ve seen already in the Gospels, they counted hours from dawn. So you have the first hour, which is 1 hour after sunrise, you have the third hour, which is 3 hours after sunrise. And we say that’s roughly 9:00. But that’s rough because of course, that depends on what time of year it is. 6 hours is about noon on average.

And the nights were divided into watches, and this is true well into the Middle Ages. The night was divided into three watches. And of course, those would vary slightly in length depending on the time of year as well and where you were located. If you were in northern Europe, you had some much longer watches than if you were in Palestine.

The idea here is you can’t say, well, it’s sort of 4 hours, 4 hours, 4 hours maybe on average, right? Because the night isn’t always 12 hours. Sometimes it’s longer, sometimes it’s shorter. But these watches, the reason they’re called watches is that literally there would be people in the city or in the camp watching, whose job it was to guard, protect and keep an eye on things. Because then, as now, people who are up to criminal activity tended to do so at night, the cover of darkness, that’s when animals might wander into a camp or into a city. That’s when these bad things happen, so that’s when we need someone watching.

So, the first watch was the beginning part of the night. The second watch would roughly overlap midnight. The third watch would essentially be coming up to sunrise. And so that’s why he says, “If he should come in the second watch, if he should come at midnight, or if he should come in the third watch, if he should come at like four in the morning and find them so”, blessed are those servants, right?

So, if he comes home at four in the morning and the servants have everything in hand, and are there ready to greet him, he’s going to be pretty impressed they were up and awake and ready for him at four in the morning. So that’s what he’s saying.

“But know this, that if the master of the house had known what hour the thief would come, he would have watched and not allowed his house to be broken into. Therefore you also be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

Now, interestingly, here Jesus mixes his metaphor. He doesn’t say if the servants had known at what hour their master was coming, they would have been ready, which is sort of implied by what he already said. But he chooses to work in another metaphor, to say if you knew someone was coming to rob your house and you knew they were coming at 04:12 AM on Wednesday morning, you’d have the police there waiting for you, you’d be prepared, right? But sort of the whole point if you’re going to try and rob someone’s house is you make sure they don’t know you’re coming. That’s sort of the whole concept.

And so then finally he says here at the end what these analogies are all leading to “Be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.”

Notice a couple of things here. First of all, Jesus is already, even in immediate context, even in the chapter that we read earlier, referring to Himself as the Son of man, right? So now he says the Son of Man is coming, not in the future, He says that while he’s standing there right in front of him.

So, this tells you when we start talking about the Second Coming of Christ or Christ’s return or his appearing, this was already part of the plan. We’ve seen St. Luke sort of emphasize this over and over again, where Jesus says exactly what’s going to happen when he goes to Jerusalem, because it makes it clear to us this isn’t sort of a tragedy that befell Jesus, like Jesus had this one plan where he was going to march in and everyone was going to accept Him and he was going to become king. That didn’t work out that way, they killed him, so he had to rise from the dead. That’s not how it happened, St. Luke wants us to know.

No, the plan was he was going to Jerusalem for them to kill him so he could lay down his life planning to rise again and here planning then to eventually return and judge the living and the dead after some time period had passed. And sort of the whole point of what Jesus says here is that that is an indeterminate period of time, that it is not a set period of time. It’s not Jesus ascends into heaven and December 2012, the world ends, and he comes back and he’s let us all know that so we can be prepared.

Now, we have to first look at this from the perspective of the people who heard it originally. What did that mean to them, the Son of Man is coming?

Remember, the Son of Man is a phrase that Jesus picks up from the Book of Daniel. And in the Book of Daniel, remember, there’s the Ancient of Days, and then there’s one like the Son of Man or the Son of Adam in the Hebrew, literally, who comes up before him. And he’s given authority to judge. So this would have been clear to them as this is a reference to the idea of the Day of the Lord, the Day when the Lord comes and visits his people. Visit is the nice King James word for it, right? But as we said a lot in the Old Testament, the prophets, this isn’t a visit where God stops by for tea and scones. When God visits, it’s more like wait till your father gets home, right? When God comes to visit, some things are going to get sorted out. Some things are going to get sorted out.

