Father Stephen De Young: Now, here in verse eleven, we go to the next day. This is another one of those things. I know I’ve commented on this a lot, but a lot of times we read the Bible in sort of little chunks. We read like one story. And so we miss these transitions. We missed the fact that St. Luke is setting these things up as happening in sequence. This happens and then the next day this happens, and then the next day this… and then he’s connecting these things. So, the next day after the healing of the slave:

Now it happened, the day after, that He went into a city called Nain;

Nain is really another one of those villages. City is an exaggeration, but so he’s doing what he’s been doing. He travels to another one of the villages to preach there and to heal.

and many of His disciples went with Him, and a large crowd.

It doesn’t say, notice, that a large crowd gathered, but that a large crowd went with him. So again, this is a big group of people following him around.

And when He came near the gate of the city, behold, a dead man was being carried out, the only son of his mother; and she was a widow. And a large crowd from the city was with her.

So he’s coming into the city with this crowd following him. He runs into this big crowd leaving the city, that’s a funeral procession, because especially in a Jewish city, another thing that’s unclean besides Gentiles are dead bodies. So, body has to be taken outside the city to a cemetery to be buried. And so they’re on their way out carrying the body. Jesus is on his way in, they run into each other.

This is an only son, and the woman is a widow. Why is that important? Well, as we’ve talked about many times the state of women, this is a Jewish peasant woman to boot. This isn’t a Roman woman who’s a Roman citizen. So, we’re about as low as you can get. If she was seven years old, it might be a little lower, but culturally this is as low as you can get. The only way a peasant woman could do anything in that culture would be through her husband. If she wanted to do anything involving what we would call a court case, her husband had to go and represent her. She couldn’t give testimony. She couldn’t testify in court. Women weren’t allowed to testify in court because they didn’t trust women. So, she couldn’t even testify in court, let alone bring a lawsuit or something, if someone wronged her. She couldn’t go and get a job. It doesn’t happen, okay?

So as a widow, the only hope you have is if you have a son, because then your son can do that for you, right? Your son will take care of you. Your son will represent you. Your son will go and do these things for you. Well, now her son’s dead. So this isn’t just… you add to this is a woman who’s lost her son, and that grieving. A woman who’s lost her only child, and that grieving. But what she has to look forward to for the rest of her life is begging. Homelessness and begging. And that she’s living in this peasant village. She’s going to be begging other peasants for scraps of food. So she does not have a long and joyful life ahead of her at this point. Her life is over and this misery and grief and mourning she’s experiencing doesn’t have sort of an end point that she can see. She’s lost everything.

“When the Lord saw her,” Notice, this is important. Notice how they just referred to Jesus: “the Lord”, not when Jesus saw her, but when the Lord saw her. We’ve talked about this briefly before. This is the Greek word kyrios, right? Which is the word that’s used instead of Yahweh in most places in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. So this is another St. Luke tipping his hat: when the Lord saw her. If we were reading this in the Old Testament, right, and it said “The Lord spoke to Elijah”, who would we be talking to? God. Right? If we were reading the Old Testament, right? And you say, “Well, this is obviously a human being.” Well, okay, Genesis: “the Lord went walking in the garden in the heat of the day.” We were talking about God, right?

So, St. Luke here speaks about Jesus the way the Old Testament speaks about God.

When the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her and said to her, “Do not weep.”

But notice, even if he calls him the Lord, the word for compassion here is from a Greek verb which is a fun word to pronounce: splanchnizomai. In the popular Greek understanding, different emotions and different feelings were associated with different bodily organs. That sounds weird, but we still do that a little when we talk about love, we have little hearts, right? So we associate love with our heart. They were just a little more advanced than that. And for whatever reason and I honestly do not know the reason, but for whatever reason, they associated compassion with your spleen. I do not know why. Splanchnizomai, That’s actually where we get the word spleen, okay? But they associated that with your spleen. So if we wanted to translate it very literally, it would be when the Lord saw her, “he spleened her”, right? We would probably use terminology in English, more like “his heart went out to her”. Right? Which of course, doesn’t literally mean he reached into his chest and pulled out heart.

But notice, we’re talking about an organ of the human body. We’re talking about human emotion and human feeling. So again, we’ve got those two pieces here. Jesus is referred to as the Lord, at the same time, he’s experiencing this very human emotion of seeing this bereft woman and taking pity on her.

