Stage 3 lies between the two journey markers at Luke 13:22 and Luke 17:10. The very first paragraph (see Luke 13:22–30) sets its dominant theme. Describing the coming kingdom Christ says 'People shall come from east and west and north and south, and will take their places at the feast39 in the kingdom of God' (Luke 13:29 NIV). At Luke 14:15–24 this metaphor is extended into a parable in which Christ likens the coming kingdom to a great supper. Now both these passages have counterparts in Matthew (see Matt 7:21–23, 8:11–12; 22:1–14); but at Luke 15:11–32 Luke records the parable of the Prodigal Son which no other evangelist records. In this parable the joy at the homecoming of the prodigal expresses itself in a banquet with music and dancing (see Luke 15:23–25) and corresponds to the joy which earlier verses (see Luke 15:7, 10) say breaks out among the angels in heaven over repentant sinners. Then again at Luke 16:19–31 Luke has another major story which no other evangelist records. It tells of a rich man whose everyday meals were glittering banquets (see Luke 16:19) but who in the life to come suffered unquenchable thirst (see Luke 16:24); but it also tells of Lazarus the beggar who in this life longed for a few crumbs to still his hunger, but who in the world beyond rested in Abraham's bosom and was comforted (see Luke 16:21, 23, 25). [p 270]
Now the contemplation of these coming delights is itself delightful; but for that very reason this stage is also marked by unutterable sadness. Prominent in all the four leading paragraphs which we have just mentioned are people who for one reason or another miss these delights. Two groups, we shall find, miss them unintentionally, though each of them for different reasons; and their eventual frustration is terrible. The other two groups miss them on purpose, though each of them again for different reasons; their deliberate rejection of salvation is appalling.
It is, of course, only natural that as Christ's journey brought him ever nearer to his own destination of glory, he should remind people ever more frequently of the two possible destinations that await them at the end of their journey through life: inside the Father's house with its banquet of joy and satisfaction, and outside the Father's house with its eternal frustrations and pains. And since it is possible for people to miss the Father's house, it is understandable that he should spend a great deal of time analysing for us the various reasons why some people's journey through life will end so disastrously. His aim is obviously to warn us not to adopt their foolish and fatal attitudes.
Now from one point of view the thought-flow in this stage runs on in one unbroken stream, the last paragraph of one movement serving also to introduce the theme of the next movement. If, however, we make out a table of contents giving pride of place to the four paragraphs that carry the dominant theme, it will help us to see more easily how the individual parts of the stage relate to each other and to the whole (see Table 10). [p 271] [p 272] [p 273]
Table 10 Stage 3 of the Going Luke 13:22–17:10
| 1 The pleas of the lost refused 13:22–30 | 1 The Lord’s invitation declined 14:7–24 | 1 The father’s entreaty rejected 15:3–32 | 1 The pleas of the lost refused 16:19–31 |
| a There shall be weeping . . . When you shall see Abraham . . . and all the prophets in the kingdom of God and you yourselves cast out. b . . . the door is shut . . . c You . . . stand outside . . . and knock, saying, ‘Lord, open to us’; and he shall say, ‘I do not know you . . . depart from me.’ | Three parables 1 To guests: the honour of being exalted. 2 To hosts: the eternal reward of true hospitality. 3 The messianic banquet: . . . they all began to make excuse . . . Then the master of the house was angry. . . | Three parables 1 The joy of finding a lost sheep. 2 The joy of finding a lost piece of silver. 3 The welcome-home banquet. . . . the elder brother . . . was angry and would not go in; and his father . . . entreated him . . . | a And in Hades . . . being in torment he sees Abraham afar off and Lazarus in his bosom. b a great gulf is fixed. c And he said, ‘Father Abraham, send Lazarus to me . . . to my brothers.’ Abraham refuses both requests. |
| 2 Christ’s attitude to certain rejection 13:31–35 | 2 The cost of discipleship 14:25–35 | 2 The calculations of stewardship 16:1–13 | 2 Disciples’ attitude to inevitable occasioning of stumbling 17:1–4 |
| a It is impossible that a prophet perish out of Jerusalem. b Go tell that fox . . . c . . . how many times I would have gathered your children . . . and you would not . . . | a Who of you . . . does not first sit down and count the cost . . . b Any one of you who does not renounce everything which belongs to him cannot be my disciple. | a How much do you owe . . . ? 100 measures . . . ? Sit down quickly and write 50. b If you have not been faithful with what belongs to someone else, who will give you what belongs to you? | a It is impossible but that occasions of stumbling should come . . . b If your brother sins rebuke him. c And if he sins against you seven times a day and seven times turn again . . . you shall forgive him. |
| 3 Man’s needs and God’s due 14:1–6 | 3 The Pharisees criticize Christ 15:1–2 | 3 The Pharisees scoff at Christ 16:14–18 | 3 The Lord’s due and his servants’ needs 17:5–10 |
| When he went into the house . . . to eat a meal they watched him. Right opposite him was a man with dropsy . . . And . . . he said, ‘Which one of you would have an ass or an ox fall into a well, and would not pull it out at once on the Sabbath day?’ | The complaint is that he is too lax: The Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered angrily among themselves: ‘This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.’ | The complaint is that he is too strict: The Pharisees who were lovers of money . . . scoffed at him. And he said ‘. . . It is easier for heaven and earth to pass away than for the tiniest part of the law to become null and void.’ | But which one of you, having a servant ploughing . . . will say to him when he comes in from the field, ‘Come at once and sit down to a meal, and not Prepare my supper first . . . and then have your own?’ |
The movements
- The glorious company of the saints (Luke 13:22–14:6)
- The satisfactions of the messianic banquet (Luke 14:7–15:2)
- The joys of redemption (Luke 15:3–16:18)
- The comforts of heaven (Luke 16:19–17:10)
1. The glorious company of the saints (Luke 13:22–14:6)
i. The pleas of the lost refused (Luke 13:22–30)
The first movement comes immediately to the urgent and exceedingly practical question which is going to dominate the whole stage: the question of salvation and of entry at last into the coming kingdom of God. 'Lord,' someone asked 'are those who are going to be saved few in number?'
