Hey, happy Monday.
Thanks for joining us to start the week.
I’m grateful that you would
begin your week with us in the Gospel of Luke.
It’s still kind of shotgunning some different things here today.
We move into a
couple of passages as we move toward the end of Chapter
11 that are probably sound odd,
maybe the first one more so than the second,
but there’s some stuff in here I think that can be really helpful,
so let’s read through it and then we’ll try to unpack it.
“When the crowds were increasing,
he began to say,
‘This generation is an evil
generation, for it asks a sign,
but no sign will be given except the sign of Jonah,
for just as Jonah became assigned to the people of Nineveh,
so the Son of Man will be to this generation.
The Queen of the South will rise at judgment with the people of this generation and condemn them,
because she came from the ends of the earth to listen to the wisdom of Solomon and see something
greater than Solomon is here.
The people of Nineveh will rise up at the judgment with this
generation and condemn it,
because they repented at the proclamation of Jonah
and see something greater than Jonah is here.’”
So this picks up a thing that we saw a couple of verses ago,
it’s probably back in about verse 16, I think,
others to test him kept demanding a sign.
And now Jesus,
after a little detour,
gets back to that idea and he handles it very aggressively.
In the Gospels, when a sign is demanded of Jesus,
when proof is demanded of Jesus,
he typically responds very aggressively,
and that’s true here as well.
He says, “This generation is an evil generation,
for it asks for a sign.” And so the idea,
and if that sounds like harsh language,
think through the idea that it is the exact contradiction to faith.
Faith asks you to make a judgment based on the testimony of Jesus and the witness of Jesus,
and come to the conclusion of who Jesus is,
and a sign is the exact opposite.
You have to prove it
to me, Jesus.
I can’t discern that on my own,
I need proof.
And the Gospel takes that almost
personally because it believes that Jesus is so obviously who Jesus is,
that no sign should be needed,
certainly no sign should be requested.
And so if this sounds like harsh language,
an evil generation,
keep in mind that the Gospel has a deep bias against forcing Jesus to prove himself.
Yeah, I think it’s worthwhile,
Clint, that we recognize that the story is progressing,
the conflict is intensifying,
and some of that is related to the fact that Jesus is
drawing crowds.
In fact, that’s where Luke begins this week,
when the crowds were increasing.
So this idea that as a claim is happening,
this symbol or this sign that’s being sought out
is not some kind of true test of faith.
This isn’t the people who think that Jesus is the
Messiah and who are just waiting for him to seal the deal and to make it clear.
No,
this is a kind of testing of Jesus,
give us the good stuff.
If you’re worth
being the Messiah, then you need to deliver the good stuff.
It reminds me of the Gospel of John,
where after Jesus feeds the crowd,
they want to make him king.
There’s something very selfish in
this crowd’s portrayal here, and certainly,
Luke doesn’t take long and doesn’t spare words,
it’s an evil generation,
it asks for a sign.
And then the sign given is a very interesting one.
So instead of,
you know, Luke has made it abundantly clear already that Jesus’s power
over the natural is real,
that he’s able to walk through crowd without being harmed,
he’s able to heal the sick,
he’s able to cast out demons,
Jesus is able to do these miraculous, supernatural things,
right?
And here, when it comes to the sign,
what’s noticeable is he chooses not a work of power,
but rather a proclamation of repentance to,
and this is very notable,
a foreign people, right?
The Old Testament is full of texts and stories where God’s prophet
is the one who calls the people of God,
by the way, the Jews to repentance.
But instead of turning to those texts,
Jesus turns to Jonah, this is notable,
because Jonah is the one who literally runs away from God’s task to proclaim repentance to
the foreign people, the people that Jonah considers to be an enemy,
and it’s those people who do
repent.
So Clint, there’s a setting up here of the crowd.
When Jesus says that they’re evil,
he’s not saying that as some sort of rhetoric.
I mean, the way that this story is told will end
up with Jesus comparing the Jews to the most hated rivals of the past and saying that the rivals will
do better.
And I mean, that is incendiary language for a crowd of people who are gathering around him.
Yeah, I think,
Michael, even the second example,
he gives the Queen of the South,
which is a reference in Kings and Chronicles to the Queen of Sheba,
a character that shows up in the Old
Testament whom we don’t know a great deal about,
but she is also a foreigner and a woman and comes seeking Solomon’s wisdom.