What he’s about to do is clearly not like, “Okay, now I’m going to do a sign to demonstrate to you all that I’m God.” This is motivated purely by his compassion for this human being, for this woman who he sees, okay?

So he tells her, “Do not weep”, which probably didn’t go across all that well, right? If you walk into a funeral today and walk up to grieving family member and say, don’t cry. Not going to go over really well.

Then He came and touched the open coffin, and those who carried him stood still. And He said, “Young man, I say to you, arise.”

Notice once again, how does he raise him from the dead? Speaks to him. Talks to him. Tells him to get up and rise from the dead. Not like Elijah who prayed, ask God to do it. Jesus says it, and it happens.

So he who was dead sat up and began to speak. And He presented him to his mother.

Why does it mention that he started talking? He’s really alive. This is really her son, right? This isn’t just some kind of parlor trick where he made him sit up in his coffin, pretend where he’s alive, right? And also, there’s a period in the 18th century where people were starting to become atheists, and they didn’t really have the courage of their convictions, so they didn’t want to come out and say, just the Bible wasn’t true. So instead, they went through all the stories of the Bible and came up with bizarre explanations as to how they happened. They weren’t miraculous.

One of my personal favorites is the theory that when Jesus was walking on the water, he actually knew about a hidden sandbar. He went walking out to them on a sandbar. The disciples didn’t know the sandbar was there, so they were all impressed, that kind of thing. Well, what they did with a lot of these healings was they come and say, “Well, he wasn’t really dead. They didn’t have brain scans, they didn’t have heart monitors, they didn’t have science. They thought the kid was dead. He was just in a coma or something. But Jesus was smart, and so Jesus could tell that he was just in a coma. So Jesus stopped them from burying him and propped the kid up.”

But notice the speaking part sort of prevents that interpretation. He’s not presented as somebody sort of waking up and, “Oh, where am I?” Right? Jesus says “Rise,” he sits up and starts talking like nothing had ever nothing had ever happened.

So now we have another understatement:

Then fear came upon all,

As you can imagine, if you were in the middle of a funeral procession and somebody walked up and told the deceased to wake up, and they did, you might have fear come upon you.

†And they glorified God, saying, “A great prophet has risen up among us”; and, “God has visited His people.” And this report about Him went throughout all Judea and all the surrounding region.

Notice they’ll accept, okay, Jesus must be a prophet. But notice the difference between what they say and what the centurion said. It’s placed in parallel. The centurion has a superior understanding of Jesus’s authority. He realized he was doing something that prophets couldn’t do. In terms of this, “God has visited his people”. We’ve talked about this before. What are they hoping and waiting for in terms of the Messiah? Part of their understanding of that is, remember, the temple was destroyed. They rebuilt the temple. And when they read about the first temple, when the first temple was dedicated, wind and fire and spirit of God comes into it and all this happens. Well, they rededicated the temple after they rebuilt it, nothing happened, right? Zippo. And so they haven’t… And as we saw in First Maccabees, there hadn’t been a prophet. There weren’t prophets coming from them. And so they’ve experienced as a people the fact that, yeah, we’re back here in the land, the Romans are in charge of us, and God doesn’t seem to have come back yet.

Interlocutor: [Inaudible]

Fr. Stephen: Some of them did. We’re going to get to that here in a minute. It’s going to be a discussion about that, who and what St. John the Baptist is later in this chapter. So they as a people leading up to Jesus and Saint John the Baptist, they’ve been experiencing this sort of absence of God. And so the different factions of Pharisees, the Sadducees, have all come up with different theories as to why that is, right? The Pharisees, for example, their theory is, well, God left the temple and let it get destroyed and let us go into exile because we were sinful. So if he hasn’t come back, it’s probably because we’re still sinful. And so we need everybody to repent. We need everybody to start following the law. And when that happens, then God will come back. That was sort of their conclusion. Well, so when they see Jesus do this and raise someone from the dead and they say God has visited his people, that’s what they’re saying. They’re saying this is a sign that God has returned. This is happening. So we really have two identifications here. The first one is that Jesus is a prophet. The second one is more that he’s the Messiah. But we saw, with a centurion, him going even a little farther than that. Him going even a little farther than that. That’s why Jesus says, I haven’t found faith like this even in Israel because the Jewish people aren’t there yet. That’s what was so wonderous about the centurion’s announcement.

So what I just teased now, in verse 18:

†Then the disciples of John reported to him concerning all these things.