The Lord did not answer his question directly, but in the end he answered it very plainly: when the door into the kingdom is eventually shut—and we should notice the solemn fact that one day it will be shut—there will be many shut out. Not only so: many will be shut out who thought they were going to get in. They will discover, when it is too late, that their expectation was groundless and false: they have missed salvation, all unexpectedly and unintentionally.
Our Lord notices two things about these people: first their surprise at being shut out and then their disappointment and frustration. Their surprise is shown by the fact that when they knock for admittance and the master of the house replies from behind the closed door that he does not know them or where they come from, they protest that surely he must know them, since in times past they ate and drank in his presence and he taught in their streets (see Luke 13:25–26). From this we gather what Matthew makes explicit (see Luke 7:21–23) that the master of the house is none other than Christ himself, and that these people are referring to the fact that when he was on earth they were fellow-guests, or even hosts, at dinner parties which he attended: they knew him socially. And what is more they had been present on occasions when he preached: they knew his views and had taken some interest in his sermons. This they obviously felt was enough to gain them entry into the kingdom of God. They are astounded when they discover it is not enough.
Then what is necessary for entry? The master makes it clear: for anyone to enter Christ must know him or her personally (see John 10:14–15, 27–29) through a mutual direct relationship. The people [p 274] standing outside the closed door have obviously never had any such personal dealings with Christ. They are still what they always were: 'workers of iniquity'. While they were on earth they never radically repented of their sinfulness, never sought and obtained from Christ forgiveness and the gift of eternal life. They never became one of 'his own' (John 13:1); they were never born of God through personally receiving Christ as Saviour and Lord (see John 1:12–13). And having never so received him, they must now depart from him.
If their surprise is terrible, their frustrations are bitter indeed (see Luke 13:28–29). In the figurative language which Christ uses, they are pictured as standing outside the closed door but able to see through some chink or window in the door into the great banqueting hall of the kingdom of God; and they can actually see the guests arriving and taking their places at the banquet. The guests come from every period of history: there is Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets. They come, not merely from the Jews who had national links with these great patriarchs, but from every nation and every quarter of the globe. What a vast assemblage of faith, what an accumulated wealth of experience. What table talk there will be at that eternal banquet, with all of every nation knowing and understanding and enriching each other because each one in the course of life's journey came to know the master of the house.
To have been so near to Christ on earth without receiving him and without coming to know him personally, and therefore to be shut out for ever from the glorious company of the saints, while others from distant times and cultures have found the way in (see Luke 13:30)—who shall measure the disappointment and frustration of it? There shall there be weeping and gnashing of teeth (see Luke 13:28). It ought to be for us a matter of supreme concern to make sure that we shall be among those who enter the narrow door (see Luke 13:24).
ii. Christ's attitude to certain rejection (Luke 13:31–35)
The first paragraph has told us what, when we first hear it, must sound strange if not shocking: the time will come when Christ himself shall bar people from eternal bliss in spite of their entreaties [p 275] to be let in. But the first paragraph must not be read without the second, which puts the other side of the story.
We are now told therefore how the Pharisees relayed to Christ Herod's intention of killing him if he stayed within Herod's borders. Herod's dim understanding of what Jesus stood for (see Luke 9:3–9) probably made him fear that Jesus would lead some messianic uprising, and he wanted no disturbance in his territory. Herod was not interested in the heavenly banquet and the glorious company of the saints: he had already murdered John the Baptist at one of his own banquets (see Matt 14:3–11). He was interested only in political power and self-indulgence. Christ despised his values, his petty-minded cunning and his threats, and sent him a sharply worded rebuke (see Luke 13:32). Christ was following a divinely foreordained course through this world, expressing God's love to men through innumerable acts of mercy and salvation. Herod's threats would not lead him to speed up or cut short his ministry. Nor could Herod's death threats frighten him either: he was willing and ready and indeed intending, to die. Only it would not be given to some petty politician like Herod to kill him in the interests of some minor political skulduggery. When Christ died, he would die in such a place and at the hands of such people as would give his death the utmost significance. And when we have grasped that significance, it will explain why he must eventually reject the pleas of the lost.
Jerusalem had a centuries-long reputation for killing the prophets whom God sent to her (see Luke 13:34). The Saviour knew that before he came into the world. He came nonetheless. Jerusalem stood in danger of the wrath of God for her rejection of God's prophets. Christ offered himself therefore as her Saviour, and urgently called her citizens, like a hen calls her chicks, to find shelter and salvation under his redeeming protection. When he first called, they refused, as he knew they would; but the fact that he knew they would, did not deter him from calling, or lessen the sincerity of his call, or his willingness to save. He called again many, many times (see Luke 13:34); but they would not be saved. If one day he has to refuse their pleas, it will be only because they first refused his over and over again. [p 276]
But there is more to it. When they set their will to reject him, he respected their will, and accepted their rejection. Jerusalem was Messiah's own capital city; and in Jerusalem was the very house of God. Christ did not raise an army, nor use his miraculous powers to drive out his enemies from Jerusalem and throw Israel's rebellious priesthood out of his Father's house. Instead he let them throw him out of both the temple and the city; and what had been his Father's and his, he left in their hands: 'your house', he said, 'is left to you' (Luke 13:35). It is an awesome thing to contemplate: if men use the free will God has given them to reject the Saviour, neither God nor Christ will overrule that free will or remove it. That does not mean, of course, that puny man has the power to defeat the will of the Almighty: it was always God's will that man's will should be genuinely free, and man be able to say no to God, if he chose. But when they arrive unrepentant at that house of which he is the indisputable master, he will not be obliged to let them in there too.
