Today, I am reading and commenting on  Luke 6-7.

Today’s passage begins with two incidents related to what Jesus taught about the Sabbath.  At the end of the first incident Jesus declares Himself Lord of the Sabbath.  In the second incident, Jesus asks if it is lawful to do good, or to do evil, on the Sabbath.  This is clearly a rhetorical question, because Jesus immediately, without waiting for an answer, restored the man’s hand.  I want to make note that the way Luke presents these two incidents indicates that he wants us to understand that he is not presenting the material necessarily chronological order, that these two incidents did not happen right after the other.  We need to keep this in mind as we read all of the Gospel of Luke–for the most part, events described earlier in his account occurred before events described later, but Luke makes it clear that sometimes an event is related out of chronological order for the sake of communicating the lesson more clearly.

This passage also makes clear that Jesus had many more than twelve disciples.  First, Luke makes a point that Jesus selected twelve apostles out of His many disciples after a night of prayer.  That right there is an important example for us to keep in mind.  Jesus, even though He was God, spent a night in prayer before selecting the twelve whom He set aside as His special messengers to the world.  After describing Jesus selecting the Twelve, Luke begins his account of Jesus’ central sermon (equivalent to Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount) by telling us that Jesus stood on a level place surrounded by a large crowd of His disciples, and a great number of other people.

Finally I want to touch on a theme which pervades all of Jesus’ ministry, but which Luke highlights in this sermon.  It is really made of two parts.  first, love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.  Second, do good things for those who can’t and/or won’t return the favor.  In fact, we should especially do good things for those who will hold us in a negative light even after we have done them a good turn.  Related to that is what Jesus tells Simon the Pharisee after the “sinful” woman anointed Him, “whoever has been forgiven little, loves little.”  Do we think of ourselves as having been forgiven little?  Or, do we realize how deep our debt really was?

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.

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