Father Stephen De Young: My usual disclaimer if you want to hear the big long introduction to Luke’s Gospel, it’s on the website. It’s the first Bible study on Luke and you could find it there. By way of a quick sort of catch up before we get started. We’re only in chapter six, so it shouldn’t take us that long to run through those first five chapters.

But we talked first obviously about the prediction of and the birth of St. John the Baptist and then about the prediction and birth of Christ. And in the last couple of chapters, Jesus has sort of started his teaching ministry in Galilee. He’s been going into the synagogue, he’s been traveling from place to place, healing people and preaching. And He has already received a little bit of resistance from the Pharisees and the other religious authorities have started to sort of question and challenge him.

And we talked about last time how it’s been portrayed a little bit differently in St. Luke’s Gospel than in St. Matthew’s Gospel and St. Mark’s Gospel. In St. Mark’s Gospel, remember, Pharisees are pretty much hostile right off the bat, immediately there and on the attack. And he always made very clear that the Pharisees came up from Judea, they came up from Jerusalem and were sort of bothering him in Galilee, whereas the Pharisees in St. Luke’s Gospel, he doesn’t particularly say where they came from. They’re just sort of there when He’s in the synagogues and they’re there when He’s preaching amongst the people.

And we’ve actually seen in St. Luke’s Gospel more hostility from sort of the common people, like the people in Nazareth at the synagogue who tried to drag him out and kill him and some of the other common people than we have with the Pharisees. So far though, the Pharisees have been sort of asking pointed questions and there’s been some conflict already.

So, as we pick up here in chapter six, we’re just coming off of, remember at the end of chapter five, the Pharisees showed up with some of those questions particularly related to fasting and why they felt that Jesus’s disciples weren’t fasting appropriately and why they should be. And now as we begin chapter six, we’re going to see that saga continues with the Pharisees. They haven’t gone anywhere and they haven’t understood what Jesus has tried to tell them in response to their questions.

So let’s go ahead, we’ll get started here in chapter six, verse one:

Now†it happened†on the second Sabbath after the first that He went through the grainfields. And His disciples plucked the heads of grain and ate†them,†rubbing†them†in† their†hands. And some of the Pharisees said to them, ìWhy are you doing†what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath?î

So, Jesus is walking through these grain fields. Obviously, people are following him, right? Because there’s Pharisees there. It’s not just him and his disciples. So, there are people there. So probably Jesus, as he’s walking and traveling, is speaking and his disciples get hungry. So, they start pulling off heads of grain and rubbing in their hands and getting the wheat out and chewing on it as they go.

So, the Pharisees see his disciples doing this. Now notice this is the second time with the Pharisees, but also, it’s the second time they don’t come up to Jesus about what Jesus is doing. They come up to Jesus about what his disciples are doing. So they come up to Him and say, “Why are they doing what it’s not lawful to do on the Sabbath?” Because of course, there’s a law that on the Sabbath you can’t grind grain. And apparently in the Pharisees mind this is grinding grain. So they come and they question Him.

But Jesus answering them said,†ìHave you not even read this,†what David did when he was hungry, he and those who were with him:†how he went into the house of God, took and ate the showbread, and also gave some to those with him,†which is not lawful for any but the priests to eat?î And He said to them,†ìThe Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath.î

There’s two pieces here to his response. First, he points to the example of King David in the story, I know you probably don’t remember all the way back in First Samuel, three and a half years ago or whenever we were in First Samuel. But David, remember, was on the run from Saul for quite some time. David had been made king, but Saul was still alive and still king and was not happy about that. So, David and his men were on the run. While they were running from Saul, they came to the place where the tabernacle was. And in the tabernacle, remember, one of the things was the show bread, which was bread that was stacked on an altar, and the priest ate from that. That was for them to eat while they conducted their duties in the tabernacle.

