Luke 7

Luke 7:1-8

Subdivision 2. (Luke 7:1-50; Luke 8:1-21.)The Word as the Ministry of Salvation. We have now the Word as that by which the ministry of salvation is effected; the language being still often; as that of the synoptic Gospels so much is, symbolic, and the healing of the body illustrative of that deeper spiritual healing which it is so well qualified to picture to us, and which is so in the mind of the Spirit to keep before us. This fuller blessing, without which there is none, comes moreover continually into more open view, and its features are revealed with growing fulness.

1. The two narratives with which this part opens show us in the most striking way the power of the divine Word as Christ utters it. The first is the story of the centurion in whom the Lord finds greater faith than He had found in Israel: a faith which owns the Lord’s supremacy, whether present or absent, over all the powers of nature which are obedient to His will. The second is that of the raising of the widow’s son at Nain, which shows that giving way to His word which is the stamp upon the fallen creature; the removal of which is the significant pledge of power come in able to deliver from the condition itself of which it is the stamp. Here then; is indeed a “word living and powerful,” as the epistle to the Hebrews calls it (Hebrews 4:12), and ready as well as competent to meet man’s need. (1) Matthew gives us the healing of the centurion’s servant, but in another connection; and with certain differences, which have occasioned question. For Luke represents not only the elders of the Jews as first sent with prayer that Jesus would come and heal the sick man, but that, while He is upon the road, the friends of the centurion are sent with a second message, which excuses his not coming in person by his felt unworthiness. In Matthew we are told the centurion came; but his words are to the same effect as those of his friends in Luke. It seems, therefore, that the account in the former is to be explained by the latter: the Gentile Gospel taking care to show fully the humble place that the Gentile took, both in making use of the Jewish elders, and in not actually coming to the Lord Himself. The faith at which the Lord wonders is related in both; while the Jewish writer it is who gives, and in fullest accord with the dispensational character of his book, the warning to the Jews of the rejection of children of the Kingdom, while those of the nations should come in from every quarter to partake in its blessings with the patriarchs of Israel. The Roman soldier sees everywhere in the world the law and order which Rome so emphasized. But he sees it to draw an argument from it for the absolute authority of Him whom his faith owns as having supreme power over all the powers of nature. He himself, only a man under authority, could speak and be obeyed; it needed not, then; the presence of Jesus -He needed not to put His own hand to the work, when all things served Him. We have only to compare the wonder of His disciples when He calmed the the sea of Galilee, to realize how indeed the faith of the Gentile surpassed that of the Lord’s nearest and chosen followers. (2) The story of Nain is found in Luke only. Nain means “pleasant,” what the world was as God made it; what it is still naturally to the natural man. But at the gate of it, carried out, is a dead man, death being still the way out of the world, as it is the shadow over it. The widowed mother, whose only son he is, and the sympathetic crowd that follows, show in how many ways death affects the survivors. The consequences of it, which lie in another world, are not introduced into this picture, but man’s conscience will not allow him to forget them: “the sting of death is sin,” which threatens the soul with judgment. Thus the pleasant world is become the “valley of death-shade,” and as such Christ has come to it in His infinite compassion; as He comes here to Nain. To the sorrowing mother He says, “Weep not,” and His is no fruitless sympathy. He touches the bier, as touch it Himself He must, by His death to give His word power over it. Then the word is spoken which abolishes it, and the dead man rises. He “sat up and began to speak; and He gave him to his mother.” Here, then, is man’s need fully met, the judgment which is upon him, all that sin and death imply, has found a remedy. The people fear, and glorify God; and the word goes out throughout all Judea that a great prophet is risen up, and God hath visited His people: a testimony true indeed, but quite below the wondrous truth as to His Person who was there.
2. The twofold testimony of God which man needs and which God has provided is now shown us in John and the Lord: John the preacher of repentance, the witness to man’s condition; the summing up of the Old Testament controversy with man; while pointing forward, as the Old Testament did, to Him who was to come; Christ the Bringer of salvation; the New Testament Voice, the Manifester of God to men; and who opens the way to God for men. Repentance and faith are the double answer to this double testimony, though neither of these can exist without the other. They are the backward and forward glances of the soul, and which are at the same time its downward and upward ones. Or, conversion being the “turning round” of man, repentance is the back turned upon self, as faith is the face turned toward God in Christ. Repentance is as inseparable, therefore, from faith, as faith is from repentance. The testimony of John and of Christ come in; then; in this place with perfect naturalness; and in the contrast between them their accord is manifest. In both, divine wisdom will be justified by her children; and the refusal of the one will be seen; as in Israel’s case, to be the refusal of the other. (1) But first we have to see the Baptist in his prison perplexed with doubt, as to which he sends two of his disciples to Christ, that He may satisfy it. “Art Thou the One that is coming?” is his question; “or wait we for another?” Honest doubt never stays away from Christ, but comes to Him for solution. The Lord points him to the works which at that very time He was doing, the power of God being manifested in various goodness, while the gospel-tidings were being given to the poor. Not wonders alone were evidence, but wonders that were “signs” -significant of the nature and power of Him from whom they proceeded. While all the time the sweet gospel invitation addressed itself to the needy, most Godlike in coming lowest down. The Lord adds one gentle word for the conscience of His fore-runner: “And blessed is he who shall not be stumbled by Me.” (See pp. 122, 123, notes.) (2) The messengers departed with this, and now, when John may seem to have failed entirely in his witness, the Lord bears witness to him. Be it that he had failed, was it in vain that crowds had gone out into the wilderness after him? Was he then but a reed shaken with the wind? Was he a courtier of men; clothed in soft raiment? did they look for such in the wilderness, rather than in the courts of kings? Certainly, his whole life proved him far other than these. But what was it, then; that drew men after him? Was he a prophet? Yea, says the Lord, and more than a prophet: he was one of whom the prophet had spoken; as the messenger of God before Messiah’s face, to prepare His way before Him. Such then was John, the prepares for the Kingdom of God; as great in this position as any of women born; yet the one comparatively little, actually in the Kingdom thus announced, would be greater than he. (See pp. 123, 124, notes.) But in fact John’s message had been rejected by the leaders of the nation; the Pharisees and lawyers, while only those classed by these as “sinners” had heard and been baptized by him. These owned the righteousness of God in pressing upon them through John their need of repentance; but the others rejected for themselves the counsel of God, and were not baptized of him. Thus a remnant only of the people, and these the outcasts, were ready for the grace which now addressed itself to them. As to that generation at large, they could only be compared to children sitting in the market-place, triflers who would have had John dance to their piping, and the Lord and His disciples weep when they mourned. They understood not, for they were too careless to understand, either the one or the other. To them John was but a demoniac; Christ a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, to be judged according to the company He kept.

