Luke 9

J. 2, 3 Now the Jews’ feast of tabernacles was at hand. His brethren therefore said unto him, Depart hence, and go into Judea, that thy disciples also may see the works that 4 thou doest. For there is no man that doeth any thing in secret, and he himself seeketh 5 to be known openly. If thou do these things, shew thyself to the world. For neither 6 did his brethren believe in him. Then Jesus said unto them, My time is not yet come: 7 but your time is alway ready. The world cannot hate you; but me it hateth, because 8 I testify of it, that the works thereof are evil. Go ye up unto this feast: I go not up 9 yet unto this feast; for my time is not yet full come. When he had said these words 10 unto them, he abode still in Galilee. But when his brethren were gone up, then went he also up unto the feast, not openly, but as it were in secret.L. 51 And it came to pass, when the time was come that he should be received up, he stead- 52 fastly set his face to go to Jerusalem, and sent messengers before his face: and they 53 went and entered into a village of the Samaritans, to make ready for him. And they 54 did not receive him, because his face was as though he would go to Jerusalem. And when his disciples James and John saw this, they said, Lord, wilt thou that we com- 55 mand fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did? But he 56 turned, and rebuked them, and said, Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. For the Son of man is not come to destroy men’s lives, but to save them. And they went to another village.11 And it came to pass, as he went to Jerusalem, that he passed through the midst of 12 Samaria and Galilee. And as he entered into a certain village, there met him ten men 13 that were lepers, which stood afar off: and they lifted up their voices, and said, Jesus, 14 Master, have mercy on us. And when he saw them, he said unto them, Go shew your- selves unto the priests. And it came to pass, that, as they went, they were cleansed. 15 And one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, and with a loud voice 16 glorified God, and fell down on his face at his feet, giving him thanks: and he was a 17 Samaritan. And Jesus answering, said, Were there not ten cleansed? but where are 18 the nine? There are not found that returned to give glory to God, save this stranger. 19 And he said unto him, Arise, go thy way: thy faith hath made thee whole.

It was seen from the first that his awful powers were uniformly beneficent; that he came, not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them; that he used omnipotence to bless, but never to hurt. Men saw him clothed with power over disease, and even over death; able to cast forth spirits, or to still the sea, and yet accessible, full of sympathy, the lofty patriot, the tender friend, the patient counsellor; shedding tears, at times, from a full heart, and ever ready with a wise and gentle word for all; so unaffected and gentle that children drew round him with a natural instinct, and even worldly hardness and vice were softened before him; and this contrast of transcendent power, and perfect humility, made them feel that he was indeed the head of the kingdom of God among men. The secret of his amazing success, as the founder of a new religious constitution for mankind, lay in the recognition of this perfect sacrifice of one so transcendently great, culminating in “the death of the cross.” It was the perfect realization, in himself, of the life he urged on others. It implied the ideal fulfilment of all human duties, and no less so of all divine, for the heavenly love which alone could dictate and sustain such a career was, in itself, the most perfect transcript of the nature of God. A life in which every step showed kingly grace and divinely boundless love, condescending to the lowliest self-denial for the good of man, proclaimed him the rightful head of the new kingdom of God. G.

Our Lord evades the urgency of his relatives, and afterward goes up to the festival more privately; that is, with less of public notoriety and without being followed as usual by crowds. The journey mentioned in L. 9 : 51 was obviously his last journey from Galilee to Jerusalem; and verse 53 shows that he was passing on rapidly and without delay. In both these circumstances Luke accords with John; and the two accounts are therefore properly arranged together. The healing of the ten lepers evidently connects itself with the same journey through Samaria; and is narrated by Luke out of its proper order. R.

2. In the autumn, half a year after the Passover, the Jews kept their feast of Tabernacles in remembrance of Israel’s dwelling in tents during the time of their marching in the wilderness. R. B.—The feasts of the Jews still set before us the benefits of God. The Passover tells of deliverance from the bondage of sin by Jesus Christ; the feast of Pentecost, God’s eternal covenant with us through the Spirit; and that of Tabernacles reminds us of his watchfulness and providence over us in the wilderness of this life; and of that state of travel, sojourning, and warfare, wherein we must continue till our entrance into the promised land of heaven, into the eternal rest of God. Q.