Well, David and his men got there, they were starving, hungry, and so they took the showbread, and they ate it. They broke the law in order to feed themselves, because they had nothing to eat in order to feed themselves. Okay, so how does that answer the Pharisees’ question? Is it just “Whenever you’re hungry, you can break all the rules, you can just go steal some food because you’re feeling hungry?” Obviously not. That’s obviously not what Jesus is saying. But who is David? Not just the king, he was the king. He had been anointed as a king and was the prototype for the Messiah. He’s the prototype for the Messiah.

And this is where it dovetails into the second thing. Jesus says the Son of Man is also Lord of the Sabbath. “Also” in addition to what?

This is from a previous run in with the Pharisees that he had in Luke’s Gospel. Remember when they let the man down through the roof and Jesus said to him, “Your sins are forgiven?” And they lost their mind. They said, what? “Only God can forgive sins.” Remember we talked about how Jesus didn’t argue with them? He didn’t say, “That’s not true. I can too”, right? But he forgave sins, implying that he’s God. But remember what he said. He said, “Which is easier to say to this man, your sins are forgiven, or to say to him, who’s paralyzed, get up and walk?” And then he said, “But so that you will know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”, and then he healed him.

So, this also, the Son of Man could forgive sins. So, who does that make Him? He’s also the Lord of the Sabbath. So what Jesus is saying is he’s the Lawgiver. He’s the Lawgiver. If he’s the one who gives the Law, does the Law apply to Him? No, it’s for Him to administer, right? So if he says it’s all right for My disciples to grind grain to eat on the Sabbath, then it’s okay for them to do that, right? So that’s what He’s saying. He’s once again pointing to who he is.

Now, the Pharisees may have walked away going, “Who does He think He is?” But the point is, He was telling them who He is. Because remember, the Sabbath law was different from all the other laws in the Torah. If you think about it. Because when was the Sabbath law made?

Interlocutor: The Ten Commandments.

Fr. Stephen: Before the Ten Commandments. How’s it different than the rest of the Ten Commandments? Genesis 1: God created the world in six days, on the 7th day, he rested. So the Sabbath commandment goes back before all the rest of the Law. It’s from creation, right? So if Jesus is now saying He’s the Lord of the Sabbath, that doesn’t just mean he’s like Moses and He’s a lawgiver. That means He’s God.

Interlocutor: Can you compare that to the laws today?

Fr. Stephen: Well, the laws today don’t come from God. The laws today are made up by human beings. So we’re talking about God’s law, but so if Jesus is the one who gives God’s law and is the one who applies God’s law, that means He’s God, right? Because Moses didn’t have the freedom to make changes and add things, right? Moses, it was given to him on tablets. God wrote them with His own finger, and said, “Here’s the tablet, you take these and you give them to the people.”

So, what Jesus is saying here is that he’s not just a prophet like Moses, he’s not just a king like David, but that He’s God Himself. Coming in the flesh.

In verse 6, we have the next week, we have this whole series of stories that are all happening on these Sabbaths, because as we’ve been told, he’s going around from village to village in the synagogues are preaching on the Sabbath. And so every time he comes out and preaches, there’s a crowd there, there’s some troublemakers. There’s some troublemakers in the crowd.

Interlocutor: I wonder why he’s doing this on the Sabbath, is he deliberately irritating…?

Fr. Stephen: Well, no, he’s going to the synagogues. That’s what we were told at the beginning of this by Luke was that on the Sabbath he was going to the synagogues and preaching there. That was sort of his base, right? And then during the week, he’s healing people. He’s still preaching and talking. There’s a focus on preaching in the synagogues on the Sabbath.

Now it happened on another Sabbath, also, that He entered the synagogue and taught. And a man was there whose right hand was withered. So the scribes and Pharisees watched Him closely, whether He would†heal on the Sabbath, that they might find an†accusation against Him.

So now they’re not even waiting for him to do anything. They’re sitting and watching, they were like, “Hey, that guy is saying, check it out. I wonder if he’s going to heal him. Let’s watch. He can get him if he does.”

