Luke For Everyone (New Testament For Everyone)

by Tom Wright

It’s the gospel before the gospel, a fierce bright shout of triumph thirty weeks before Bethlehem, thirty years before Cal-vary and Easter. It goes with a swing and a clap and a stamp. It’s all about God, and it’s all about revolution. And it’s all because of Jesus – Jesus who’s only just been conceived, not yet born, but who has made Elisabeth’s baby leap for joy in her womb and has made Mary giddy with excitement and hope and triumph. In many cultures today, it’s the women who really know how to celebrate, to sing and dance, with their bodies and voices saying things far deeper than words. That’s how Mary’s song comes across here. Yes, Mary will have to learn many other things as well. A sword will pierce her soul, she is told when Jesus is a baby. She will lose him for three days when he’s twelve. She will think he’s gone mad when he’s thirty. She will despair completely for a further three days in Jerusalem, as the God she now wildly celebrates seems to have deceived her (that, too, is part of the same Jewish tradition she draws on in this song). All of us who sing her song should remember these things too.

Mary and Elisabeth shared a dream. It was the ancient dream of Israel: the dream that one day all that the prophets had said would come true. One day Israel’s God would do what he had said to Israel’s earliest ancestors: all nations would be blessed through Abraham’s family. But for that to happen, the powers that kept the world in slavery had to be toppled. Nobody would normally thank God for blessing if they were poor, hungry, enslaved and miserable. God would have to win a victory over the bullies, the power-brokers, the forces of evil which people like Mary and Elisabeth knew all too well, living as they did in the dark days of Herod the Great, whose casual brutality was backed up with the threat of Rome. Mary and Elisabeth, like so many Jews of their time, searched the scriptures, soaked themselves in the psalms and prophetic writings which spoke

Discipleship always involves the unexpected.

Now Jesus, coming through the waters of baptism as God’s unique son, the one through whom Israel’s destiny was to be fulfilled, faces the question: how is he to be Israel’s representative, her rightful king? How can he deliver Israel, and thereby the world, from the grip of the enemy? How can he bring about the real liberation, not just from Rome and other political foes, but from the arch-enemy, the devil himself?

Jesus responds to the devil, not by attempting to argue (arguing with temptation is often a way of playing with the idea until it becomes too attractive to resist), but by quoting scripture.

It is a central part of Christian vocation to learn to recognize the voices that whisper attractive lies, to distinguish them from the voice of God, and to use the simple but direct weapons provided in scripture to rebut the lies with truth.

What was so wrong with what he said? What made them kick him out of the synagogue, hustle him out of the town, and take him off to the cliff edge to throw him over? (Note the irony: the devil invited Jesus to throw himself down because God would protect him; Jesus, having refused, found himself in a similar predicament. Perhaps Luke is telling us that God did protect him, because it came about not through self-advertisement but through commitment to his true vocation.)

That’s like someone in Britain or France during the Second World War speaking of God’s healing and restoration for Adolf Hitler. It’s not what people wanted to hear.

Crowds and healings, powerful teaching about God’s kingdom: many found it threatening then, and many find it threatening still.

The Pharisees’ kingdom-plan, in line with plenty of earlier Jewish aims and ideals, was to intensify observance of the Jewish law, the Torah. That, they believed, would create the conditions for God to act, as he had promised, to judge the pagans who were oppressing Israel and to liberate his people. In addition, some of the more militant believed that it was their God-given duty to take the law into their own hands, and to use violence to kick-start the process of revolution. Jesus’ kingdom-vision was very different – almost diametrically opposite, in fact. Since he was drawing crowds and becoming well known, they needed to find out what was going on.

It’s not great faith you need; it is faith in a great God. Faith is like a window through which you can see something. What matters is not whether the window is six inches or six feet high; what matters is the God that your faith is looking out on. If it’s the creator God, the God active in Jesus and the Spirit, then the tiniest little peep-hole of a window will give you access to power like you never dreamed of. Of course, this cannot be used for your own whim or pleasure; as soon as you tried, it would show that you’d forgotten, once more, who this God really was. Humility once again.

Today’s world is full of disputes, large and small, only a few of which get into the newspapers. Nations, ethnic groups, political factions, tribes and economic alliances struggle for supremacy. Each can tell stories of the atrocities committed by their opponents. Each one claims that they therefore have the right to the moral high ground, and must be allowed redress, revenge, satisfaction. But, as anyone who has studied the complicated history of the Middle East, Rwanda or Northern Ireland will know, it is simply impossible to give an account of the conflict in which one side is responsible for all the evil and the other side is a completely innocent victim. The only way forward is the one we all find the hardest at every level: repentance and forgiveness. The resolute application of the gospel, under the Lordship of the risen Jesus, is the only way forward towards the creation of new hope and possibilities. The extraordinary work of the Truth and Reconciliation Com-mission in South Africa, under the leadership of Archbishop Desmond Tutu, showed the way in the last years of the twentieth century. He offers a wonderful example: who will follow?

Note that ‘kingdom of heaven’ is Matthew’s preferred form for the same phrase, following a regular Jewish practice of saying ‘heaven’ rather than ‘God’. It does not refer to a place (‘heaven’), but to the fact of God’s becoming king in and through Jesus and his achievement.

Our word ‘miracle’ tends to imply that God, normally ‘outside’ the closed system of the world, sometimes ‘intervenes’; miracles have then frequently been denied by sceptics as a matter of principle. However, in the Bible God is always present, however strangely, and ‘deeds of power’ are seen as special acts of a present God rather than as intrusive acts of an absent one. Jesus’ own ‘mighty works’ are seen particularly, following prophecy, as evidence of his messiahship (e.g. Matthew 11.2–6).