Above all let us notice in what way Christ accepted Jerusalem's rejection. When the last of his many pleas met with their determined rejection, he could, as we imagine, have abandoned his final journey to Jerusalem, and have consigned his nation to the hopeless and endless suffering of the consequences of their fatal decision. He did the opposite. He continued on his foreordained path to Jerusalem determined to die at their hands. One day, however long it took, that death would be the means of bringing Israel to repentance (see Isa 53:3–5), and the means of their cleansing (see Zech 12:10–13:1), so that when at his second coming they look on him whom they pierced they might be able to say through their tears of repentance, 'Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord' (Luke 13:35).
iii. Man's need and God's due (Luke 14:1–6)
'Lord, open to us,' say those who stand outside the door knocking for admittance, 'we ate and drank in your presence' (Luke 13:25–26). In case we should imagine that their plea is evidence of genuine [p 277] repentance, Luke now relates an incident which shows us what 'eating and drinking in the presence of Christ' meant for the likes of these people when he and they were on earth. One of the rulers of the Pharisees invited Christ into his house for a meal. 'And there right in front of him', says Luke dramatically (Luke 14:2) 'was a man suffering from dropsy.' Christ could not have failed to notice him.
The question is how he came to be there and so prominent. As the commentators all point out, he apparently was not a guest: when Christ healed him he sent him away. It seems he had been deliberately planted there by the Pharisees who then watched (see Luke 14:1) to see what Christ would do. They held that to heal on the Sabbath was to break the law. They knew what he believed and taught; but they had set up the situation to see if he would dare to defy them to their faces, heal the man and so brand himself as a law-breaker. He asked them if it was right to heal on the Sabbath. There was stony silence (see Luke 14:3–4). So he healed the man and then asked another question. Again stony silence. They had no answer with which to justify their position (see Luke 14:5–6). But that did not mean that they were prepared to repent or even to rethink their ideas. They held that Christ was wrong, and the whole incident had been arranged to demonstrate how wrong he was. They hoped, of course, to be admitted one day to the messianic banquet; they did not believe that Jesus would be the master of the house.
The mere fact of disagreeing with him was in itself serious; but serious also was the matter over which they disagreed. It concerned nothing less than the attitude of God towards man's need and man's salvation. Their position was that the honour due to God and to his law meant that no work might be done on the Sabbath. On that everyone was agreed, for that was what Scripture said. They added, however, that healing a man on the Sabbath was work, and therefore God's honour and obedience to his law demanded that the man's need however great must not be attended to on the Sabbath. It must wait.
Such severity appeals to some minds as being evidence of great holiness, self-denial and devotion to God. Christ showed that it was hypocritical and false. In the first place, Christ pointed out that if [p 278] their son or ox40 fell into a well on the Sabbath, any one of them would run and pull him out at once. Leave the boy or animal so much as a few minutes and he might drown. Yet here was a man whose body was morbidly filling up with water; soon, none of them knew how soon, it would prove fatal. Why make him wait to be rescued when they would not make even their animals wait?
The answer had nothing to do with God's honour, but everything to do with their pride and self-interest. They held that by keeping God's law they gained merit; and upon their merit depended acceptance with God and eventual entrance into his kingdom. So they added regulations to the law of Sabbath, which made it not just a day of rest and delight in God, but a rigorous test of ability to keep endless, strict regulations. Their motive was that the more and the stricter were the rules they kept, the more merit they piled up for themselves. Their interpretation allowed them to pull their ox out of a well on the Sabbath, because if their animal drowned, they lost money. But they enforced their rule against a man's being healed on the Sabbath: if he died, they lost nothing. It was not God's honour, nor man's good, but their own self-interest and pride of attainment that concerned them.
According to Christ—and this is what angered the Pharisees—their merit was useless. Their bloated sense of religious attainment was a spiritually pathological state more dangerous than the physical dropsy which threatened the patient's life. In the first place, acceptance with God and entrance into his kingdom do not, cannot, and never will depend upon a man's merit. Moreover God never authorized nor approved of their addition of these strict rules to his Sabbath law; and therefore their keeping of them brought them no merit in his eyes. Worse still, their rules amounted to a slander on the character of God. His honour and due never demand that man's salvation must wait. If man is in desperate need and danger, God will always give that need priority: Calvary has subsequently shown us to what extreme he is prepared to go in doing so.
The Pharisees, however, were not prepared to give up their imagined merit. According to them Jesus was wrong, and his concept [p 279] of God and of salvation was wrong as well. When eventually they arrive at the door of the kingdom, they will hardly gain entrance simply by pointing out that after all they did invite Jesus to dinner and attend some of his theological lectures, even though they disagreed with him. Christ is not the democratically elected chairman of a religious club to which everyone, whatever his views, whether he agrees with the chairman or not, has right of entry. He is the Son of the Father and master of the house. The banquet is his expression of what God is like. To reject his teaching is to reject the banquet.
2. The satisfactions of the messianic banquet (Luke 14:7–15:2)
i. The Lord's invitation declined (Luke 14:7–24)
At Luke 14:1–6 Christ was at dinner in the house of a Pharisee. The three parables which Luke now records were told while Christ was at table with fellow-guests in someone's house. We need not stay to decide whether it was the same Pharisee's house and the same occasion or not: we can afford to leave that decision to the exegetes. For our purposes it is sufficient to notice that the thought-flow follows on from Movement 1 without a break.