†But He†knew their thoughts, and said to the man who had the withered hand,†ìArise and stand here.î†And he arose and stood.

So Jesus knows what they’re thinking again. Not only is he going to do something for the man, but he calls the man up. He says, “Come on up here where everybody can see you!”  So, He’s going to do this in front of everybody to make a point.

Then Jesus said to them,†ìI will ask you one thing:†Is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or to do evil, to save life or†to destroy?î†And when He had looked around at them all,

so he throws that out because he knows again where they’re coming from. So he says, what should you do on the Sabbath? Should you do good or should you do evil? Should you save a life or should you take a life? Well, there’s only really one answer you can give to that, right? Nobody is going to stand up and say, “You should do evil on the Sabbath,” right? Okay. So of course they don’t respond. So he looks around at everybody, “anyone, anyone”, nobody wants to answer.

He said to†the man,†ìStretch out your hand.î†And he did so, and his hand was restored as whole as the other. But they were filled with rage, and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.

Now notice none of them are going to say anything publicly, right? Because what could they say after that? So they just get angry and they go and they gossip and talk about themselves.

Interlocutor: And then they plot.

Fr. Stephen: Yeah, “We got to get back at him somehow”.

Now it came to pass in those days that He went out to the mountain to pray, and continued all night in†prayer to God.† And when it was day, He called His disciples to†Himself;†and from them He chose†twelve whom He also named apostles: †Simon,†whom He also named Peter, and Andrew his brother; James and John; Philip and Bartholomew; Matthew and Thomas; James the†son†of Alphaeus, and Simon called the Zealot;†Judas†the son†of James, and†Judas Iscariot who also became a traitor.

Yeah, they didn’t have spoiler warnings in the first century. So Luke has already sort of dropped on us part of where this story is going. Notice again at the beginning here: “He went out to the mountain to pray and continued all night in prayer to God.” Now we’ve already talked about this before, but it bears saying again, because as we’ve been going through here, I’ve been showing how Jesus has been basically claiming to be God, through his actions, by doing what God does. Well, one of the verses that people will point to who don’t believe Jesus is God will be verses like this who say, “Oh see, look, he went and he prayed to God. So they say, oh, then he can’t be God. What was he doing talking to himself?” And they think that’s real clever. Ha-ha. So the point being, as I said before, if God takes on Himself, our human nature, and becomes flesh, He’s not going to be an atheist.

I also have mentioned before, I think, that a lot of times you’ll hear people talk about, for example, the doctrine of the Trinity or talking about Christology, talking about the fact that Jesus is both God and man. And they’ll say that these are things that developed. These are things that developed. They’re not really in the Bible, but over the course of centuries people argued about it and they came up with these doctrines. And as I said before, that’s completely backwards to the actuality. What causes those doctrines to be articulated, to be written out the way we now have them is the fact that people were reading the Scriptures and trying to explain it.

Because on the one hand they’re reading the Gospel of Luke and they say, “Okay, Jesus can forgive sins and only God can forgive sins. Jesus is the lord of the Sabbath. Well, God established the Sabbath, right? So he’s doing all the things God does that seems to be indicating that he’s God. And then at the same time he prays to God.” And so the doctrine of the Trinity develops. There’s one God, but that one God is three persons: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And so, it’s the person of the Son who becomes incarnate. And the person of the Son, when he prays is speaking to the person of God the Father.

And they say, “Well, look, Jesus does God things and he does human things, right? How do we explain this? How do we understand this?” And so, we have the idea of Christology, that Jesus is one person, but he has two natures: divine nature and human nature.

