Following Jesus to Jerusalem: Luke 9-19

By Paul Barnett

In this study of Luke's Gospel, chapters 9 to 19, Australian Bible scholar Paul Barnett traces the journey of Jesus to Jerusalem in the last stage of his earthly ministry, and challenges readers to live in the light of Jesus' self-sacrificial humility. This is a stirring call to authentic Christian discipleship.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Authentic Publishers
• Release date: Jun 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781780780306

Paul Barnett

Paul Barnett is a teaching fellow at Regent College, Vancouver, and a visiting fellow in ancient history at Macquarie University in Australia. He was the Anglican bishop of North Sydney from 1990 to 2001, and is the author of Jesus the Rise of Early Christianity.

Book preview

FOLLOWING JESUS TO

JERUSALEM

FOLLOWING JESUS TO

JERUSALEM

Luke 9 – 19

Paul W. Barnett

Copyright © 2012 Paul W. Barnett

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This edition first published 2012 by Paternoster Paternoster is an imprint of Authentic Media Limited 52 Presley Way, Crownhill, Milton Keynes, MK8 0ES www.authenticmedia.co.uk

The right of Paul W. Barnett to be identified as the Author of this Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher or a licence permitting restricted copying. In the UK such licences are issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency.

Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London, EC1N 8TS

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78078-030-6

Scripture quotations are from the Holy Bible, English Standard Version, published by HarperCollins Publishers © 2002 by Crossway Bibles, a division of Good News Publishers. Used by permission.

All rights reserved.

Cover Design by David McNeill (www.revocreative.co.uk).

To David and Bronwyn Short,

partners in tribulation, the kingdom and patient

endurance

Contents

Part 1. Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem

Chapter One – Travel

Life as a Journey

Pointlessness

Journey According to the Bible

Back to Where We Were

Chapter Two – Theophilus’ Journey

Theophilus’ Journey a Symbol for Our Journey

Jesus’ True Journey

The Length of the Journey

Parables and the Journey to Jerusalem

Part 2. Jesus and the Kingdom of God

Chapter Three – The Son of Man and the Kingdom of God

The Son of Man

The Son of Man and the Kingdom of God

Chapter Four – Who is Jesus?

An Impossible Dichotomy

Part 3. Galilee – Mission of the Kingdom

Chapter Five – Missionary Disciples: Disappointments

Luke 9:51, 57–62

Chapter Six – Excuses, Excuses, Excuses

Luke 9:57–62 and 14:18–20

Part 4. A Merciful Kingdom

Chapter Seven – A Kingdom for the Lost

Chapter Eight – Two Sisters

Luke 10:38–42

Part 5. Lost Sinners and Lost Pharisees

Chapter Nine – Lost Pharisees

Luke 14:1–24

Chapter Ten – Lost Sons

Luke 15:1–32

Chapter Eleven – The Pharisee and the Tax Collector

Luke 18:9–14

Part 6. Surprising Samaritans

Chapter Twelve –The Good Samaritan

Luke 10:25–37

Chapter Thirteen – Ten Lepers

Luke 17:11–19

Part 7. The Kingdom and Riches

Chapter Fourteen – Life and Riches

Luke 12:13–34

Chapter Fifteen – The Journey as a Preparation for the Future: Mammon

Luke 16:1–31

Part 8. Jericho

Chapter Sixteen – Following Jesus to Jerusalem

Luke 18:15–43

Chapter Seventeen – Zacchaeus

Luke 19:1–27

Part 9. Ready for the Kingdom

Chapter Eighteen – Disasters

Luke 13:1–5

Chapter Nineteen – Ready for the Kingdom

Luke 17:20 – 18:8

Part 10. Jerusalem

Chapter Twenty – Lament over Jerusalem

Luke 13:31–5

Chapter Twenty-one – King from the Cross

Luke 23:39–43

Part 11. Life as a Journey

Chapter Twenty-two – Life as a Journey

Fellow-humans and the Image of God

Being Human and Being a Disciple

The Challenge of Complementary Priorities

Convictions about Jesus and the Kingdom of God

Things Theophilus Needed to Know and Do

Jesus Travelling with Us

Reflection

Endnotes

Part 1

Jesus’ Journey to

Jerusalem

Chapter One

Travel

In the history of humanity there has never been a time like this for travel. Huge liners that dwarf the Titanic take vast numbers of people to exotic locations that most people in earlier generations could only read about. Giant aeroplanes bring people from one extremity of the planet to another within twenty-four hours of departure.