The first two parables deal with the question of what the attitude of guests and hosts should be to earthly entertainment; the third deals with the question of people's attitude to the messianic banquet. The two questions are not unrelated: false attitudes to earthly entertainment can help to pervert people's thinking about the heavenly banquet.
First, then, Christ commented on the fact that for some people the chief satisfaction of a wedding feast is the opportunity it gives them to advertise their own imagined merit and distinction. They cannot humbly enjoy the feast and the company as a gracious gift given to them quite independently of their own importance, and allow the host, if he chooses, to confer unexpected distinction on them; they must sit themselves down in the chief seats so that everyone can see how distinguished they are, or else they do not really enjoy the feast at all. [p 280]
Secondly, Christ commented on the tendency of some hosts not to invite poor guests who could not possibly pay them back for their hospitality. Their dinner parties were rather a calculated quid pro quo. Their guests would thank their host as if the dinner were free, but they knew in their hearts that they were expected to repay him. It considerably altered the significance of the host's lavish dishes, and his guests' enjoyment of them.
Christ's criticisms of these less than ideal attitudes prompted one of his fellow-guests to remark 'Blessed is the man who shall eat at the banquet in the kingdom of God' (Luke 14:15). The sentiment was true enough: no one is invited to that feast on the basis of his merit and distinction and no guest therefore will spoil the occasion by parading his own supposed worthiness. Nor is any guest expected to pay the host for the feast by good behaviour, self-denial or religious observance; nor will it ever be possible for any guest to repay the host. The feast is a genuinely free gift, provided by the unadulterated generosity of the host. The remark led Christ, however, to speak further of the messianic banquet but this time with certain differences from his description in Luke 13:25–30.
First he called attention to the lavish provision: it is to be a great supper with many guests and with all the dishes well prepared (see Luke 14:16–17). Doubtless the satisfactions to be enjoyed in eternity will be of a higher order than mere physical satisfaction; but even in this world a banquet is much more than a means of satisfying physical hunger. The metaphor of feasting, as distinct from merely eating a meal, assures us that no true potential appetite, desire, or longing given us by God will prove to have been a deception, but all will be granted their richest and most sublime fulfilment.
Secondly, his description of the guests who eventually enjoy the feast does not mention, as Luke 13:28 did, the illustrious saints, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and all the prophets, but the poor, the crippled, the blind, the lame (see Luke 14:21). These are people whose experience in this world has seemed to mock them by giving them some concept of what life could be like if it were truly fulfilled, and then frustrating their potentials, cheating their appetites and leaving deep longings [p 281] unsatisfied. Many are the people to whom life has done this kind of thing, if not physically, then emotionally and spiritually. Salvation will more than compensate them with unstinted satisfaction.
Thirdly, just as at Luke 13:25–30 there were some who missed the feast, so there are here, but with this difference: those missed it unintentionally, pleading to be let in, but shut out; these miss it intentionally, invited to come, summoned at the appointed hour to take their seats, but deliberately declining the invitation. They make polite excuses but the excuses are transparently thin. They could come if they wished: they have no wish to come. The supper apparently, is not good enough for them.
The parable reminds us that there are multitudes who reject salvation for this very reason. They enjoy the Creator's gifts: the Creator himself they regard as a bore. They reject salvation deliberately. Life on earth they admit is not all it could be, but it satisfies them; eternal life, they know without even tasting it, would not please them. They will have their choice: they will never taste of the banquet (see Luke 14:24).
ii. The cost of discipleship (Luke 14:25–35)
The heavenly banquet is free. It fulfils all Christ's conditions for true hospitality: it has not to be paid for or merited; the host can never be repaid. But because it is free that does not mean it is cheap. Quite the reverse. This paragraph is about to tell us that salvation is so valuable that if receiving it as a gift involved us in the loss of everything else, we should be foolish indeed not to accept the loss. Thousands have been and still are confronted with this choice right at the outset of their Christian lives. They see, as clearly as Saul of Tarsus saw, that salvation is a free gift. Equally clearly they see that confession of faith in Christ will cost them career, friends, family, perhaps life itself; and they have to decide between Christ and salvation on the one side and all else on the other. All disciples of Christ must be prepared for that choice at any time. They must be ready to 'hate', that is, to give second place to, and if need be to let go, all else (see Luke 14:26).
Secondly, Christ insists that no one can be a disciple of his without carrying his own cross and following him (see Luke 14:27). He [p 282] must be prepared to accept the same hostility from the world as Christ suffered. But more. A man carrying his own cross along the street of some ancient city was normally a condemned criminal or a defeated rebel sentenced to death, deprived of all rights and possessions, and on his way to execution. Everyone who claims forgiveness because Christ died as his substitute, thereby confesses himself as a sinner who has forfeited all his rights and everything except what the grace of Christ gives him.