So these aren’t things that get made up or develop, they’re ways of understanding the information, the revelation that God has given us. So you come to a place where… there was a somewhat famous story of an Anglican bishop who got a lot of speaking invitations. So he traveled all around. Sometimes he’d just get off a plane, get in a cab, go someplace, jump on the stage and speak, because he was moving around that much. So he gets to this one place and he goes up on stage and just launches into his speech. He’s talking about the Trinity, specifically about St. Paul’s epistles. And he comes to the end of his argument, and he says, “And so, if the doctrine of the Trinity didn’t exist already, you’d have to come up with it in order to understand what St. Paul says.” That was sort of his end theme. And so he went and sat down, and the guy who sat down next to say, “Wow, that was pretty brave”, and he said, “What do you mean? I thought that was pretty straightforward Orthodox theology.” And the other guy said, “Yeah, but you’re at the Unitarian convention”, so that kind of went badly for him.

But the idea there the idea if the doctrine in the Trinity didn’t exist, if the doctrine of Christ didn’t exist, in order to understand the Scriptures, we’d have to come up with it all over again. We’d have to reinvent the wheel because it’s the only thing that allows us to understand what the scriptures are teaching us.

So that’s the idea. That’s the thing to keep in mind. We hear them talking about developing and changing as if St. Paul had no idea what the Trinity was and he didn’t know that Jesus was God, he was just sort of coming up with stuff off the top of his head. That’s not how it works. These things are ways of understanding what’s been revealed to us by God that are required by the revelation that God has given us.

So then after that, we have the… now we already saw some of these people have already been called to follow Jesus. Remember Peter and Andrew and James and John, he called them from their fishing boats and he already called Matthew the tax collector. He was there in his tax collecting booth and Jesus called him. But now we have Jesus setting up sort of his inner circle.

We’ve talked before as we went through the Gospels that from what we see in the Gospels, there seems to have been sort of concentric circles of people around Jesus. There were three disciples in particular: Peter, James and John, who seemed to have been very close to Jesus. We see sometimes Jesus going off by himself with just those three, like on the Mount of Transfiguration, for example. And then beyond that we have the twelve disciples who are close followers. Beyond that we have the 70 or the 72, it depends on which Gospel, but roughly 70 people who he sends out at one point. And then beyond that there’s a group of 120 people that’s mentioned in Acts who are with him for most of his ministry who are traveling around. And then of course, as we’ve seen when Jesus is preaching, there’s big, huge crowds. So there’s lots and lots of people. In fact, St. Paul mentions at one point in First Corinthians that one of the times that Jesus appeared after he rose from the dead, there were 500 people there who saw Him. So beyond that you get to bigger and bigger crowds.

But the inner circle here you have twelve. This may be an obvious question, but they can’t all be tough ones. But why twelve?

Interlocutor: The twelve tribes of Israel.

Fr. Stephen: Right, the Old Testament, you had the twelve tribes of Israel, right? That’s how the people, the people of God were structured around the twelve tribes who were from the twelve sons of Jacob.

Interlocutor: What if Jacob had had 13 sons?

Fr. Stephen: Well, then there might have been 13 tribes there sort of were, remember, because Joseph had two sons, Manasseh and Ephraim, and they’re sometimes referred to as half tribes. It’s because they are both descended from Joseph, so there sort of were 13.

So there were twelve tribes that now… what Jesus is doing symbolically by doing this, by having this core group of his disciples be twelve, is he’s setting up this group now that’s following him as sort of a new people of God over against the old people of God. Now, what I just said can be very controversial because some people will read into what I just said that somehow that means Israel is bad or the Jews are bad. God sort of washed his hands. Like Israel in the Old Testament was Plan A and it didn’t work out, so now we’re doing Plan B or that kind of thing.

To that, the first thing I have to point out is that every one of these twelve people is Jewish. Every one of them is a descendant of those twelve tribes makes sense. But remember what we saw over and over again in the prophets, what they prophesied was going to happen in the future. There’s going to be a judgment that was going to come on the people of Israel and then a lot of the people of Israel would end up being cut off, but that there would be a faithful remnant that God would preserve. That faithful remnant that God preserved, with the Gentiles who came in and were drafted in would then become a restored Israel or restored people of God that would bless all the nations.