So some of the people who have been following Jesus around, we’ve seen he has this crowd of people following him around. Some of them are people who were followers of St. John the Forerunner before Herod, remember, Herod has thrown him in prison already for insulting him and his wife/brother’s wife, his wife/sister-in-law. And so he’s thrown him in jail. So these people who had been following St. John are now following Jesus. They see Jesus do these things. They go and take word to St. John in prison and say to them, “Hey, here’s what Jesus is doing. Here are these things that are happening.”

And John, calling two of his disciples to him, sent them to Jesus, saying, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?”

This may seem like a kind of silly question. Again, if we take it in the context here where Luke presents it, okay, Jesus just commanded someone to be healed from a distance and they were. He just raised someone from the dead. They go and they tell St. John that and say, “Go ask him if he’s a Messiah or not”, right? That seems a little odd. But we need a little context to understand what he’s saying. And that’s that, when we were going through the prophets a couple of years ago, it’s very easy for us… See, we’re now Christians living in the 21st century. We’re reading the Old Testament after the fact. We’ve already read the New Testament, so we’ve got the spoilers. We know how the story is going to end, right? And so when we go back and read Isaiah, and Isaiah is talking about the suffering servant, we go, “Oh, that’s Jesus”, right? Because again, we know the end of the story. Well, before Jesus actually suffered and died, it was a little less clear to them.

So their understanding of who the Messiah was going to be and what the Messiah was going to do is based on piecing together a whole bunch of different prophecies and things from the Old Testament. It was not as clear to them as it now is to us, looking back on it. And so as we’ve already seen, a lot of them have wrong ideas about who the Messiah is going to be and what he’s going to do. A lot of it seems to be focused on political and military conquest and that kind of thing, which as we know, isn’t accurate, isn’t what Scripture is actually saying. So they’re piecing these things together and so they’re sort of different schools of thought and theories.

And one of these was that there was not going to be just one Messiah, but there were going to be two. There are going to be two figures who are going to come. And even within that idea, there were several different schools of thought, like in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that are a set of documents from a Jewish sect that lived at a place called Qumran. And the Dead Sea Scrolls, they talk about there being a priestly messiah and a kingly messiah. So there’s going to be a messiah who’s going to come and he’s going to be the king and there’s going to be another messiah who’s going to come and he’s going to be the new high priest. The new high priest is going to restore the temple. The new king is going to restore the nation. That was sort of the idea that they had.

As we saw picking up on the prophecy in Malachi, there were other people who believed, well, Elijah is going to return and then the Messiah is going to come. So it’s going to be sort of this Elijah figure, either literally Elijah, because he went up to heaven in the chariot, literally Elijah is going to come back to earth, or figuratively, there’s going to be sort of this Elijah prophet figure first and then the Messiah. So there’s that kind of idea and there are all kinds of variations of other things too.

So what St. John is really asking here, is Jesus the prophet, the king? Is he the Messiah? Is he the one who’s going to deliver Israel from the Romans, right, or is he the one who comes first and then this other guy is going to come second? So, St. John’s question is not expressing faithlessness or doubt the way it’s sometimes portrayed. It’s not that he doubts Jesus is the Messiah.

He’s asking a clarifying question of Jesus because he believes Jesus knows. He believes that Jesus knows the correct interpretation of prophecy and knows who he is. And so what he’s really asking Jesus here, are you the coming one or should we expect another, is, “I believe this is happening right now. How is it going to happen? Which role do you play in this?” So he’s asking for clarification and details and understanding of the Scriptures, is what he’s really asking Jesus for.

Interlocutor: You would think he got an answer when he was baptizing him.

Fr. Stephen: But in terms of, again, if there’s going to be two different figures, which one is Jesus? So that’s the kind of question he’s asking. It’s not a faithless question. It’s a question that comes from his belief that Jesus is part of God returning to his people, just not totally being clear on what part and what’s going to happen now. Right?

And as St. John is staring down his death at the hands of Herod, he’d kind of like to get up speed, on how exactly is this going to play out here.

And John, calling two of his disciples to him, sent them to Jesus, saying, “Are You the Coming One, or do we look for another?” And that very hour He cured many of infirmities, afflictions, and evil spirits; and to many blind He gave sight.

So before Jesus answers them, he doesn’t answer them at first. He just starts healing people. He just starts healing people in front of them. And finally, when he’s done:

Jesus answered and said to them, “Go and tell John the things you have seen and heard: that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have the gospel preached to them. And blessed is he who is not offended because of Me.”