There is no denying, then, that discipleship is costly, both at the beginning and all the way along the road. Christ does not hide the fact. The disciple faces a tremendous project. As with any other major project of building or conquest, the costs of carrying it through to completion should be carefully calculated and faced in advance (see Luke 14:28–33). A guide might offer to take a party of inexperienced travellers on a highly dangerous journey. He might guarantee that he would bring them safely through. He might offer to do it for nothing and refuse any reward. But he also might very reasonably lay it down as a condition that for the duration of the journey everyone in the party should hand over themselves and all their possessions and provisions to his control and yield unquestioning obedience to his authority. Christ guarantees that he will bring every true disciple through life's journey to the heavenly banquet. On the way he will teach them the behaviour that will be expected of them at the banquet. The banquet itself is free; and Christ requires no payment for his services. But he lays it down as an indispensable condition that every disciple must renounce all rights to his property (see Luke 14:33). That does not mean that he must give everything away to other people. As far as other people are concerned (and that includes the church), his right of private property remains (see Acts 5:4). 'All that a man has' includes not just money and goods, time and energy, talent and body and soul, but wife and children as well. Obviously, a disciple is not called upon to give his wife and children away to other people. But them and all else he must surrender to Christ, and be prepared unquestioningly to accept Christ's authority over everything. Salt is good; but salt that has lost its saltiness is useless. Is it worth calling it [p 283] salt? A traveller who is not prepared to stir out of his armchair in his study, is not a traveller. A disciple who is not prepared to follow the master or do what he says, is no disciple (see Luke 14:34–35).
iii. The Pharisees criticize Christ (Luke 15:1–2)
At Luke 14:1–6 the Pharisees planted a sick man at a dinner party to which they invited Christ in order to force a showdown: either he submitted to their rabbinic regulations for the Sabbath and left the sick man sick, or else he healed the sick man on the Sabbath and showed himself to be sinfully irreligious, in their eyes, by disregarding the ceremonial law.
Now they criticize him again, this time on grounds of moral laxity: Christ welcomed tax-collectors and loose-living people, and was prepared to take a meal with them. This, according to the Pharisees, was to condone these people's immorality. The criticism was grossly unfair. It overlooked Christ's unambiguous teaching against immorality, which was in fact far stricter than that of the Pharisees themselves (see Luke 16:18; Matt 5:27–32); and it also overlooked both the purpose for which the tax-collectors and sinners sought his company and his motive in taking a meal with them. They were coming in order to hear him preach (see Luke 15:1) and they knew exactly what moral standards he stood for. But like the prodigal unsatisfied with his husks (see Luke 15:16–17), and wistfully searching for something more satisfying, they were taking their first tentative steps back home to the Father. Of course Christ welcomed them, and not only to his formal public preaching. He had for them an invitation to a banquet which could satisfy their truest longings with wholesome and magnificent pleasures, instead of the husks with which they had tried to gratify their perverted cravings. How and where better could he explain the invitation to them and show them that it was genuine, and how to accept it, than by taking a meal with them and talking with them over the table? The Pharisees derived great personal satisfaction out of successfully keeping their own religious rules; but they had little interest in the joy of retrieving for God those who had broken God's laws. And that was serious, for as Movement 3 is about to [p 284] tell us, one of the chief delights which the Master of the house invites us to share with him at his banquet is his joy as the Redeemer of men.
3. The joys of redemption (Luke 15:3–16:18)
i. The father's entreaty rejected (Luke 15:3–32)
Like the first paragraph of Movement 2, our present paragraph consists of three parables, the third one of which depicts a banquet. Luke presumably wants us to see the similarities between these two paragraphs, but more particularly the differences. Like the people of Luke 14:16–20 who refused the invitation to the great supper, so the elder brother of Luke 15:25–32 refused to go in and take part in the welcome-home banquet for his brother; only unlike the people of Luke 14:16–20 he objected to going in not because the banquet was not good enough, but because in his estimation it was too good. Too good, that is, for his waster of a brother. The father came out and pleaded with him to go in, but he was angry and refused (see Luke 15:28). He objected most strongly to the whole idea. If his brother could go off, live a dissolute life, bring disgrace on the family, waste all his money and opportunities, and then come home, make some kind of a profession of repentance and immediately be received, made a fuss of, treated as if nothing had happened, indeed treated better than he had ever been in his life before, then that put a premium on sin and evil living. It made a mockery of all the long years of hard work that he himself had put in on the farm serving his father like a slave. If that was his father's idea of forgiveness, of 'saving the lost', he wanted nothing to do with it.
The parable, we are explicitly told (see Luke 15:1–3), was aimed at the Pharisees. They had been objecting to Christ's receiving tax-gatherers and notorious characters, and it is not difficult to see how the parable was meant to apply to them. Perhaps the first point to be made is the one which the two short introductory parables prepare us to notice in the third major parable: there is a tremendous joy to be experienced in the finding of the lost. In everyday affairs everybody recognizes it. The Pharisees themselves (see Luke 15:4, 8) would [p 285] experience a spontaneous joy at finding a lost sheep, or a lost piece of silver, and their friends would recognize the natural validity of that joy if they were called upon to share it. The joy is in fact the analogue in humble earthly experience of the joy which angels at their far higher levels experience at the conversion of a sinner. The father in the third parable therefore understandably protested to his complaining elder son that it was perfectly right and reasonable of him (the father) to put on a banquet with music and gladness to celebrate the finding of his lost son, and perfectly reasonable and right of him to expect the elder son to join in (see Luke 15:32). But the elder brother would not go in to the banquet; to him his father was being soft, indulgent and grossly unfair. The merriment was immoral.
The parable, then, told the Pharisees that they were out of sympathy with the Father and with the angels, and that they were in danger of excluding themselves deliberately from one of the chief joys of the heavenly banquet. The parable did more: it analysed for the Pharisees why they felt no joy in the redemption of tax-gatherers and sinners. The older brother's grievance was that he had worked like a slave for his father for many years, never transgressing any of his father's orders, and he had never got anything out of it to rejoice over with his friends, not even so much as a kid. Yet his brother, who had done no work, but instead had wasted his father's resources in disgraceful debauchery, had only to come home to be given the calf which the family kept fatted up ready for some special celebration. That was to reward sin and selfishness, and to penalize honest endeavour to behave as one should.