So, Jesus is not just picking up on the number twelve, right? But by using the number twelve, he’s picking up on that prophecy, in that these twelve are the core of that faithful remnant of those believing descendants of the people of Israel. This is especially important for Luke because remember, the Gospel of Luke is part one of a two-part story with the Book of Acts. Of course, in the Book of Acts, he’s going to show the second piece of that. He’s going to show the Gentiles being brought in and grafted in, and the beginning of that new people of God. So any kind of idea that the Old Testament or the Old Testament people have got or the Old Covenant are wadded up and scrapped, right? Nothing like that, as we saw throughout the Old Testament, well, even as we just mentioned, Moses comes down the mountain with the tablets and what does he find? They’re worshipping the golden calf.

So, right from the beginning. Not everybody who’s genetically in the nation of Israel is believing in and following God, right? And so the judgment that comes upon Israel in the New Testament, in the ministry of Christ, is a picture of the judgment that’s going to come on the whole world. Because in the world now, there are righteous people, there are wicked people, and then there are wicked people like me who are hoping for mercy. It’s sort of a third category in between. But God is being patient, right? God doesn’t just go out and smite everybody who’s wicked. If He smote everybody, the second they sin, we don’t be in trouble, right? But He doesn’t just go around immediately judging everything, right? He’s just letting things be… But the time is going to come when there’s going to be a judgment, there’s going to be blessing and there’s going to be condemnation. Well, this happened early for the nation of Israel. There was a sorting out and a cutting off, and the people who are truly faithful had the people who weren’t paired away.

And when we get into Romans, a lot of Romans, St. Paul is talking about just this issue, and he’s talking about specifically this, is what happened to Israel. And he’s going to make that point and he’s going to give examples from the Old Testament. This has always been what God has done. In the flood, God saves Noah and his family, everybody else gets cut off. He destroys Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his daughters get brought out, the rest of it gets destroyed. This is the pattern. And so what we see in the history of Israel in the Old Testament is not the normal pattern. It’s God being very patient and very kind and very forgiving and bearing with, being long suffering, bearing with Israel and its sinfulness. But ultimately, the time comes where that ends and there’s this judgment. The righteous are saved and the rest are cut off of that.

St. Peter, when we get to First Peter someday, a couple of years, St. Peter picks up on that to talk about the final judgment. Right now, God is being patient with us. He’s being patient with the world he’s bearing with us. He’s giving everyone a chance to repent, time to repent. But eventually that’s going to come to an end and the world is going to end and there’s going to be judgment.

So Jesus here, by picking these twelve people, is setting in motion the fulfillment of that prophecy. The new people of God is beginning here with the remnant of the old covenant people of God who have accepted their Messiah and believed.

So, verse 17:

And He came down with them and stood on a level place with a crowd of His disciples†and a great multitude of people from all Judea and Jerusalem, and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, who came to hear Him and be healed of their diseases,†as well as those who were tormented with unclean spirits. And they were healed.†And the whole multitude†sought to†touch Him, for†power went out from Him and healed†them†all.

So there’s a couple of things here. Notice again, that St. Luke, possibly because he’s a physician, but he always makes this distinction between people who are sick and people who are demon possessed. So, when people come and say, “Oh, well, they were a bunch of primitives back then, they thought somebody was sick or something there, they think a demon possessed them, right?” That’s nonsense. St. Luke knew the difference. There’s sickness, there were people who were possessed by unclean spirits. This is not sort of a primitive way of explaining disease in general.

People in the Greco-Roman world in the first century, were not primitive. We like to get on our high horse as modern people because we have cell phones where we can access the Internet from our pocket. We can access the sum total of the world’s knowledge in all of world’s history on a device in our pocket. We mostly look at funny pictures of cats, but we have that capability. And so we just assume, “Well, these people back there ignorant, they didn’t know anything”. OK, the Greeks and the Romans had figured out the circumference of the earth by doing math, observing the sun. They had invented all manner of things. They understood medicine. They produced some of the greatest works of literature ever produced. These are not primitive ignoramuses.