3. His brethren. (See Section 62, Matt. 13 : 55.) Not among these did Jesus during his lifetime find his most faithful followers, or his most beloved companions. There seemed to be in them a Judaic obstinacy, a lack of sympathy, a deficiency in the elements of tenderness and reverence. Peter, affectionate even in his worst weakness, generous even in his least-controlled impulse; James, the son of Zebedee, calm and watchful, reticent and true; above all, John, whose impetuosity lay involved in a soul of the most heavenly tenderness—these were more to him and dearer than his brethren or kinsmen according to the flesh. F.

3-5. If he were what he seemed, was he to hide himself among the hills of Galilee, and not go up boldly to the capital, and wrest from the rulers the acknowledgment of his claims? Let him, if he was fit to take the leadership of the people, place himself at once in the centre of influence at Jerusalem, and show himself to the world. Then if he made his pretensions good, it would be some honor to claim connection with him; some benefit to be enrolled as his followers. Christ’s own brothers judge of him by themselves. They measure all by outward and visible success. In speaking thus to Jesus, they sever themselves by a wide interval from their great relative. Unselfish, unworldly were all his motives, aims, and ends. They are of the world, and true children of the world they are, in thus addressing him, proving themselves to be. And this they must be told at least, if they will not effectually be taught. H.

Jesus was indeed a lonely being in the world. With all the exquisite tenderness of his human sympathies—touched with the feeling of our every sinless infirmity—with a heart that could feel for a peasant’s sorrow, and an eye that could beam with tenderness on an infant’s face—he was yet one who, wherever he went, and by whomsoever surrounded, was, in the secrecy of his inner being, profoundly alone. He moved among a narrow-minded, grovelling, sensual race, breathing a spirit of ineffable purity and holiness. And while his whole life passed away, while every day, and almost every hour of it, was spent in intercourse with those whose minds never travelled beyond the petty circle of their own national prejudices and passions, his inner being was yet ever filled with thoughts that wandered through eternity, that communed with invisible intelligences, that mused upon the affairs and destinies of the universe. What depths were there in that mighty spirit which none around could fathom! What ineffable joys and mysterious sorrows, unintelligible to the beings with whom he consorted as to the veriest children! The seclusion of the wilderness could not have increased an isolation like his. He was solitary amid crowds. He “trod” the path of life “alone, and of the people there was none with him.” C.

6. My time is not yet come.** It is certainly remarkable, that in all the life of Jesus in the flesh—though the weight of the world’s redemption was pressing upon him, and his ministry of eternal reconciliation was bounded by three short years, yet there is not a single step or movement of his, from first to last, that gives us an impression of haste. Always straitened till his whole work is accomplished, because the night cometh when no man can work, he is yet always deliberate. Are there not twelve hours in his day? He is almost as free from hurry as he is from sin. You see his disciples urging him hither and thither. They want him to go sooner, or stay later, or to make a more sudden manifestation. “Show thyself to the world.” But he still bides his time, and only says his hour is not yet full come. F. D. H.

6-8. His time was coming—the time of his manifestation to Israel—of his showing forth to the world—a very different kind of manifestation from that of which his brethren were dreaming. But it was not yet fully come, and therefore he did not mean to go up to Jerusalem and openly to take part from the beginning in this approaching feast of Tabernacles. H.—His time was a God’s time, but the time of his unbelieving brethren was a world’s time, and that “is alway ready:” they would go to-day or to-morrow, secretly or openly, according to their worldly good-pleasure—what mattered it? Their time agreed not with his time. With them and in their spirit Jesus would not go up to Jerusalem. Not attended by them and the other pilgrims, and expecting a procession to conduct him thither, in short, not “showing himself to the world,” was he going up to the feast of Tabernacles. It was not this feast that was appointed to place openly before the eyes of Israel its King and High-Priest; that was reserved for the next Passover feast; then was his time full come. But to this feast he went up in secret, regardless of the impatient reproaches of his brethren. R. B.

It is quite clear that the Evangelist saw nothing in the language of our Lord but the desire to exclude his brethren from any certain knowledge of his plans. It was essential for the carrying out of his purposes, which were closely inwoven with the events of the next few days—that his brethren should not know about his plans. And therefore he let them depart in uncertainty as to whether or not he intended to follow them. Certain as they were to be asked by multitudes whether he was coming to the feast, it was necessary that they should be able to answer, with perfect truthfulness, that he was at any rate not coming with them, and that whether he would come before the feast was over or not they could not tell.