The children of wisdom alone justified wisdom’s ways: and who, then; were these children of wisdom? The answer to this is given us in what immediately follows now. 3. That which follows is one of those stories peculiar to Luke and characterizing it, the story of the woman in the Pharisee’s house: the woman a “sinner;” the Pharisee one of those “ninety and nine just persons” of whom the Lord afterwards speaks, and whom He puts there in contrast with the “lost.” Here it is the Pharisee who invites the contrast. They had called Him the “Friend of sinners.” We see here how truly He was that, and in what manner: what sinners gained from that wondrous friendship. We see a spiritual transformation wrought, and wisdom justified in a child of wisdom, a sinner transformed. We see how sanctification comes from salvation, or, indeed, is the internal part of it; and that there is nothing holier than the gospel grace. Asked by a Pharisee to eat with him, Jesus enters the house and takes His place at table. And there it is -strange place for such a meeting -a woman in the city who is a sinner, having heard that He is in the house, draws near and stands behind Him weeping, her tears falling upon His feet. With the hairs of her head she wipes them off, and kissing His feet, anoints them with the ointment which she has brought with her. Sinner she is, yet the knowledge of it does not keep her back; rather it gives her boldness to be there where of all places, perhaps, she would find the most unsparing judgment. But His shield shall be over her -the Friend of sinners: how differently does that sound to her, and to the Pharisee whose house she has entered! Indeed he is already astir, his mind drawing its conclusion against One who can permit the familiarity that a woman like this is showing. But even He, he reasons, must be ignorant of her character. A prophet would have known; but a prophet could not have permitted defilement such as this. The Lord answers his unspoken thoughts and makes him judge of himself as compared with this woman whom he condemns; a sinner, truly, but a forgiven sinner. Surely, he too could not deny himself to be a sinner! and if so, did he not know for himself the sweet sanctifying power of forgiveness, -the outflow of heart to God who has forgiven? Perhaps, indeed, he had not sinned as she: could God then forgive the debt of fifty pence, but not the five hundred? And if to her the larger debt had been remitted, could he not recognize in these tears, this abandonment of ecstatic emotion, in contrast with his own cold treatment of the Guest he had invited, the sense of that larger debt which made her in a Pharisee’s eyes a sinner indeed? But remitted! Yes, it was the consciousness of that remission which had wrought in her after this manner. Even he should understand -could understand in the case of a common debtor; though himself having been forgiven little, he loved but little. Thus the Pharisee is set in the light of God, and his inmost heart searched out, while He who reveals Himself in doing this, openly takes the place which the woman’s faith before had given Him, and confirms to her that which she in her simplicity had appropriated already. “And He said unto her, Thy sins are forgiven.” If they murmur at His words, only the more positively does He reiterate them: “And He said unto the woman; Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” 4. (1) We have seen; then, the power of the Word in the soul of one that receives it; all the more that, as we saw her first, she had as yet bad no word distinctly addressed to herself to assure her of the blessing which she grasps with such effect. We now go on to see how the fruits produced characterize the reception of it, -how the seed tests the soil. This is shown in that familiar parable of the Sower, which we have had already in the two previous Gospels, here given a slightly abbreviated form, and without the parables which accompany it in them. As an introduction to it, however, we are shown as fruit of the Word the company of disciples who now follow the Lord, and some of whom minister to Him of their substance. It is here first we find those faithful women who follow Him to the cross itself, and at the sepulchre greet Him first in resurrection. Their own deliverance has attached them to Him, and He on His part receives their services, emancipating them from the harsh restrictions of Rabbinism, which put the woman into a not merely inferior but a degraded place. The twelve are also with Him, and throughout all Galilee, with the testimony of word and work, goes also that of the new communion of faith and love which Christianity was fully and universally to establish. (2, 3) People gather together to Him out of every city around; and in the midst of such a multitude it is that the Lord searches out the heart (as so commonly He does where the crowds follow Him) by the parable of the Sower. No fruit is to be got from man for God, except as the word of God produces it; but with the same seed and the same Sower, how different are the results! The devil, the flesh, and the world are in triple league against God and His word, and man is traitor to himself in listening to them. All this, however, has been already dwelt upon. The closing verses are substantially as in Mark (4: 22-25). (4) The following verses are also in both the other Synoptists, though here somewhat briefer and in different connection. They complete, in the place in which they stand in Luke, G the view of the relation of the word of God to salvation and fruitfulness for God, and carry us on in principle to Christianity, which develops and manifests this.