Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 19-20.

We teach the story of Zacchaeus to children because they find him amusing and we use him to illustrate the value of enthusiastically seeking Jesus.  That is not a bad lesson, but it’s not really the lesson that Luke intends to convey.  No, the lesson Luke seems to primarily convey is the value of accepting those who seek the Lord.  When the people saw Zacchaeus, they saw a sinner.  Jesus saw a man seeking God.  In response to Jesus’ recognition of him, Zacchaeus gave half his wealth to the poor and recompensed those he had cheated.  The people saw a sinner, Jesus saw a man who desired God’s love.  The Son of Man came to seek and save the lost.  Our mandate is to seek the lost and invite them to Christ.

Immediately after the story of Zacchaeus Luke records the Parable of the Ten Minas, which I have always thought of as a parallel to the Parable of the Bags of Gold from Matthew.  While the parable in today’s passage is similar to the one from Matthew, it is clearly different.  In this parable, the man who gave money to his servants was going on a journey to be made king over a distant land, something which is nowhere in the parable told in Matthew.  Interestingly, Jesus includes a bit about a delegation from the man’s subjects (different from the servants to whom he entrusted the minas) saying that they did not want him to be their king.  At the end of the parable Jesus returns to those who did not want the man to be their king.  Jesus says that the man, now king, ordered those men brought and killed in front of him.  This tells me that Jesus is saying that the man who gave out the ten minas is Himself, and that the servants to whom they were given are His disciples.

The final thing I want to touch on that I never noticed before, but which fits into my understanding of Passion Week, is that the crowd which joyfully praised God and Jesus during His Triumphal Entry were His disciples.  It has been my understanding for many years now that the crowd which praised Jesus during the Triumphal Entry were different people from the crowd which condemned Him and called for His death less than a week later in front of Pilate.

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

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