The Pharisees felt the same about Christ's gospel of forgiveness and salvation by grace. They had honestly toiled hard to keep God's commandments. Like the elder brother they were proud of their record; but it had never brought them any joy, and sense of acceptance with God, or any assurance of salvation. How could it? Salvation and acceptance with God can never be enjoyed on those terms (Rom 4:4–7; Eph 2:4–10). Yet here were some of these tax-gatherers and sinners who had broken practically every commandment and lived disgracefully, and now through simple repentance and [p 286] faith they were enjoying the welcome of Christ, and sensed the very kiss of God's acceptance in their hearts; it was for them as though the great banquet had already begun. It made the Pharisees angry; and, of course, they had to brand it as bogus.
The parable conveys yet another answer to the Pharisees' criticism. Astonished at his elder son's sense of grievance the father pointed out that in welcoming home the prodigal, he had not penalized the elder son in any way or robbed him of what was his. 'All that I have', he said, 'is yours'. But that did not pacify him. 'All these years I have slaved for you', he said; and he had a slave's mentality. He had no feeling of being the heir to all the father had, simply because through no merit of his he was the son of his father. Like a slave he thought only of earning everything for himself by his own hard work. Generosity to a bankrupt but repentant prodigal was to him not an expression of his undeserved wealth as the heir of all the father had, but the squandering of hard-won earnings which he could not afford to give away. He would not join in the joy of a banquet provided at such expense.
So, and for similar reasons, many still intentionally shut themselves out of the possibility of sharing with God the joys of redemption both now and hereafter.
ii. The calculations of stewardship (Luke 16:1–13)
The parable of the Prodigal Son introduced a young man who wasted his resources in dissolute living (see Luke 15:13). The parable of this second paragraph presents a steward who wasted his master's goods, or so it was said (see Luke 16:1). The first of the two parables teaches us that if we sinfully waste our lives and then, even at the eleventh hour, come back to God in true repentance and faith, the fact that we have wasted our lives will make no difference at all to the pardon we shall receive or to our acceptance with the Father. The second parable puts the other side of the story: if we waste our lives, it will in another sense make an eternal difference.
The steward's methods may not have been altogether just: we are not meant to copy them. But we are to copy his foresight. [p 287] Realizing that he would soon have to leave his post and that he would not have control of his master's goods much longer, he used his temporary stewardship of those goods to make friends for himself, so that when he had to leave his job, they would receive him into their homes.
We are in a similar position. Nothing we have in this life belongs to us. We brought nothing into this world and we shall take nothing out of it (see 1 Tim 6:7). We are simply stewards. One day we must go and leave it all. While we have in our control, therefore, what our Lord here calls 'the mammon of unrighteousness' (so called because, in this disordered world, it is unfairly distributed?), we are to use it, not indeed in order to gain salvation, for nothing can buy that: it is a gift; but in order to make friends. Not fickle friends of the sort that the prodigal son is said to have made; but friends who will welcome us in the eternal world, and remain our friends eternally. 'Make to yourselves friends by means of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when it shall fail, they may receive you into the eternal tabernacles' (Luke 16:9).
We need to bring a little practical realism into our anticipation of what heaven will be like. In some respects it may not necessarily be all that different from what life is like now. We should consider that while all believers will be equally welcome in heaven and all be loved equally, not all will have equally as many friends. If when accounts are rendered and it becomes known in heaven that it was your sacrificial giving that provided the copies of the Gospel of John which led a whole tribe out of paganism to faith in Christ, will not that whole tribe show towards you an eternal gratitude which they will not show towards me who spent my spare cash on some luxury for my own enjoyment? Moreover when it is a question of our relationship with Christ as Saviour, then of course it is a one-way process in which he does all the saving. But when it comes to our relationship with him as Friend, the relationship is a two-way process: 'you are my friends', he says (John 15:14) 'if you do the things which I command you'. If our side of this friendship has been lacking here, will it make no difference at all there? [p 288]
In the verses following the parable Christ proceeds to list some of the eternal differences which unfaithful stewardship will make (see Luke 16:10–13). Compared with the real and eternal riches, the mammon of unrighteousness is a very small matter (see Luke 16:10–11). But our employment of it gives enough opportunity to demonstrate whether we have been faithful or unjust. If then we have not been faithful, says Christ, in the unrighteous mammon, who will commit to our trust the true riches? Moreover, nothing that we have in this temporary world is our own. It is only lent to us on trust for the time being. In that eternal world it will be different. There awaits us there an eternal inheritance covenanted to us in and through Christ (see Gal 3:15–29). But owning it is one thing; being put in active, practical administration of it is quite another. If therefore in this life we have not been faithful in what belongs to another, who will put us in active administration of our own things in the age to come (see Luke 16:12)? And finally, in our use of mammon here in this life an extremely important matter is at stake. We can use mammon in the course and in the cause of serving God; or we can serve it as an end in itself. If we do the latter, it means, as God sees it, that we are despising him and giving him second place (see Luke 16:13). No one can suppose that a life thus spent in despising God will make no difference when we reach eternity.
iii. The Pharisees scoff at Christ (Luke 16:14–18)
At Luke 15:1–2 the Pharisees criticized Christ for being too lax. Now at Luke 16:14, having heard his teaching on the right use of money, they sneer at it as being too strict. They were, says Luke, lovers of money; and that accounts for their sneering. They had to be told that the standards which they had set themselves and which they prided themselves on keeping were immeasurably too low for God's acceptance. And not in money matters only. Christ did indeed eat with prostitutes and tax-collectors in his desire to get them converted; but his teaching on sexual morality, marriage and divorce insisted on a divine ideal that some of the critics of his gospel, content with mere legality, were not prepared to rise to, nor even to contemplate (see Luke 16:18). [p 289]
Still today mere religion will often discourage a man from accepting salvation by faith, on the grounds that it is bound to lead to careless living; and in its place it will urge him to do the best he can to keep God's law. Then when 'doing his best to keep God's law' has not produced anything like holiness of life, mere religion will comfort him with the thought that God is after all very reasonable: only a fanatic would suppose that he meant us to keep his law all that strictly. But mere religion of that kind is bogus: no heaven worth the name could possibly be built upon it. Indeed, the man who comforts himself with such lax views of God's law is in mortal danger, as the next paragraph will point out.