Three factors at least have made this travel possible: the prosperity of people in the developed world in the past half-century; the astonishing progress in technology in the manufacture of the wide-bodied airliners and massive cruise ships; the absence of international conflict through the international military dominance of one super-power, the United States.

Two thousand years earlier, in the era of Jesus and the apostles, there was a kind of parallel to modern world travel. The ancient Pax Romana (the Roman Peace) anticipated our modern Pax Americana (the American Peace). After a century of civil wars in 31 BC the young Roman general, Augustus, emerged as the supremo of the world, defeating the forces of Mark Antony and Cleopatra in the Battle of Actium.

Augustus ruled a now-united empire for the next forty-five years. Furthermore, he secured his succession in his stepson Tiberius for the next twenty-three years. In fact, Augustus established a dynasty of rulers – the Julio-Claudian dynasty – who would rule until AD 68. They were succeeded by members of the Flavian family (AD 69–96), who were followed by a sequence of outstanding leaders known as ‘the five good emperors’, from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius, who spanned the years AD 96 to 180.

Thus from 31 BC and for the next 210 years the Roman world enjoyed unprecedented peace, and with it great prosperity. The sea-lanes were cleared of pirates allowing a new era of travel within the relatively calm waters of the Mediterranean during the spring and summer months. Older cities like Tarsus, birthplace of Paul, were expanded and numerous new cities sprang up in the expanding and consolidated Roman world. Linking these cities to one another and to Rome was a new network of roads. Along these narrow cobbled roads passed thousands of travellers, some walking, others riding horses and mules, others again conveyed in carriages – soldiers, merchants, bureaucrats, tourists, and the apostles of Christ.

Life as a journey

Journeys usually have a purpose. People board a Boeing or Airbus to travel from one city to another. Few do this aimlessly. Almost everybody travels to somewhere intentionally, to meet a friend, to visit a place of interest, to transact an item of business. Journeys have a point of departure, a destination and – almost always – a defined purpose.

It is not surprising, therefore, that we often think of life as a journey, but it is surprising that relatively few of us can articulate our sense of purpose in life’s journey. Ask someone boarding that aeroplane why they are doing so and they will tell you. Ask people about the ‘why’ of life’s journey and many will struggle to give an answer, at least one they will state openly. The driving force may be to become rich or to enjoy endless pleasure, but few would be prepared to say so openly. Some become committed to a ‘cause’, an idealized ‘mission’ committed to changing things; for example, the ‘green’ movement or the animal liberation movement. For them life revolves around the movement.

For the majority, however, life is about finding a marriage partner, raising a family and working to provide food, shelter and education. For them life is about coping, getting by, and looking forward to seeing the children grow up and welcoming grandchildren. For this majority the purpose for life’s journey doesn’t have to be spelt out, as it is self-evident. The purpose of the journey is to create and sustain one’s own family.

Pointlessness

And yet hanging over all of life is death. This unpleasant reality is pushed out of consciousness in the developed world because medical advances keep us alive longer. And today old people don’t die at home but in special places where groups of people die in what are euphemistically called ‘retirement homes’ or, more humorously, ‘God’s departure lounges’.

The destination of life’s journey is death. Because the ultimate arrival point of life is non-life it begs the question about the purpose of the journey. Why set out on the journey if it’s a journey to nowhere?

For many people, therefore, the journey itself, not the destination is the thing. It hardly bears thinking about, really, and I suspect most people prefer not to think about it. Just get on with today and tomorrow and make the most of it. Crudely, this is the ‘Eat and drink, for tomorrow we die’ philosophy Paul mentions (1 Cor. 15:32, quoting Isa. 56:12).

Back in the time of the Greeks and Romans people probably thought more deeply about the meaning of life than we do today. That may have been because death was so much more obvious than it is now. Disease could wipe out the population of a walled, unhygienic city in a matter of weeks.

Many people then were devoted to Stoicism, a philosophy that took its name from the Stoa (or porch) in Athens where Zeno, its founder, taught. In time famous Romans like Cicero, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius adopted and adapted Stoic thought. It was intensely ‘rational’ and ‘moral’ but believed only in a material world and about a distant, uncaring deity. If life had lost its meaning and sense of purpose then suicide was a valid option to take. The most influential Stoic philosopher was the emperor Marcus Aurelius who died in AD 180. He wrote about death by one’s ‘own will’ in Meditation 10.22: ‘Either you live here and have already accustomed yourself to it, or you are going away, and this was your own will [suicide]; or you are dying and have discharged your duty. But besides these things there is nothing. Be of good cheer, then.’

