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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 9.

    We often view the ministries of Jesus and John the Baptist as being very different. This is largely based on Jesus’ contrast between Himself and John where He said that John was criticized for abstaining from things and He was criticized for partaking in those same things. However, here Luke tells us that many people thought of Jesus’ ministry as an extension of John’s, to the point where some thought Jesus was John the Baptist come back from the dead. This tells us that while Jesus may have been stylistically very different from John, their message and their actions must have been very similar. It strikes me that the reason Matthew, Mark, and Luke all made note of Herod’s confusion was in part to communicate to us that some of us will be called to lives of self-denial and sacrifice of physical comfort while others will be called to befriend sinners and illustrate to them that God intends for us to experience joy. Even those called to asceticism are intended to experience joy.

    Luke revisited the confusion which people had about Jesus just a few verses later, after recounting the feeding of the 5,000. After asking the disciples who the crowds thought He was, and receiving their answers, Jesus asked them who they thought He was. Peter responded for the disciples by saying that He was the Messiah. Immediately after this Jesus began teaching them that He would be put to death and then be resurrected. As part of that Jesus also taught the disciples that they needed to be prepared to sacrifice themselves to be His followers. It seems to me that Jesus started to teach about His death and the suffering His disciples would face at this point in order to begin to change His disciples expectations about what the Messiah would bring. An important point Jesus makes here is that getting every possible material good will do us no good if we lose ourselves in the process. An author I enjoy reading placed a paraphrase of this in the mouth of one of her characters, “It does you no good to gain your heart’s desire if it costs your heart to get it.” The character in question made this statement when they surrendered the opportunity to gain something they had spent their whole life working towards when they realized the next step in their plan to get it involved compromising their principles.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on Luke 9.

    When Jesus said to His audience that they needed to “take up your cross daily” it would not have been a vague metaphor. That would have had vivid meaning to them as they would have been familiar with seeing condemned men carrying their cross has they were taken to be executed. Jesus is telling us that in order to serve Him we need to do things which we will no more desire than those men desired to carry their cross. If we wish to serve Jesus we will need to willingly go to our deaths, sacrificing our wants and desires in order to perform God’s will. If we try to avoid doing so, we will lose our lives and our very souls. The only way we can preserve our lives and our souls is to willingly give them up to serve God. One of the main characters in a book series I love put it this way, “It does us no good to give up our heart to obtain our heart’s desire.” As much as we might dread what we expect to find at the end of the path which Jesus leads us down, the end of every other path is worse. However, Jesus also tells us that we will find that the end of the path He is leading us down will be less dreadful and more glorious than we imagine. Yes, there will be suffering, but beyond the suffering is glory.

    I have been struggling with what to say here because I am going to use an example involving someone who I know reads this blog. Here Jesus tells us that the least among us is the greatest. He says this in the context of telling us that those who welcome a child in His name welcome Him, and that those who welcome Him welcome God the Father. We have a tendency to read Jesus as saying that those who are least will be greatest, as if you may be the least now, but you will be the greatest later. However, that is not what Jesus said. He said, “Whoever IS the least among you IS the greatest.” This is not that somehow in the future God will make you great because you are least. No, this is the least are really the greatest.
    Now for the part that makes me nervous. I, and a couple of other friends, run a practice for a local group. After our last practice I was talking with someone who feels that they are not as good as they should be. They feel like they are the least able person at our practice (for the purpose of this blog I am going to assume that this feeling reflects reality, although that is open to debate). As a result of this, they think it is a waste of time for them to continue. Yet I cannot help but think that Jesus is telling those of us who think we are better than this person at this activity that we are wrong. He is also telling this person that because they are the least at this activity that they are actually the greatest. The thing about it is that I almost know what He means in this context. This person, who thinks they are so terrible at this activity, is my favorite teacher of newbies who are just starting to understand what they are doing because when she works with them she does not intimidate them, as some of our members who are more confident of their skill do(myself included, not because I am that good, but because I am that confident). And because she more naturally fences down to them in a way that encourages them to stretch their ability. And all of that is irrelevant to my point. Jesus is telling us that when we think we are the least is actually when we are the greatest.