4. The comforts of heaven (Luke 16:19–17:10)
i. The pleas of the lost refused (Luke 16:19–31)
The Pharisees who sneered at Christ's teaching on the right attitude to money, are not said to have been rich, but rather lovers of money (see Luke 16:14); and that is a different thing. The dangers inherent in the love of money are now solemnly brought out by our Lord's story of a rich man who dressed in the most expensive materials and whose everyday meals were glittering banquets; but when he died, he found himself in hell.
Like the people of Luke 13:25–30 the rich man missed heaven unintentionally. He no more expected to find himself on the wrong side of the fixed gulf (see Luke 16:26) than they expected to find themselves on the wrong side of the shut door. He pleaded for alleviation of his torment, as they pleaded for the door to be opened; but his pleas were refused as theirs were. Why was it, then, that he missed salvation?
Here we shall need to proceed carefully, for it would be easy to jump to the conclusion that he missed salvation because he was not generous enough with his money and had no compassion on the poor. Such a conclusion would be true, but only half of the truth; and like so many half-truths it could be dangerously misleading. It could lead some to imagine that if, doing the opposite to the rich man, they compassionately give a hefty contribution to the world's poor and [p 290] hungry, they will by that means secure themselves right of entry into God's heaven. It is not so, of course. Scripture explicitly asserts that salvation is not by works, but by faith (see Eph 2:8–9; Titus 3:5).
On the other hand, while salvation is not gained by love and good works, it invariably leads to love and good works. A profession of faith that does not show its reality by good works is not genuine (see Jas 2:14–24).
So it was with the rich man: he had never really believed what he professed to believe. He was not an atheist. We must not even suppose that he was a Sadducee who believed that there was no afterlife. Like the Pharisees to whom Christ was telling his story, he would probably have claimed to believe that Scripture was the Word of God and that after death there was a judgment. His mistake was that never for one moment had he ever got round to taking it seriously. We can see that from his behaviour. The second greatest commandment in the Old Testament ran, 'You shall love your neighbour as yourself'. At his very door, so near that he nearly tripped over him every time he went out, there had lain a beggar infested with sores and starving. Some of the bits and pieces that fell from his table may have reached the beggar; but he himself personally made no attempt to show the man any love or compassion. He did not think it mattered whether he obeyed God's law or not—at least he did not think it mattered enough for God to send him to hell for not obeying it. Only the narrow-minded and fundamentalist took the Bible as strictly and literally as that. The very idea that God would ever send him or any of his cultured, sophisticated, very pleasant and polished friends to hell was to him preposterous. None of his set believed that. He certainly didn't. And the unbelief that lay behind his inaction eventually became explicit in his final conversation with Abraham (see Luke 16:27–31). When he pleaded for Lazarus to be sent to warn his brothers, Abraham replied that there was no need, since his brothers had the Bible and could read what it said. At that the rich man protested that it was no good supposing that his brothers would take what the Bible said seriously enough to repent, unless they were sent some spectacular [p 291] apparition. The rich man was sure of it: he himself had not really believed what Scripture said, and that was why he was now in hell.
Abraham persisted in his refusal to send Lazarus to warn his brothers, and it is instructive to notice why. It was not that Abraham, or God either, was determined to give people no more than the minimum of evidence. If seeing and hearing an apparition would have brought the brothers to repentance, every room they sat in, every street they walked down, would have been alive with apparitions. But apparitions would not have helped them. They did not need to be convinced that the afterlife is real, or that after death there comes the judgment, or that there is a hell. They needed to be convinced that their neglect of God's law was serious enough to land them personally in hell. And that was a moral issue, and ultimately a question of God's moral character. The highest possible evidence in the matter therefore was the plain statement of his Word directed to the brothers' moral conscience and judgment. And so it is with us. If our moral judgment is so irresponsible that it can make light of the Bible's warnings of our guilt before God (see John 3:18; Rom 1:18, 20; 2:1–3:20), no amount of seeing of apparitions would convince us that we personally were in danger of perdition unless we repented.
Now the story of the rich man and Lazarus is not said to be a parable, and it is obviously not one.41 But the language it uses to describe their ultimate condition is obviously figurative. It will be instructive to compare the figures used here with those which our Lord used at Luke 13:22–30. There the lost were represented as being able to see Abraham and the other guests arriving for the banquet, as pleading themselves to be allowed in, but as being kept out by a shut door. There is, of course, no thought of the door being shut to stop the guests coming out. In our present passage the rich man is similarly represented as being able to see Abraham and Lazarus, but this time they are said to be far off (see Luke 16:23). Between them [p 292] there is not a closed door, but a gulf, which moreover not only prevents the rich man from crossing over to Lazarus but also prevents Lazarus from crossing over to the rich man (see Luke 16:26).
On earth there was no gulf between the rich man and Lazarus: the beggar lay at his garden gate. Nor was it difficult for the rich man to see Lazarus' need: his disease was hideously evident. How clear was the lesson which God had set the rich man, and how easy and near the opportunity to love his neighbour as himself. Any time he wished he could have brought him into his house, treated his sickness and invited him to a meal. Lazarus so treated would have been the means not only of bringing a new joy and satisfaction into his life, but of developing his moral character. But the rich man put an impassable gulf of compassionless selfishness between himself and the sick beggar.