In many ways, if you want to talk about contemporary American culture, they were a lot more morally advanced than us. You go and read some pagan moral philosophers, right? They would have thought America was a madhouse, the way people act on television, right? They would look at us as primitives, more likely if they saw the way we behave and the way we act. So, whenever you hear someone talking like that. You know, they haven’t studied much about the Greco-Roman world, how much they knew, how much they understood, how sophisticated they were.

And the fact is, people don’t fundamentally change, we may express things a little differently, right? Like they would worship the god Pluto. You don’t think there’s anybody today who worships money? We don’t slap a name on it and say it’s a god who lives on Mount Olympus. But there’s plenty of people who worship it, right? I mean, we don’t call it Aphrodite or Venus, but there’s a whole lot of people who worship beauty and sexuality, right? And we don’t call it Aries or Mars, but there’s a whole lot of people who are really in love with war in this world. So, we haven’t really changed that much. We like to think we have, but the reality is we’re very much the same and in some ways they were more sophisticated than us. So, he knows the difference between demon possession and illness.

But notice also, remember, this is part of our two-part work. Notice he says people came from all Judea and Jerusalem and from the seacoast of Tyre and Sidon, which is what is now Lebanon. These are who? Gentiles, right? So, St. Luke is already sort of tipping the hat that Jesus isn’t just talking to Jews. He’s not sort of weeding out, “Hey, show your Jewish membership card or your I don’t want you hanging out here”, right? So he’s already right. Jesus is proclaiming this to everybody.

That’s a little different than, remember how St Matthew presented it. St Matthew presented it more, Jesus came to the people of Israel, right? Jesus came to the people of Judea and they rejected him. And so then the gospel goes out to all the nations. That’s sort of how St Matthew has it. Whereas St Luke both here and in Acts, and we’ll see this in Acts too, it’s not so much that the Jews didn’t want Jesus, and so he goes to these other people instead. It’s more, Jesus proclaimed this to everyone, starting with the people of Israel, but it was always for everybody. It wasn’t just because they rejected it, but it was always for everybody. He just started with his own people.

And so notice here he’s about to give a sermon and as we’re going to see, a lot of pieces of this sermon that Jesus is about to give, this is the longest sermon in Luke, a lot of pieces of the sermon he’s going to give are going to look a lot like a lot of the pieces of the Sermon on the Mount in St Matthew’s Gospel. They’re not going to be identical. And the biggest difference right off the bat is, of course, that was the Sermon on the Mount. Remember we talked about Jesus went up on the mountain to preach that and we talked about at the time sort of the symbolism there, right? What came down from the mountain? We were just talking about it. Moses with the law came down from the mountain. And when we went through the Sermon on the Mount, a lot of what Jesus was talking about was about the law. You have heard it said in the law, I say to you, blah, blah, blah. So St. Matthew was sort of presenting Jesus as a new Moses.

As we just saw here in St. Luke’s Gospel, he’s standing on a level place. So this is sometimes called the Sermon on the Plain because it’s not on a mountain. So some people will come along and say, “Well, see, look, these two Gospels contradict each other because the sermon is not the same. So they can’t get their story straight about what Jesus said. And one of them says it was on a mountain and the other one says it was down on a flat place.”

Well, this has a sort of really obvious answer both in St. Matthew’s Gospel and in St. Luke’s Gospel, and in St. Mark’s Gospel for that matter, even though he doesn’t really record any of the sermons in St. Mark’s Gospel, all three of them tell Jesus is traveling around preaching, right? He’s preaching all the time. And we’ve seen several Sabbaths have gone by. We got through at least a month, right? So if Jesus is traveling around for a month preaching, he’s going to preach more than one sermon, right? He’s going to preach in more than one venue, right? He’s going to preach on a hill, he preached in a boat, remember? Preaches on a plain, preaches different places. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this from listening to people preach, but sometimes they repeat themselves, right? Sometimes they talk about the same things, sometimes they use some of the same phrases. When I ramble on and on, I know I tell you the same thing 12 or 13 times, right?