And so, what Jesus was saying to them directly is, that is going to happen, and it’s not going to be at a time that you expect. Why would he have to tell them it’s not going to be the time you’d expect?

Interlocutor: They were expecting him to come right now.

Fr. Stephen: Well, they were, but they also had a very firm idea in their mind of how this was all going to play out, right? The Messiah is going to come, he’s going to raise an army, he’s going to throw the Romans out. He’s going to reestablish the kingdom of Israel, and then God is going to come and visit, he’s going to judge all the Gentiles and he’s going to glorify us, right? That was the paradigm they had in their head.

And so, we’ve already seen here the people making at least partial identification that Jesus is the Messiah. So when Jesus says this to them, He’s throwing a monkey wrench sort of into their conception that, “Okay, Jesus is the Messiah. He’s going to raise this army, he’s going to overthrow the… Wait, what? The Son of Man’s going to come at an hour you don’t expect?”

And then secondly, obviously, in terms of his overall point, is what? You shouldn’t be worried about these earthly things. You should be worried about spiritual things. Why? Well, because judgment is going to come. The day when you’re judged, the day when your works are assessed, where you have to give an account for what you’ve done with your life, is going to come in a moment that you don’t expect, which means what? It means you have to be ready all the time. You have to be ready all the time. You have to be concerned about this all the time. And so this should be your concern. Your standing before God should be your concern, not what food you’re going to shove into your mouth tomorrow. But if tonight’s the night when I die, if I walk out of here and get in a car accident and die, am I ready to stand before the Lord and give an account for what I’ve done with my life? And if the answer is no, then you’ve got some work to do.

And so, Jesus is shifting that idea. Stop worrying about these day-to-day things. Worry about what really matters. Remember, he’s just coming off of the parable of the rich fool, the man who had the bumper crop. So he built the bigger granaries, stored it all and said, “Oh, good, now I’m all set, I can sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of my life.” And God comes to him and says, “You fool, you’re going to die tonight.” And when he died that night and stood before the Lord, the Lord didn’t ask him, “Well, how much grain did you have stored up? Oh, well, welcome to heaven. You were very successful as a farmer!” That doesn’t happen. The thing that was important is the thing he ignored in favor of these other things. He shouldn’t have taken his leisure. He was not ready to take his leisure because he was not ready to meet the Lord.

Then Peter said to Him, “Lord, do You speak this parable only to us, or to all people?”

So once again, what have we seen from the apostles in the last couple of chapters, the disciples at this point?

Interlocutor: They’re still not getting it.

Fr. Stephen: Well, they don’t get it. Yeah. And specifically, they keep thinking they’ve got some kind of positions in Jesus’s government coming. They’re arguing about who’s going to be the greatest. They’re asking Jesus about how they’re going to be rewarded, all the time. And Jesus keeps trying to tell them, “You’re going to be rewarded with martyrdom. That’s what you’ve got coming.” And they don’t understand that. Well, this is more of that, right. “Are you just saying this to everybody or is this for us in particular? Is this for us in particular? Are we like your special servants and so we need to be ready.”

And what does being ready mean? Probably in that context, when you make your move against Rome, right? Are you saying we need to be ready to go, right. When this all comes down? You’re not saying this to just I mean, you’re telling us it’s about to happen, we’re going to Jerusalem and we’re good. Meaning they completely don’t get it. The opposite of the point Jesus was trying to make.

And the Lord said, “Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his master will make ruler over his household, to give them their portion of food in due season?”

So notice, Peter’s question is, “Who are you talking to about being a good servant?” Because those are the metaphors he’s using. “Who are you talking to about being a good servant? Us, or just sort of everybody, right?” And so, Jesus response is another who question, right. Who are you talking to? He says, well, who is the good steward? The steward was a servant. He was still a servant, but he was a servant who was in a position of authority over other servants. And we still use it that way. Like the wine steward at a restaurant is sort of in charge of all the wine. We consider him a step up from a waiter, but he’s basically middle management kind of waiter. He’s still an employee, he’s not a manager, but he is in charge of… so a steward is someone who not only a servant, but a servant in charge of other servants, which is what Peter is wanting to be. He’s wanting to be in a position of authority over these other people, the rabble who are following Jesus, right? “I’m special.”