For Marcus Aurelius, suicide is not only acceptable but is the perfectly appropriate and necessarily ethical act in certain situations. The only thing that puts ethical limits on suicide is that, while one is mentally and physically effective, one should do good for others and for oneself. There are modern parallels in the voluntary euthanasia movement.

Journey according to the Bible

The Bible, however, tells us of another journey. In the Old Testament it is the Hebrews’ journey from Egypt through the Red Sea to the Promised Land. In the New Testament that story is re-told as the journey of pilgrims beginning in the waters of baptism and ending after death in the New Jerusalem.

The Bible is candidly unsentimental about the universal reality of death, which it attributes to human beings, the creatures closest to God, usurping the divine right of the Creator. Into our world of wilfulness and injustice came the Son of Man whose mission was to reconcile alienated humanity to the One he called the Father. This he would do by his own death in which he would ‘bear the sins’ of others within his own person. No less remarkably death would not claim him because the Father would raise him alive after three days in the tomb.

His journey did not end in death. As Representative Human, Jesus punched a hole in the wall called death, making it possible for others to follow through that opening to life with God on the other side. Suddenly death is no longer the destination of the journey but life; in fact a higher, greater and better life than this life.

Not only so, Jesus has provided extensive guidance about how to live during the years of our journey, however few or many they may be. That guidance the Son of Man gave in two ways; that is to say, by his words and by his example.

The gospel writers have preserved this guidance about how to make the journey in the pages of their gospels. Matthew does so by his account of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. John’s records this in Jesus’ upper-room teaching on the eve of the crucifixion. Mark and Luke do so in their narratives of Jesus’ journey from Galilee to Jerusalem. When Moses was near the end of his life he provided teaching for the period when he would no longer be with the people. This he did within the book of Moses called Deuteronomy. In this present book I am concentrating on Luke’s record of the journey of the Son of Man to Jerusalem and his teachings along the way, as we find it in chapters 9 – 19.

The sense of hope and purpose found in the victory of the Son of Man over death and in his teachings about how to live have profoundly influenced human history over the past two millennia. William Lecky, a historian of morality and a sceptic, famously wrote: ‘Christianity . . . has exercised so deep an influence that it may be said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions of philosophers, and all the exhortations of moralists.’¹ The Stoic philosophy lives on, although not under that name. It is the anonymous, politically correct, God-denying world-view that believes that ‘reason’ and ‘matter’ (the ‘environment’) are all there is and that life’s journey is ultimately a journey to oblivion. Should life become too difficult then no barrier should be raised against self-destruction.

Now that the Christian era in the developed world is all but passed, other world-views, including neo-Stoicism, are occupying the space Christianity once filled. This sharpens the need for the modern-day Christian to travel the ‘Jesus journey’ with a clear sense of the destination but equally with a clear understanding about the challenges of the journey.

Back to where we were

In many ways history has come full circle. Old ideas about the meaning of life – or the non-meaning of life – are being recycled. This comes as shock since the usual way of thinking is that humanity is evolving onto higher and higher things. The incredible developments in technology – medical and electronic – give an illusion of onwards and upwards progress. It’s blue sky now and bluer skies tomorrow. In a sense, though, nothing has changed fundamentally. The same old questions remain.

Consider this. The rejection of the Creator and Judge from our thinking declares, in effect, that ‘nothing matters’. There is a ‘nothing matters’ world-view out there in both popular and high culture and that finds day-to-day expression in a ‘nothing matters’ morality. Our thinking is that there is no God, that life is transient and ultimately pointless so that all that is important is ‘me’ and ‘now’.

This is not altogether different from the tombstone humour of the era of the Greeks and Romans. One tombstone joke stated, ‘I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.’ So popular was this joke that it was routinely abbreviated as: ‘n.f.f.n.s.n.d’.²

This ancient slogan sounds quite modern. There was little sense then that life was a meaningful journey, with a purpose, a beginning and an ending. Into that nihilistic, anxiety-ridden world the early apostles came with their message of the Jesus journey, the ‘Way’ God intended us to live. Because we are now back to where we were, having come almost full circle, we must begin to tell this story again.

Luke’s chapters 9 to 19 are a great place to begin thinking about my life’s journey – its beginnings, its purpose, its values and its destination. So let us walk with Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, observing him and listening to him as he talks to people along the way.

Chapter Two

Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem

One striking thing about early Christianity was that its leaders travelled so much. Paul was