They say the same thing, but sometimes they don’t say it exactly the same. Sometimes they’re talking about a slightly different topic and so they’re saying basically the same thing, but they say it a little differently, right? Or they make a different connection, or they add something, or there’s something they talked about when they talked about it before that they don’t talk about this time.

So we would expect that if we have two different gospels giving us a rundown of two different sermons of Jesus, they wouldn’t be absolutely identical, but they would be kind of similar, right? You wouldn’t expect it to give one sermon over here, another servant here, and there’d be nothing alike, right? That would be a problem if in one place he was talking about the law, and in the other place he was saying, “Oh, the law is not important”, that would be a problem. We expect them to be similar and we wouldn’t expect them to be identical.

And this goes back to, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about differences between the gospels as we’ve been going through them. But remember what St. John Chrysostom said: that the fact that there are differences is the biggest proof that this is eyewitness testimony. Because if you have four eyewitnesses to an event and you interview them all separately, their stories are not going to be identical. They’re going to be similar, right? I mean, if one of them says that a purple elephant fell out of the sky, okay, maybe we don’t listen to that one, right? They’re going to be similar. They’re going to involve the same they’re going to explain, they’re going to talk about the same events, but they’re not going to be absolutely identical. And if you do call four separate witnesses in, and you sat them all down and they told you an identical story using the same words and phrases. You’d know what? You’d know these guys got together and came up with the story, right? They were coached, there’s something going on. Right, but so if we have four different Gospel writers telling us the story of Jesus based on eyewitness testimony, we would expect it to all be similar. I’ll describe basically the same kind of events and the same kind of things, but not identical.

And especially when you’re talking about several years of a person’s life. We’re not just talking about one event, we’re talking about several years of a person’s life. All kinds of things happen. And different authors are going to think different events are important, more or less important. Jesus said a lot of things, just in this one month, imagine how much he said.

Matthew thought some parts of that were very important and other parts were not as important to record, and he recorded the ones he thought were really important. St. Luke did the same thing. St. Mark did the same thing. St. John does the same thing. And so we get from all four this rounded out picture of who Jesus is.

So the fact that this sermon is in a different place and is slightly different makes perfect sense. And this is exactly what we would expect to find, unless you’re trying to create problems, if your goal is, I don’t want to have to believe this is true, so I’m going to find some way to undermine it, well, then you could kind of manufacture problems. But the reality is, just on a fair level, this is exactly what you would expect to find if you had two different records of two different sermons.

I should also mention, as I mentioned back then, a year ago, it is about a year ago now when we talk about the Sermon on the Mount, that the disciples were not sitting there with steno pads and pens, taking shorthand, writing down every word Jesus said. The Sermon on the Mount, you could read in about, if you read it nicely and slowly, 35, 40 minutes. But we’re told that the text Jesus spoke for a lot more than 35 or 40 minutes we spoke for hours, remember, because it was evening by the time he finished. So, this is not being presented to us as here’s word for word everything he said. These are things that he said. These are things that he said, again, that St. Luke heard from the people who he’s getting testimony from and that he believed were important to pass on in Jesus’s teaching, because again, you couldn’t record everything. St. John makes that point right at the end of his desk. If everything Jesus said it and did were written down, the world itself could not contain all the books you’d have to write to get every single word, as much as we’d love to have that.

So all of these people are being healed. And then Jesus now is going to begin to preach.

ìBlessed†are you†poor,

For yours is the kingdom of God.†

Blessed†are you†who hunger now,

For you shall be†filled.

Blessed†are you†who weep now,

For you shall†laugh.

Blessed are you when men hate you,

And when they†exclude you,

And revile†you,†and cast out your name as evil,

For the Son of Manís sake.

Rejoice in that day and leap for joy!

For indeed your reward†is†great in heaven,

For†in like manner their fathers did to the prophets.