So he says, “Okay, who am I talking to? Well, okay. Who is a good steward? Who is a good server?”

Interlocutor: My question is this when we look at this and about being ready, is the church saying that there are certain levels that people enter into by their devoutness, their goodness? Or do you just come through the pearly gates and we’re all equal? I know we have saints.

Fr. Stephen: So you’re talking about in heaven?

Interlocutor: In heaven, after we arrive. Because as I read this, there’s a division of labor here, like you’re talking about the steward over other people. You’re talking about management, a division of labor.

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, nothing here so far has been talking about eternal life. This is talking about how we live our life on this earth. We live our life on this earth prepared for Christ’s return or our death at every moment. And so, a steward would be someone who, for example, has a position of authority of the Church, which is what Peter is wanting. Now, he’s not thinking church, he’s thinking government, probably at this point. But someone who is, from St. Luke’s perspective, writing later. It would be someone who has a position of authority in the church, right? So St. Paul would be a steward. He’s a servant of Christ, but he also has a position of spiritual authority over other servants of Christ.

Interlocutor: I was thinking of the word “laity”, and the word “priestly functions”, and what that division of labor is.

Fr. Stephen: Well, let’s take a look at what Jesus goes on to say about what it means to be in that kind of position of authority.

So he says, who is the person who’s a faithful and wise steward who he will make notice? Who will he make ruler over his house and who he will give a position of authority? So Jesus knows why Peter’s asking this. You’re asking me this because you want to see yourself as being sort of special, getting a position of authority. He says, okay, so what kind of servant gets put in a position of authority? He says:

“Blessed is that servant whom his master will find so doing when he comes. Truly, I say to you that he will make him ruler over all that he has. But if that servant says in his heart, ‘My master is delaying his coming,’ and begins to beat the male and female servants, and to eat and drink and be drunk, the master of that servant will come on a day when he is not looking for him, and at an hour when he is not aware, and will cut him in two and appoint him his portion with the unbelievers. And that servant who knew his masterís will, and did not prepare himself or do according to his will, shall be beaten with many stripes. But he who did not know, yet committed things deserving of stripes, shall be beaten with few. For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required; and to whom much has been committed, of him they will ask the more.”

So his answer here is twofold. First he says, I’ll tell you who the good steward isn’t. The good steward isn’t the good steward isn’t the person who’s given a position of spiritual authority. We could guess, given the last chapter, who he’s probably talking about here and who uses that authority to lord it over, to abuse the people under his care, to take advantage of it, to eat and drink and be merry, because he decides, “Oh well, the Master is gone and he’s not coming back anytime soon, so we could all do as we please.”

This is originally, and in the context we see it, this was probably a thinly veiled shot at the chief priests and the rulers of the temple because this is exactly what they had done, they were taking advantage. We talked about when we were working our way through St. Mark’s gospel, that by this time in history, 90% of the farmland in Palestine was owned by the temple, that was privately owned, that the Romans didn’t control directly, 90% of the privately owned farmland was owned…

And the Sadducees of the chief priests had done this by leveraging the temple taxes against people, by levying temple taxes that the people couldn’t pay. And so the land that had belonged to their families, in some cases since Moses, the land that had belonged to their families that God had given to them, they would levy these huge taxes that they knew that people couldn’t pay and then say, “Well, okay, we’ll take your land as payment.” And so they ended up being tenants on their own families’ land.

So this isn’t just figurative when he talks about beating and abusing the other servants. I mean, these people who are in these positions of religious authority, who God had placed there to be a religious authority and shepherd his people were instead profiting off of and abusing the flock.

