As I start to do some work on Luke 21, I remind myself of where we are in Luke.
The section beginning at 9:51 and ending somewhere around the end of chapter 19 is often termed “the journey section”. Jesus sets his face to go to Jerusalem in 9:51. It takes him 10 chapters to get there. Much that is in those chapters is not described in terms of a journey, and there are few geographical markers. Nevertheless, this is a section charactersised by a movement towards Jerusalem as Jesus’ destination, and one of the dominant issues (as Jesus picks up followers along the way) is what following Jesus means and looks like.
In that frame, there are some surprises regarding who turns out to be a true follower of Jesus and who does not.
- One would expect the Pharisees to be loyal to him, but Jesus consistently exposes their hypocrisy.
- Yet this exposure is said very much with the disciples in the room; the same kind of hypocrisy is not beyond Jesus’ own disciples.
- At the same time, there are plenty of people who would be considered outcast by both the Pharisees and the disciples – children (see my post on children in this section of Luke), tax collectors, the poor, the widow, the leper and so on. These people show themselves to be true followers of Jesus.
- These people are welcomed by Jesus in the presence of his disciples.
This leaves a deliberate ambiguity for the disciples. They hear the warnings of hypocrisy levied (chiefly) at the Pharisees. They also hear the welcome extended to those they would instinctively reject. So the challenge for the disciple, and for the Christian reader of Luke, is: Who will we be like? Will we emulate the hypocrisy of the Pharisees, or will we emulate the outcasts at those points at which they are true disciples?
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