Notice that emphasis on Him curing blind people. Does anybody know why that might be? It’s from Isaiah. Do you remember the passage that Jesus read? The synagogue at Nazareth? “I have come to open the eyes of the blind to preach the good news to the poor.”

And see, Jesus references that the good news is preached to the poor. He references that again here, right? So what’s his answer to St. John? His answer to St. John is, “I’m the one who Isaiah was talking about when he said these things”. Isaiah said these things would happen. Look, I’m doing them. And then just to clarify, he explains it to them. He says, “Look, this is happening”. And he uses the language from Isaiah, right? So I’m the one who Isaiah was talking about.

And notice what he says at the end. “Blessed is he who is not offended because of me.” What does that mean?

Interlocutor: The Pharisees were offended by him.

Fr. Stephen: Right, so there are people who are offended by it. But remember what the question he’s answering is. Question he’s answering from St. John is… St. John wants a better understanding of who Jesus is as the Messiah and how this is going to play out. So, Jesus here is referencing the fact that the way he’s about to do this is not the way people are necessarily expecting Him to do this. And so there are going to be people who look at Him, particularly the fact that he was crucified, we’ve talked about before, right? That’s how fake messiahs die, they get crucified by the Romans. And that’s why St. Paul is going to call Jesus’s crucifixion a stumbling block to the Jews, because they can’t get over that—It’s like, “Okay, yeah, if he’s the Messiah, why was he executed as a criminal by the Romans?”

So that’s what Jesus is alluding to here. There are going to be people who, rather than seeing what I do and seeing how it fulfills the Scripture, are going to come to Christ with their expectations of what the Messiah should be and should do. And because of that, they’re not going to accept Him, because he’s not going to necessarily fit into their mold of what they think the Messiah should be.

When the messengers of John had departed, He began to speak to the multitudes concerning John:

So now he’s talking to the people about St. John. Messengers have gone back to tell St. John what Jesus said. He says:

“What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? But what did you go out to see? A man clothed in soft garments? Indeed those who are gorgeously appareled and live in luxury are in kings’ courts. But what did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I say to you, and more than a prophet.

So, St. John asked for clarification about who Jesus is. Jesus is now giving the people who are there listening to him clarification about who St. John is.

Interlocutor: But John said at the beginning, “I’m not worthy to loosen your sandals”, so he knew…

Fr. Stephen: Well, like I said, he knew Jesus was the Messiah, he was the presence of God. But again, he was asking me for sort of fine-tuning details, right? Like, are there going to be two? And you’re the first one? And part of that shows John’s humility, because to jump ahead here to what I’m about to say. Part of what Jesus says here about St. John is that St. John was the first one, that he’d say John was Elijah, right? And that Jesus is the second one. St. John had too much humility to look at himself and say, “Oh, I must be the first one!” His question is, is Jesus the first one or is he the only one? Right? Because he couldn’t see that about himself because of his own humility. But Jesus is here testifying to who St. John is, right? So he says “You all went out to the wilderness. You all went out to see him in the desert. You all went out to get baptized by him. Why’d you go out there? Why’d you go see him? Were you looking for somebody who was wobbly?”

That isn’t St. John. We saw the stuff he was saying and what he was preaching. Wobbly reed swayed by the wind. That didn’t cut it. “Did you go out to see a man clothed in soft garments?” This is something that’s coached a little in the English translation. It really means that you go out to see, more literally, someone who’s a effeminate. You go out to see a wimp. You go out to see somebody who’s… And he says, no. Men like that sit in king’s courts. Who’s he referring to? Herod, who just threw St. John in prison. You want to find somebody like that, go see Herod. That’s not St. John.

What did you go out to see? A prophet. Did you think he was a prophet? Jesus says, you’re right, he is a prophet. He is a prophet. But he’s more than just one of the prophets. Now he’s going to continue, verse 27:

This is he of whom it is written: ‘Behold, I send My messenger before Your face, Who will prepare Your way before You. For I say to you, among those born of women there is not a greater prophet than John the Baptist; but he who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.”