And I’ve always said to be someone like that, to be a religious leader like that, I think you’d have to be the most confident atheist in the history of the world, because if there is a God of any kind and you do that kind of thing in his name, you’re in it deep, man. You would have to be completely confident that there was never going to be any kind of reckoning, right? And that’s what Jesus is alluding to here when he says the Master’s delayed, he’s not coming, that they’ve basically decided that all those promises from the Old Testament ain’t never coming true. And so we need to just make the most out of this life and use our positions to get what we can.

So Jesus, through that reference, this isn’t just Jesus doing social commentary, right? It is that, but it’s not just that. He’s making a point to Peter, right? You want to be a steward. You want to be someone who’s in a position of spiritual authority under me, right? You’re not going to be like that. You’re not going to be like that. You’re not going to be like these current spiritual authorities. It’s going to be something very different, because if you’re like that, what’s going to happen? Well, “cut in two” is pretty graphic. Cut in two and assigned a portion with the unbeliever.

That means you’re going to be treated worse than the Gentiles. You being a Jew isn’t going to do you any good if you’re one of these people. You could be worse off than the Gentiles. Then he goes on to explain why. Because those Gentiles, the Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, the Chinese, who they didn’t know about, they didn’t have the Torah to study, they didn’t have the law, they didn’t have the Temple, they didn’t have the priesthood. So, when they go and they sin, when they go and they do these things, they’re doing it in ignorance to some degree.

And so he doesn’t say they’re going to get off the hook. Notice he doesn’t say, oh, there’s no judgment for them then. He says, but their judgment is going to be less severe than the judgment received by those who knew these people, who have spent their lives studying the Torah and should know exactly what God wants them to do. And they’re doing the exact opposite. And so this is not just, again, a criticism of them, but this is a warning to St. Peter, this is a warning to St. Peter and the other disciples where they’re listening, and anybody else in the crowd who has designs on having spiritual authority and spiritual knowledge, being a scholar, being a lawyer, being a Pharisee. Anyone who has designs on that, it’s a warning. If you’re given much, much will be required of you. You’re going to be judged more strictly, you’re going to be judged more harshly.

And so Peter heard what Jesus said in the first part and was completely focused on the whole reward part, right? “Are you saying if we disciples are good service, we’re going to get a big reward?” He doesn’t say no. He says, “Yeah, blessed is the servant who God is going to find watchful.” But you might want to be more concerned about the fact there’s also going to be a greater punishment for you because of what’s been committed to you, what God has given you.

That does apply to, for example, priests and bishops, but it also applies in our modern world to all of us. We take for granted a lot of the things we have that no generation of Christians has had before us. No generation of Christians before us had the access to the Bible that we have today.

And I say no generation because even if you go back and look at literacy rates. No generation of Christians has had the access to the scriptures that we have today. No generation of Christians has had the access to the services of the church that we have today. The service texts. When Father Rafael was here, he would have killed to have the service books that we have available to us today, he would have loved to have had them. We have access to so much. We can go online and read the church fathers all day and all night for free. We look at funny pictures of cats, but we could be out there reading the Church fathers, night and day.

Every one of us has had a whole lot committed to us, a whole lot committed to us. And so every one of us needs to take into account this warning. We’re going to be held even more responsible to be ready. The illiterate person growing up in a village in Syria 200 years ago who was a Christian is not going to be held to the same standard that you and I are held to here and now with everything we have that that person didn’t. That person would have loved to have, would have rejoiced to have.

So it’s not just for leaders, it applies to us leaders. St. Paul is going to apply this. Not many of you should presume to be teachers because the teacher will receive a harsher judgment. I get that quoted to me every fall when we look for Sunday school teachers. But the point is there. We all sort of have this desire to be important, to be leaders, to be in charge. And we all, to some extent have that role, whether it’s in our families, amongst our friends, in the workplace, here at the church, wherever we have that role, that role brings with it more responsibility.

I don’t want to go too far off on this, but there’s a general truth of the Scriptures and in Christianity where we don’t see a lot of talk. I’m not going to say zero because there are a couple of passages, but we don’t see a lot of talk about rights. We as Americans talk about rights a lot. I have the right to do this, I have the right to do that. What we see a lot in the Scriptures everywhere is responsibilities. Responsibilities and duties that we need to fulfill.