10; L. 51. He left, indeed, some faithful hearts behind him; but how few! Galilee had rejected him, as Judea had rejected him. At Nazareth, the sweet mountain village of his childish days—at Nazareth, with all its memories of his boyhood and his mother’s home—they had treated him with such violence and outrage, that he could not visit it again. And even at Chorazin, and Bethsaida, and Capernaum—on those Eden-shores of the silver lake—in the green delicious plain, whose every field he had traversed with his apostles, performing deeds of mercy, and uttering words of love—even there they loved the whited sepulchres of a Pharisaic sanctity, and the shallow traditions of a Levitical ceremonial, better than the light and the life which had been offered them by the Son of God. And on all this land, and most of all on that region of it, the woe has fallen. Exquisite still in its loveliness, it is now desolate and dangerous. The vineyards and fruit-gardens have disappeared; the fleets and fishing-boats cease to traverse the lake; the hum of men is silent; the stream of prosperous commerce has ceased to flow. The very names and sites of the towns and cities are forgotten; and where they once shone bright and populous, there are now gray mounds where even the ruins are too ruinous to be distinguishable. . . . And the very generation which rejected him was doomed to recall in bitter and fruitless agony these peaceful, happy days of the Son of man. Thirty years had barely elapsed when the storm of Roman invasion burst furiously over that smiling land. He who will, may read in the “Jewish War” of Josephus the hideous details of the slaughter which decimated the cities of Galilee, and wrung from the historian the repeated confession that “it was certainly God who brought the Romans to punish the Galileans.” F.

52. Of the Samaritans.** While the Jews of the north generally, in going southward or returning, crossed the Jordan and advanced through Perea, in order to avoid passing through central Samaria, our Saviour, uninfluenced by the current intense prejudice against the Samaritans, took the direct way through their territory, whenever it suited him. N. C. B.—53. Did not receive him. This treatment was not only an incivility, but a violation of the rights of hospitality. The Saviour and his friends, according to the recognized laws of Oriental civilization, had a claim to be entertained in that village. It was this view of the outrage, unquestionably, which excited such fierce indignation in the two disciples. H. B. H.

54. James and John—not Peter, as we should have expected, but those “sons of thunder,” who afterward would have all the highest honors of the kingdom to themselves. Yet one was “the disciple whom Jesus loved,” while the other willingly drank of his Lord’s bitter cup. B.—In their sense of righteousness and judgment, in their indignation against sin—all this, indeed, displaying itself in an untimely severity, which would have consumed the sinners and the sin together—we see the “sons of thunder” on their natural side, and as they would have been but for grace. They are fresh from the Mount of Transfiguration, where they had seen how the glory of the great prophet of the old covenant waned before the brighter glory of him whom they served, the Lord of the new; an outrage therefore against him, and a rejecting of him, should therefore be not less terribly avenged. With all of carnal and sinful which mingled with this proposal of theirs, yet what insight into the dignity of their Lord, and the greatness of the outrage which was an outrage against him, does it reveal; what faith in the mighty powers with which he was able to equip his servants!

55. Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of. “You are missing,” Christ would say, “your true position; which is, having been born of the spirit of forgiving love, to be ruled by that spirit, and not by the spirit of avenging righteousness. You are losing sight of the distinction between the old covenant and the new, missing the greater glory of the latter, and that it is the higher blessedness to belong to it.” Under the Old Testament God was teaching men, by terrible things in righteousness, his holiness. But the spirit of the new covenant, not contrary but higher, is that of forgiving love; in it he is overcoming man’s evil with his good. There was, indeed, pardoning grace in the old, even as there is avenging justice in the new; in this too “God is a consuming fire;” and that same Lord who spake these words shall be himself revealed in flaming fire to take vengeance on them that know not God. T.

56. When the Son of man is come, the spirit of Elias must be gone; now specially, for Moses and he resigned lately in the mount. Now no law-giver, no prophet, but Christ. Bp. Andrewes.—Elias is no fit pattern for disciples, but their Master: “The Son of man came not to destroy men’s lives, but to save them.” When we look into his sacred acts we find many a life preserved from perishing; some, that had perished, by him recalled; never any destroyed. Only one poor fig-tree, as the real emblem of his severity to the unfruitful, was blasted and withered by his curse. But to man, ever favorable and indulgent! Bp. H.—They had not realized the difference which separated Sinai and Carmel from Calvary and Hermon. He had come to save, not to destroy; and if any heard his words and believed not, he judged them not. And so, without a word of anger, he went to a different village; and doubtless John, who by that time did know of what spirit he was, remembered these words of Christ when he went with Peter into Samaria to confirm the recent converts, and to bestow upon them the gift of the Holy Ghost. F.—Christ’s holy character and noble cause may have insults offered, deep injuries done to them; but it is not by the angry visitation of pains and penalties of any kind, that these insults and injuries are to be avenged; but by forbearance and gentleness, love and pity—by feeling and acting toward all such men as our blessed Lord and Master felt and acted toward the inhabitants of that Samaritan village.