So, he says he’s not just a prophet, he’s the particular prophet who was prophesied in Malachi that he was going to come before the Messiah. So this is where Jesus is making clear. You have this idea from Malachi about this Elijah who comes first. Guess what, that’s St. John, which is also then testimony to who Jesus is. Well, if he’s the first one, then Jesus is the Messiah. And he says, literally, it’s among men born of women, there’s not a greater prophet than John the Baptist. What does he mean? “But the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” Now, I’ll tell you how certain people interpret this, because I actually heard this recently from, again, someone who’s somewhat skeptical about the Bible, that this was added later. Now, let me tell you, there’s no evidence that this was added later. We do not have any copies of Luke, no matter how old, that don’t have this, okay? But theoretically this was added later because someone read it and saw how nicely Jesus was talking about St. John the Baptist. They said, well, this won’t do, because this makes it sound like St. John the Baptist is almost as great as Jesus. So we’ll put in a put down about St. John the Baptist to even it out, to make sure they know that Jesus is better.

This is silly for several reasons. Number one, the fact that we have no evidence whatsoever that this was ever not part of the text, but also in that there’s no evidence that the early Christians felt that you need to put down John the Baptist. There is a really obscure gnostic sect called the Mandaeans. Well, now that ISIS is there, I don’t know, that until recently still existed in Iraq. They may not be there anymore, but until very recently existed in Iraq, that thought John the Baptist was a Messiah. And from that some of these quote/unquote “scholars” have theorized, “Oh, well, there was a whole other movement that followed St. John the Baptist, right? They were fighting with the Christians. The Christians were saying Jesus is better. And they were saying St. John the Baptist is better. So this is part of that.”

Again, there’s no historical evidence that the Mandaeans were ever anything but a tiny little weird Gnostic sect out in the desert. There’s no evidence that there were ever any churches that worshiped St.  John the Baptist as the Messiah. There’s no evidence of any of this conflict, there’s no writings, there’s no nothing. This is all theoretical. The much simpler explanation is that Jesus is just talking about the Old Covenant and the New Covenant. Jesus is saying that St. John is the last of the prophets, because the prophets came and prophesied until Christ came, as Hebrews is going to tell us. Once Christ comes, he’s God in the flesh. Jesus is God revealing himself in the flesh. He’s the perfect revelation of God. We don’t need prophets anymore, to tell us about God, because we’ve seen God in the person of Jesus. And so, he’s saying St. John is the pinnacle of the Old Testament, of the Old Covenant leading up to the coming of Christ.

But those who are going to be in the New Covenant, those who are going to be in the new kingdom, are going to be greater than he. Why? Because they have better than the prophets had. We now know Christ personally. We know God of the flesh. We know Christ. What was revealed to the prophets, sort of in images and shadows, as St. Paul’s going to say. These sort of images to predict and prophesy who Jesus would be, we now know fully and clearly. We’re not like St. John was sitting there in prison trying to figure out, “OK, is this the first Messiah? The second Messiah, is there one? Is there two?”

We now have read the New Testament, and so we can look back and read the Old Testament and understand it, see Jesus there clearly, right? And so that’s what he’s saying, saying those who have come to know Christ now are going to be in a better position than any of the prophets, even St. John, who was the greatest of the prophets, because we now know God in Christ.

And when all the people heard Him, even the tax collectors justified God, having been baptized with the baptism of John. But the Pharisees and lawyers rejected the will of God for themselves, not having been baptized by him.

Why is there that distinction? The tax collectors knew they were sinners, right? What was St. John’s baptism about? They were baptized for the forgiveness of their sins. So, the tax collectors praise God and say, “Oh this is wonderful because what Jesus is saying is that St. John was this prophet, we were baptized by him. That means our sins were really forgiven.” So the tax collectors, the sinners, the people who knew they were sinners and went out there for forgiveness rejoice now, because that means our forgiveness is real, right?

But the Pharisees, it says lawyers here in the Orthodox Study Bible, that means teachers of the law. These aren’t like attorneys, these are the scribes, right? These are the Old Testament law. The Torah, right? They’re not so happy, because they didn’t go out to get baptized by John. Why? They’re not ready to say John wasn’t a prophet. We’ll see that later. Not ready to say he wasn’t a prophet, not going to say he wasn’t a holy person. Josephus even, the Jewish historian who stayed Jewish, well, sort of. He ultimately decided that the Romans were the Messiah, so he was kind of an apostate Jew who got in bed with the Romans. But even he acknowledged that St. John the Baptist was an incredibly holy person.  They didn’t go get baptized by St. John because they didn’t think they needed it. “He’s out there baptizing people for the forgiveness of their sins. Well, I guess I’d do that if I had any.”  That’s their attitude. “I know the law so well, and I’ve got it so fine-tuned, and I keep all the commandments.” That’s what they think. So they didn’t get baptized by John because they didn’t need it, they thought.