And so, this passage is part of, for us today, as Americans could be part of a sort of reorientation of our thinking, that I do have something I should be concerned about, right? I certainly don’t have the right to go to heaven. I don’t have the right to eternal life. We have something we should be concerned about, and it’s not the thing that we spend most of our life concerned about. It’s rather that day when we stand before Christ that we should be concerned about and that we have to give an account, not just morally and ethically, but we have to give an account for what we did with everything God gave us, which in our case is an awful lot.

Interlocutor: Why did Christians not have the service text, they weren’t bound until lately?

Fr. Stephen: Well, first, the printing press was only embedded in the 16th century. So before that, you’re dealing with handwritten manuscripts. But the Turks would not allow Christians to operate a printing press. The first printed edition of the New Testament in Greek from the Orthodox Church was printed in 1904.

Interlocutor: Wow!

Fr. Stephen: Yes. Until then, the Gospel books they were using in churches until 1904, the gospel books they were using in churches were handwritten. They’re handwritten manuscripts, which meant they were incredibly expensive. People couldn’t own them. And we don’t recognize the literacy rate in World War I. This is in the United States. World War I in the United States. The Army’s standard for literacy. So if you went into the army in World War I, and they were going to mark whether you were literate or not right. You are considered literate. If you could sign your name instead of putting an X, instead of fixing your mark, if you could sign your name, you were literate. And do you know what percentage of the US military was literate in World War 1? 30 percent.

So that’s another thing we take for granted, everyone can read, right? Well, that’s recent. So even once there was the ability for books to be manufactured more cheaply, people weren’t literate. Their primary access to the Scriptures was just what they would hear in services read to them until well into the 20th century.

So, that’s why. I mean, until World War I, pretty much the whole Middle East was under the Ottoman Empire, so Christians couldn’t have a printing press. So the same thing with the Arabic service books. They’re all handwritten, if they existed at all. You’d have to go to monasteries or to a church and they’d have a Gospel book and an Epistle book that was about it. And monasteries would have bigger libraries, but it wasn’t available to common people. And even when common people eventually could get their hands on it, they by and large, couldn’t read it anyway.

So, we sort of take that for granted now. It’s one of many things we take for granted. I realized how much I take water for granted when we had the water crisis a couple of years ago, when all of a sudden I could just turn on the tap and get water. But, yeah, it’s one of those things we take for granted and we shouldn’t. That’s part of what this passage is about. It’s not taking these things for granted.

So Jesus continues, notice, again, there’s no transition here. There’s no transitional words. Jesus is just still talking. Just still talking.

“I came to send fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how distressed I am till it is accomplished! Do you suppose that I came to give peace on earth? I tell you, not at all, but rather division. For from now on five in one house will be divided: three against two, and two against three. Father will be divided against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against her daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.”

Now, it’s not as if everyone got along with their mother-in-law until this point in history. That’s not the point. They had the same problems we do today, right? What’s he talking about here? This seems to be the opposite. Remember back at Luke 2 when Jesus was born, “Glory to God in the highest sound earth, peace, goodwill toward men.” So this seems at odds with what Jesus was saying before. So, what’s Jesus’s point? Well, if you take it out of context, you can make it mean all kinds of things, but what’s the context? What was he just talking about?

He was just talking about the fact that, again, as we said, Peter took this very positive interpretation of the metaphor Jesus was using, which was, “Oh, if I’m a good servant, I’ll get rewarded.” Missing the key piece there. And so what Jesus is saying here is, this isn’t the glory train. This isn’t, to paraphrase Howard Dean from several years ago, “We’re going to Bethany, then we’re going to Jerusalem and take it back.” That’s not where this is going, right? That’s not where this is going. What Jesus is doing involves judgment. It involves judgment. First of all, he’s going there. The baptism he’s referring to is what? His death. He’s going there to his death.