12. Ten lepers. By the Mosaic law, no disease but one was held to render its victim ceremonially unclean. Such uncleanness was stamped upon the leper alone. This strange, creeping, loathsome, fatal disease appears to have been selected as the one form of bodily affliction to stand, in the legal impurity attached to it, and in the penalties visited on that impurity, as a type of the inward, pervading, corrupting, destroying malady of sin. Among the Jews the leper was excommunicated. Cut off from the congregation of the people, he had to live apart, enjoying only such society as those afflicted with the same disease could offer. H.—The disease itself the Jews called “the finger of God,” and emphatically, “the stroke.” To heal it was one of the most decisive evidences of Messiahship. “The lepers,” said our Lord, “are cleansed,” and on such maladies he delighted to exercise his power and love. J. A.—There is nothing in the entire range of human phenomena which illustrates so impressively the divine power of the Redeemer, and the nature and extent of his work of mercy on man’s behalf, as this leprosy. New-born children of leprous parents are often as pretty and as healthy in appearance as any, but by-and-by its presence and workings become visible in some of the signs described in the 13th chapter of Leviticus. The “scab” comes on by degrees in different parts of the body; the hair falls from the head and eyebrows; the nails loosen, decay, and drop off; joint after joint of the fingers and toes shrink up, and slowly fall away. The gums are absorbed, and the teeth disappear. The nose, the eyes, the tongue, and the palate are slowly consumed, and finally the wretched victim sinks into the earth and disappears, while medicine has no powers to stay the ravages of this fell disease, or even to mitigate sensibly its tortures. Who can fail to find in all this a most affecting type of man’s moral leprosy? W. M. T.

13,14. There was something in that living death of leprosy—recalling as it did the most frightful images of suffering and degradation, corrupting as it did the very fountains of the life-blood of man, distorting his countenance, rendering loathsome his touch, slowly incrusting and infecting him with a plague-spot of disease far more horrible than death itself—which always seems to have thrilled the Lord’s heart with a keen and instantaneous compassion. And never more so than at this moment. Scarcely had he heard their piteous cry of “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us,” when instantly, without sufficient pause even to approach them more nearly, he called aloud to them, “Go, show yourselves unto the priests.” F.

15. With a loud voice glorified God.** It was the exultation of faith; he felt there was a God in the world, and that God was good. What greater joy can be imparted to the heart of man than that which this truth, thoroughly embraced, imparts? And as this grateful spirit is the source of joy, so, in a sense, it is the source of religion in the soul. The grateful spirit alone believes, because it alone acknowledges the source of its life and being, the author and fountain-head. The grateful spirit alone finds out God; to it alone he reveals himself. With the grateful one out of the ten, it falls down before him, giving him thanks. J. B. M.

17. Where are the nine?** The voice of their misery had awaked the instant echo of his mercy; but the miraculous utterance of his mercy, though it thrilled through their whole physical being, woke no echo of gratitude in their earthy and still leprous hearts. F.—18. Save this stranger. Probably this man’s faith had caused the cry of all the ten; probably he was the salt of the little group of outcasts. They were contented, for the time, with their cure: he forgot the cure itself in his gratitude. A moment more, and with obedient feet he would overtake them on their way to the priest. McD.

19. But, nevertheless, this alien shall not have returned in vain, nor shall the rare virtue—alas, how rare a virtue!—of his gratitude go unrewarded. Not his body alone, but the soul—whose value was so infinitely more precious, just as its diseases are so infinitely more profound—should be healed by his Saviour’s word. F.—Him he dismisses with a new and a better blessing; the first had reached but to the healing of his body, and that he had in common with the unthankful nine: but gratitude for a lower mercy obtains for him a higher, a peculiar blessing, which is singularly his, which reaches not merely to the springs of bodily health, but to the very fountains of his spiritual being. T. (For leprosy, compare Section 28.)

Section 84.—At the Feast of Tabernacles. Officers sent to take Him.

The Temple.