So we’ll pause there for a second. So this probably reminds you of the Beatitudes right at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew five. But notice there are some subtle differences. Remember, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, it was “blessed are the poor in spirit”. Here it’s just “blessed are you who are poor”. Remember, “it was blessed are you who hunger and thirst for righteousness”. This is “blessed are you who hunger now”. So part of this is the setting. Remember we talked about in St. Matthew’s Gospel, he’s presenting Jesus as giving a new law, right? So he presents Jesus as speaking in a spiritual sense, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the poor in spirit. These are referring back to phrases from the Psalms, and it’s referring to, specifically in the Psalms, the dynamic of a lot of the Psalms, as we saw when we went through the Psalms, is that something isn’t right with the world. The way the world was presented in Deuteronomy 28 through 30. If you’re righteous and you follow God and you keep his law as best you can and you repent when you sin, then you should be blessed and everything should go well for you. And if you do evil and you do what is wicked and you reject God and you don’t follow his law, then you should be cursed and bad things should happen to you.

But all of us who have lived in this world find that that’s not always how it works. A lot of the time, the people who are trying to do right, trying to be good people, trying to follow God’s law, right? They’re the ones who are having the bad things happen to them. A lot of times, the people who are wicked and who are not trying to follow God and they’re not doing what’s right, they seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. Looks like they got a lot of money and they’re having a fine time, right? And so part of that dynamic in the Psalms are those people who are trying to do what is right, but who are being oppressed, crying out to God to say, how long are you going to let this go on? When is that judgment going to come where we find salvation? And these people who are wicked receive what’s coming to them.

And so, St. Matthew was appealing to that in the way he structures the Beatitudes where Jesus is coming, and he’s preaching that deliverance to those people to say that time is here. Those of you who have been hungering and thirsting for justice, those of you who are poor in the spirit, those of you who have been crying out to God for deliverance, that deliverance is coming.

Now, St. Luke is doing something a little different. That’s why it’s phrased a little differently. And let me read this next part, because this, I think, makes clear the difference in what St. Luke is doing, because this next part is not in the Sermon on the Mount, St. Matthew’s gospel, you get to Beatitudes, you get the blessings, right? Well, now, St. Luke’s gospel, we’ve got woes, we’ve got curses. And remember, I said before, woe, doesn’t it mean a lot to us. Woe is the equivalent of to give you the good equivalent, I’d have to use a curse word. So, we’ll put it that way. This is “cursed is someone”, right? So Jesus continues:

ìBut†woe to you†who are rich,

For†you have received your consolation.

Woe to you who are full,

For you shall hunger.

Woe to you who laugh now,

For you shall mourn and†weep.

Woe†to you when†all men speak well of you,

For so did their fathers to the false prophets.”

So Jesus presents the other side here as well, right? Those of you who are hungry, now, you’re going to be filled. Those of you who are poor, now, you’ll receive your reward, whereas those of you who are rich now are in trouble. Those of you who are laughing and celebrating now are in trouble. Those of you who are well fed, like me, you’re in trouble, right? You’re in trouble.

And so what St. Luke is presenting is this idea that we’ve already seen Jesus present in St. Luke’s Gospel of the last being first and the first being last, that you have a choice to make. You have a choice to make. Do you want the good things of this creation? Is that what you’re going to pursue with your life? Or, are you going to pursue the things of God and the good things of the world to come which lasts into eternity? Well, if you’re wise, you’re going to be more concerned about eternity than about a short period of time here in this world. That’s going to be what’s important to you, more than this. But if you make the other choice, yeah, you can chase after those things, and you can probably have some of them. You can have a good time here and now in this world. But then when the day of judgment comes and we’re talking about the world to come, things are going to be very different for you. Things are going to be very different for you.

So that’s what St. Luke is doing here. To quote… it’s later on in St. Luke’s Gospel that we’re going to get the parable about the rich man and Lazarus, right. Do you remember what Abraham says to the rich man? He says, “You received good things in life. Lazarus received bad things.” But what happened after they both died? Lazarus received the good things, the rich man was in trouble.