And this isn’t going to be a case where even after his death and after his resurrection, there’s going to be this huge spiritual renewal among the Jewish people and they’re all going to come together as one. That’s not what’s in the cards. So if that’s what Peter’s thinking, if Peter’s thinking, this is glorious, we’re going to have this magnificent kingdom ruled over by Jesus. I’m going to be a viceroy, I’m going to have it made. No more fishing for me. Roll out the red carpet, everything’s going to be great. He’s got another thing coming, because that’s not where this is going. That’s not where this is going.

What Jesus is going to do is going to divide the Jewish people. Some of them are going to accept Him and follow them, and some of them are not. And they’re not going to just agree to disagree. The ones that don’t are going to try and kill the ones who do. And so he’s saying to Peter, if you’re going to follow me, if your goal is to be the good servant. Don’t think this is all onward and upward. You’re going to have people in your own family, people who are close to you, who are going to turn on you because of me, who are going to persecute you because of me. That’s where this is heading. That’s where this is heading.

Now, that’s in the original context. Why would St. Luke think this is so important to include his Gospel? St. Luke is writing to the churches, most of them established by St. Paul, some by the other apostles, and he’s writing to, as we’ve said a few times, these churches that are primarily made up of Gentile converts. So what’s been the experience of these Gentile converts when they came home and said, “Dad, I’ve decided to become a Christian,” did he throw them a party?

When they came home to their wife and kids and said, “Hey, we’re becoming Christians,” were they excited about that prospect? No, this is the experience they’ve had, because as we’ve talked about before, as we’re going to see in St. Paul’s epistles, where he’s writing to people who are struggling with these things, they didn’t just have to this wasn’t just, okay, “I used to go to church at the Zeus temple, and now I’m going to go to church at the Christian church, everybody will understand because I have freedom of religion, right?” They were having to leave their family worship, not just leave it, not participate in it, but repudiate it, to say it was demonic. They were not able to participate in civic life of their city, the pagan festivals, right? There was no separation of church and state. Everything is mixed together. Religion is mixed into everything. They’re having to completely withdraw and cut themselves off from their families, from their city, from Rome, Roman culture, patriotism, right? Primary act of patriotism is what? Offering incense and worshiping Caesar. Well, that’s out. They’ve become persecuted minorities.

So, this is a very important passage for who St. Luke is writing to. This isn’t an accident, right? If they’re sitting there thinking, “I was promised all these things, I was promised eternal life, I was promised spiritual peace, I was promised those things about love and joy, right, and all these things St. Paul writes about. But my life has gotten really hard since I decided to become a Christian. I’ve lost a lot of friends, I’ve lost a lot of family, I lost my job. I’m now dependent on the Christian community for my wellbeing,” that’s one of the main reasons why we read that the churches people would sell everything they had, and they’d all share it. It wasn’t just because they were communists, right? It was because a lot of them no longer had employment. That was the only way they could live, was to sort of pool their resources because they had chosen to leave society and they became outcasts. Society was happy to enforce that, that they were no longer part of Roman society.

So Jesus is aware of this. Jesus is aware of this. He knew this was going to happen. This is what was going to happen. This isn’t just an accident. This isn’t some failure of the promises, of Christianity. But what is the actual promise? The actual promise is what we heard before. The person who’s the faithful and wise steward, the person who is prepared, the person who’s ready, the person who’s concerned about their standing before Christ, right? When that day comes, when the living, the dead, the earth is judged, when that day comes, then they will be blessed, then they will receive their reward.

So this becomes a very important… it’s both important in terms of trying to correct the original context, trying to correct their mistaken view of what the Messiah was going to do and what the kingdom of God was going to be. And it’s important later in the Church to… yes, this is the experience that Christians have.

Interlocutor: You say that, but look at the debate that St. Paul and St. Peter had. Peter wanted everybody, did he not, to become Jewish?