So in rejecting that, notice what St. Luke says. Luke editorializes here a little. They rejected the will of God for themselves.

What’s the irony there? Well, what is the law? The law is the will of God written out, right? The law is this is what God wants you to do. This is how God wants you to live. And so in thinking that they had kept it and that they weren’t sinners, they really rejected it. That’s what St. Luke is saying here. The sort of example of professing themselves to be wise, they became fools.

And the Lord said, “To what then shall I liken the men of this generation, and what are they like? They are like children sitting in the marketplace

Now, again, “this generation”, I commented on this before when we talked about generation here, we use generation to refer to, like, an era of people, right? Generation X or Millennials, right? You know, The Who talking about my generation, baby boomers… The word that gets translated “generation” is actually more like a people group, more the way we use ethnicity. So the Jews are a… I’ll use Modern Greek, yenos The Romans, the Greeks are yeniThese are different generations of people.

What Jesus says, “to what shall I compare this generation?” He’s not talking about just like, the people who happen to be alive at that time in history. He’s talking about to what shall I liken and really here the Jewish people, the people who he’s come and is preaching the gospel to, even though it’s not politically correct, He’s sort of saying, you people to the people who are there listening to them, what shall I liken you? So what are they like?

They are like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, saying: ‘We played the flute for you, And you did not dance; We mourned to you, And you did not weep.’ For John the Baptist came neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and you say, ‘He has a demon.’ The Son of Man has come eating and drinking, and you say, ‘Look, a glutton and a winebibber, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ But wisdom is justified by all her children.”

That’s a great old-fashioned word, a “winebibber”.

So, what’s he saying? He’s saying, well, again, there’s two… St. John the Baptist came first, says he wasn’t eating or drinking. Meaning what? He’s living out in the desert. He’s living on locusts and honey. He’s out there. He’s scraggly, right? He’s the one who translated here. “We mourn to you and you did not weep”. It’s more like “we played a dirge for you and you did not weep”. He came and he gave you the bad news, right? John the Forerunner was bad cop. He came and said, repent, right? The ax is at the root of the tree. Fire is coming upon the earth, right? Judgment is coming. You better straighten out right now, and be baptized for the forgiveness of your sins. And they all said what? “You’ve got a demon. He’s crazy. That nut running around out there in the desert, some kind of crank”, like he’s the guy walking down the street with the end is near the sandwich board on, right?

So then Jesus comes. Jesus comes. Eating and drinking, right? Meaning Jesus comes, Jesus is good cop. Jesus comes to bring them the good news, right? Good news. He starts talking about forgiveness of sins, preaching the good news to the poor, healing people, these miraculous healings, doing all these good… feeding people, doing all these wonderful things, embracing the outcasts. What do they say about him? “He’s a drunk. He’s always eating. They never fast”. Remember they said that, “Why don’t your disciples fast?” He was eating and partying. It’s a friend of tax collectors and said, “he’s hanging around with all the riffraff”. All these no good people. So that’s the analogy there, right? We played the flute for we played you a happy tune and you wouldn’t dance. We played you a sad song and you wouldn’t cry no matter what we do.

This passage has always reminded me of one time when I was watching the weather report, when I lived in California because Southern California, where I grew up, is always having droughts. They had like an eight year drought and then they had another, like, eight year drought. Or maybe it was all one giant 16 year drought. I don’t know. There seemed to always be a drought. And you’d hear about it on every weather report, “Oh, we still got this drought. We’re still drought. We only had whatever rain.” It’s one day I’m watching the weather report and they say, “Well, we got three inches of rain, but it didn’t help with the drought.”

At that point. You have to sit and think, okay, we had three inches of rain and that didn’t help with the drought. We’re in trouble because I don’t think there’s anything else coming besides rain, right? If the rain doesn’t help with the drought, what will, right? We’re stuck in permanent drought then. The same kind of thing here. If you hear the call to repent, and that judgment is coming. We need to repent and get right with God. When we hear that, and think “I don’t know, that’s just nuts.”

We hear the gospel, and we hear the good news about salvation in Christ, the resurrection of the day. They look at that and go, “ugh, whatever”, there’s nothing else coming. God isn’t going to do anything else. That’s old hat, and you don’t care. That’s it.

And so that’s what Jesus is saying with sorrow to these people. We tried it both ways. You won’t hear it and there’s nothing else coming. Nothing else coming. So as sad as a note as that is to end on, we’ve gone a long time. So thank you for your patience.