Now in the eternal world a great gulf of another kind separates them for ever. The rich man cannot pass over to Lazarus to do him any good: Lazarus does not need it anyway. Nor can Lazarus pass over to the rich man to relieve his condition or improve his state. The rich man has had to leave behind all his wealth and sumptuous dishes: but he has brought his character with him. Such as it is, it is fixed for ever. Even his concern for his brothers has lost eternally any opportunity of helping them in the things that he now sees matter most. And it torments him.
Let our last thoughts be of Lazarus. After life's sufferings he is comforted (see Luke 16:25). He is pictured 'in Abraham's bosom'. On earth he was obviously a true son of Abraham, the father of the men of faith. Certainly it must have taken a very strong faith indeed to endure the role that he was called upon to fill in life without abandoning belief in God completely. The problem of suffering is a great mystery. But this much is clear: the suffering of some provides opportunities, whether taken or not, for the development of qualities in others that would scarce have been developed apart from that suffering. The believing medical missionary who shows the reality of his faith by devoted services to lepers, develops a character of sterling and eternal worth, and will surely be rewarded [p 293] by God in the life to come. But all this has been occasioned by the fact that there were lepers for him to serve; and it is a much more difficult role to be a leper than it is to be a much applauded medical missionary. What then of the lepers? We may not think that the mere fact of their suffering entitles them to heaven any more than the rich man's riches automatically consigned him to hell. But if the lepers are true sons of Abraham, their faith, refined by their sufferings, 'will result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed' (1 Pet 1:7). And God will comfort them for all the suffering which became the means in his hand of perfecting the character of others. Some people, it is true, sneer at the doctrine that the Lazaruses of this world will be comforted in the next. They say it encourages the better off to think that it does not matter too much if they neglect them. They seem to forget what Christ said happened to the rich man who neglected Lazarus.
ii. Disciples' attitude to inevitable occasions of stumbling (Luke 17:1–4)
If true, genuine and active faith is as eternally important as we have just seen it is, no sin against a fellow-man can possibly be more serious than to do something by act or word to stumble him in his faith, or to break that faith, in God, in the deity of Christ, in the authority of his Word, in the value of his redemption or the reality of his salvation. In this imperfect world, Christ says, it is impossible but that such stumbling-blocks will occur; but the consequences for the people responsible for their occurrence will be so grave, that it would have been better for them, before they injured someone's faith, to have been flung into the sea with a millstone round the neck where they would be safely out of the way and unable to influence anybody.
A true disciple, therefore, has two special duties in this connection. He must rebuke his brother when he sins (see Luke 17:3). Some people seem to enjoy doing it; and if they do, they are obviously not doing it in the manner in which it should be done. Most of us find it unpleasant and in cowardly fashion err by not doing it at all. But [p 294] if our silence encourages a man to think that his sin does not matter, where might he not end up? In this as in all things Christ is our example. He rebuked 'that fox Herod', for example, even though in doing so he was humanly speaking endangering his own life (see Luke 13:31–33).
Secondly, the true disciple must forgive his repentant brother, even if he sins and then repents seven times a day (see Luke 17:4). God himself never refuses forgiveness to genuine repentants. But what a tragedy it would be, if a man who professed to know Christ were to refuse to forgive his fellow man when he repented, and his fellow man got the impression that repentance is useless, and therefore ceased to repent thereafter of his sins towards men or towards God either. So if seven times a day seems an impossible number of times to have to forgive a sinning brother, let the disciple remember Christ. He called on Jerusalem to accept his protection. How many times they rebuffed him. And how many times, in spite of it, he renewed his offer of mercy (see Luke 13:34).
iii. The Lord's due and his servants' needs (Luke 17:5–10)
Faced with such demanding duties as those outlined in the second paragraph the apostles asked Christ to increase their faith.
They received the stimulating reply that even faith as small as a mustard seed would uproot a tree and plant it in the sea. To faith so strong few duties would prove difficult. But powerful faith such as that might possibly create in us wrong attitudes: the very success it achieved might make us spiritually overbearing and arrogant. And so Christ proceeds to teach us what our attitude toward God must ever be as his servants.
'Which one of you', asks Christ, 'having a servant ploughing or keeping sheep, will say to him when he comes in from the field, "Come at once and sit down to eat", and will not rather say to him, "Get my dinner ready, and dress yourself and wait on me until I have eaten and drunken, and after that you shall eat and drink"?' (Luke 17:7–10). The form of his analogy and the crucial stress on the words 'at once' may profitably recall for comparison the passage at [p 295] Luke 14:1–6 and the lesson it taught us [p . 276]. If God will always put man's salvation before the ceremonies and celebrations of his own praise, we who have been saved must always put God's service before our own interests. We certainly must never get it into our heads that we have served God so superbly well that now we have a right to put our own needs and satisfactions before his requirements. And never can we put God in our debt by serving him. If after we have served him well, as we think, he appears not to thank us or to be grateful (see Luke 17:9), why should we expect him to? When we have done everything he asks of us, it is what we were only duty-bound to do anyway. At the great banquet the master himself will serve us (see Luke 12:37). Does not that inspire us to grasp every opportunity of serving him first?
Notes
39KJV 'sit down' represents Greek anaklinomai which means 'to recline at table'. At banquets in NT times the guests did not sit but reclined round the table. 40Some manuscripts read 'ass or ox'.
41A parable is based on actual things and activities in this world, e.g. wheat, tares, sheep, oil lamps, etc., which are then used as parables of higher realities. But heaven and hell to which Lazarus and the rich man went respectively, are not parables of higher realities: they are themselves the ultimate realities. [p 297]
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