Fr. Stephen: Not really. We’ll get to that in Acts, but not really. The idea that there was this huge amount of conflict between St. Peter and St. Paul or even St. James and St Paul is largely a modern concoction. That’s not really there in the original. There were areas of disagreement and discussion and there was an incident in Antioch that went badly. But the fact that two people kind of had a run in or a disagreement doesn’t mean they were sort of bitter enemies. No, but you’ll see a lot of this with our friends on the History Channel, the National Geographic Channel. There’s been this tendency to sort of pit James against Paul or Peter against Paul because part of what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to argue that there were multiple forms of Christianity, that Christianity wasn’t united, and so then they can make up their own form of Christianity and follow that and still call themselves Christians. But that’s largely a concoction, the same as people who talk about Plato and Aristotle disagreeing about all this. They didn’t disagree actually that much if you actually read them. So a lot of that is overblown in modern sort of presentations of it. It’s exaggerated. But we’ll get there when we get into the Book of Acts and we get into Galatians. St Luke, who’s writing the Gospel here, in Acts, presents a very different picture of the relationship between St. Peter and St. Paul than that.

Interlocutor: I know a story from a wealthy rabbi

who had a Torah when he was 21 years old and he came in the door and became a Christian. And this was [Inaudible] he got in an argument long time, and the father said, you are not in our family anymore. So from argument and argument, he finally threw the Bible into the living room, and then it was laying on the carpet. Nobody touched it. And the rabbi, out of curiosity picked it up and he studied for a long time and then it finally dawned on him that Jesus was Jewish. And he later on became a Messianic Jew.

Fr. Stephen: Yes, that’s good when that happens. And St. Paul is going to talk about that St. Paul is going to say, if you’re married and you become a Christian and the other person doesn’t, you don’t get a divorce. You stay married to that person. You pray for that person in the hope that they will become a Christian. So, yeah, this should be one sided. People may be mad at you or hate you for becoming a Christian, but Christians shouldn’t hate those people in return. The goal of Christians should be to hopefully win them over, to become followers of Christ. Become followers of Christ as well.

Interlocutor: That’s the whole reason St. Monica is even a saint, because she prayed and prayed for people.

Fr. Stephen: Right, well, her son St. Augustine, specifically. So that’s good to keep in mind that this isn’t a two-way sort of enmity. This is a one-way kind of enmity. But it is to be expected. And there are still plenty of parts of the world where converting to Christianity will get you killed.

Not just by a mob. I don’t want to go too much into political commentary, but it’s interesting to note that in the current constitution of Afghanistan, which was approved by the US government during the occupation, the penalty for preaching the Christian gospel is beheading in Afghanistan.

Interlocutor: Approved by us.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah. There’s plenty of places in the world where it’s still a death penalty. We’ve been blessed so far in this country that you may lose some friends here and there, but nothing that drastic usually happens to people for their Christianity. But as I’ve said many times, there’s no guarantee that that’s going to continue. If in 1912 you’d gone to Russia and said, “In five years, people are going to be murdered for being Christians and they’re going to be burning down monasteries and blowing up churches,” they would have looked at you like you were crazy. “Five years from now… what?” But that’s what happened.

So, there is no guarantee. And so as Christians here in the United States, though we haven’t been called… the time may come. And the time is starting to come where there are people losing their jobs, for example, or losing their businesses, getting sued, things are starting to happen because they’re taking a stand based on the teachings of the Christian faith, and it’s becoming less and less popular. So we have to be ready for that. We have to be prepared for this reality that our commitment to follow Christ may not bring us rewards in this life. Quite the opposite. And so this is part of that same theme again. And what should we be worried about? What should we be concerned about? Not rewards and good things in this life, but where we stand before Christ. Remember what he said last time, earlier this chapter? “He who denies me before men, I will deny before my Father who is in heaven. And he who acclaims me before man, I will acclaim before my Father who is in heaven.”

So, this is of a piece with what he’s been saying.

Then He also said to the multitudes, “Whenever you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, ‘A shower is coming’; and so it is.”

Because their rain, typically storms, rolled in off the sea, off the Mediterranean. So if they see a cloud coming from out over the water, they’re like, “Oh, there’s rain coming.” And you’re right. Usually there’s rain coming, when you see that happen.

And when you see the south wind blow, you say, ‘There will be hot weather’; and there is.

Wind blowing it off the desert. You’re like, up, it’s going to heat up, it’s going to warm up. And there is.

“Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time? Yes, and why, even of yourselves, do you not judge what is right? When you go with your adversary to the magistrate, make every effort along the way to settle with him, lest he drag you to the judge, the judge deliver you to the officer, and the officer throw you into prison. I tell you, you shall not depart from there till you have paid the very last mite.”

The mite is literally a piece of a coin. It’s not even a tiny coin, it’s a piece of a coin. A lot of very small clay coins you could break into pieces. So what’s the metaphor here? We have a similar process, it’s settling out of court. If you’re on trial, you’re staring down 20 or 40 years in prison, it behooves you to go talk to the prosecutor and see if you could make a deal, see if you could work this out. If you’re getting sued for some incredible sum of money that’s going to bankrupt you, they’re going to garnish your wages for it and they’re going to put you in the poor house, it behooves you to go try and settle that out of court beforehand.

What is the metaphor to? When Christ returns, when God comes to judge heavens of the earth, right? As we said, when God visits, things get sorted out. So all the injustice in the world, all the sin in the world, all the wickedness in the world, it’s all going to get sorted out. Wouldn’t you rather, if you’ve wronged someone, go settle that with them now, rather than bring it before the judge?

And so, this is the relevance of that metaphor about you look outside, you could tell what the weather is going to be tomorrow, right? And you what? You prepare accordingly. There’s wind blowing off the desert. Oh, it’s going to be warm. I need to dress for warm weather. Oh, there’s a cloud, there’s going to be rain. I need to be ready for rain.

God is coming to judge the heavens and the earth. I’ll go about my business, right? It doesn’t make any sense. Why does he call them hypocrites? He calls them hypocrites because they all profess to believe this. If you asked any one of them standing there listening to him, “Do you believe that Yahweh is going to come on the day of the Lord and judge the heavens of the earth?” They all would have said, “Oh, yeah, I put true on the true and false test. Yes, that’s going to happen.” He says, “Okay, you say you believe that, but here’s how you live your life. So do you really believe that? Why aren’t you preparing?”

And so, the second metaphor is a concrete example of how to prepare, how to be watchful, and how to be ready. The sin, the wickedness, the injustice, the things I’ve done in my life, I need to try and resolve those now, both with God through confession. Here’s a place where we see St. Luke’s emphasis. Remember in St. Matthew’s Gospel we saw, starting with chapter 18, he had that passage about forgiveness in the church. That whole chapter aimed at how coming into the church, that God was going to forgive sins through confession in the church and in the church body and reconciliation.

So, St. Matthew sort of focused on that element of it, of forgiveness from God. St. Luke, as we’ve seen with some other things, tends to focus. While he doesn’t deny that obviously, tends is a focus on reconciliation between people, because remember, there’s two commandments love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, as we read a couple of chapters ago. And love your neighbor as yourself. St. Luke tends to emphasize the love your neighbor as yourself part. St. Matthew tends to emphasize love the Lord your God part. But both are true. Both are true.

And so that’s the part that he’s emphasizing here. He emphasizes the fact that we need to be reconciled with everyone before God comes to… Do you know the wait till your dad gets home metaphor, right? If I knew that my dad was coming home at 05:00 and earlier in the day, I’d smacked my sister, I knew she was going to go crying to my dad when he got home, and then I’d be in for it. You can bet I was bringing her a Popsicle. “Hey, how are you doing? Sorry about that earlier. We don’t need to tell dad, right?” It’s the same kind of idea. If I’ve wronged you and I haven’t done anything about it, when the Lord returns, he’s going to take care of that. So it behooves me to go now, right? Behooves me to go now, sort that out with you now. Make amends now. So that he won’t have to.

So, this is very concretely, what it means to be watchful, what it means to be ready. At least a big piece of that is being at peace with everyone and not in the shallow way of, “Oh, I don’t have anything against anybody,” right? But in a real way. Not only am I not holding a grudge against anybody, there’s nobody out there who’s holding one at me. There’s nobody out there who I’ve wronged, who I haven’t approached and tried to make things right.

So that’s looking at a positive example, somewhat positive. I mean, he does give the example of the guy being thrown in prison forever, but you know, of what we need to do.