And so Jesus uses these examples to say the people of Nineveh recognized truth and repented,
the Queen of Sheba recognized wisdom and sought it out,
and you people who are
Jews, who are the people of God,
have done neither of those things.
Therefore,
this is a corrupt
generation,
and those foreigners will stand in judgment over you because they responded to the
work of God and you have not.
And Jesus even intensifies that by saying something greater
than Solomon is here,
something greater than Jonah is here.
So not only do you have evidence,
you have more evidence than they had,
and where they responded,
you demand proof, you demand sign, you think that you can make God do what you want and demand things of the Messiah,
which you have no right to demand.
And so again, if this sounds harsh,
this is pretty standard stuff
in the Gospel because these are people questioning the work of God and the work of Christ,
the person of Christ,
and the Gospel always hits that with a hammer.
The Gospel always comes down on that hard.
And this preaches in a really uncomfortable way,
Clint, because repentance is difficult.
That is a universal human trait.
We all live with a kind of natural bent towards
identifying in others the problem and not seeing it in ourselves.
Of course, Jesus’ very famous story to illustrate this,
the speck in your neighbor’s eye and the plank in your own eye.
But repentance is an essential component of encountering Jesus.
Repentance is the required
step in order to see him as Messiah and not to see him as a tool to some desired end.
I’d really like to have good food tonight.
I’d really like for my life to be put together,
happy, healthy, all the time.
I’d really like, there’s so many things that we would fill in that gap,
Clint, but Jesus is uninterested in marching to our beat.
Jesus consistently throughout the Gospels
is portrayed as the one who reveals something about God’s intention for the world and something
about us, because those things go together.
And realistically,
the question is, will we repent at that revelation?
When we see the truth of our brokenness,
will we respond with humility?
Will we have some courage to admit the truth and then to trust Jesus to lead the way?
And the Gospels make it clear the crowd was more often than not
unable to do that.
And that’s a sobering presentation of reality.
Yeah, and the idea of testing Jesus,
the idea that Jesus has to jump through the
hoops that the crowd set for Him,
it’s not well received.
And it stands in contrast
to the Gospel in which Luke is trying to present to us
not so much evidence,
but awareness of who
Jesus is.
We’ve known that from the very first chapters as this story unfolds.
Luke is contrasting
the reaction of someone who believes versus someone who refuses to believe,
and he judges it harshly as the Gospels tend to do.
Let’s jump on to this next
piece.
Before we do that,
I want to say, and I don’t know if this is helpful,
and I don’t know if a scholar on the Gospel of Luke
would let me get away with this,
but do keep in mind that when we read the Gospels,
we are reading condensed accounts.
And so there are times,
and I think this is particularly true in Luke,
at least as I read it,
where not a lot of work is given to transitions.
So you have these
ideas that sort of stand alone,
and then you just go on to the next one.
And it can feel sort of
knee-jerk because it’s not told in a narrative form.
It’s sort of a list of Jesus said this,
and then he said this,
and then he said this.
And sometimes those things aren’t altogether related.
I think there’s a little of that happening here in this chapter,
particularly the last few days we’ve been working on it.
But let’s move to verse 33 here and look at these verses.
“No one after lighting a lamp puts it in a cellar,
but on a lampstand so that those who enter
may see the light.
Your eye is the lamp of the body.
If your eye is healthy,
your whole body is full of light.
But if it’s not healthy,
your body is full of darkness.
Therefore, consider whether the light in you is not darkness.
If then your whole body is full of light,
with no part of it in darkness,
it will be full of light,
as when a lamp gives you light with its rays.”
So a little bit of confusing syntax there.
But the concept is familiar.
You probably know this
from Matthew.
You probably sang “This Little Light of Mine” in Sunday school as a kid,
if you had that experience of going to Sunday school.
And this is Luke’s shortened version of
at least that teaching,
and then an expanded version of a different idea.
“No one after lighting
a lamp puts it in a cellar.” So we do not hide our light.
Jesus does not hide the truth.
We do not hide the truth,
but on a lampstand so that it may be seen.
“Your eye is the lamp of your body.”
Now, some commentators suggest that in Jesus’ day people thought that the body had light in it,
and the eye sort of illuminated the outside world.
Maybe we’re not as aware of how
vision worked,
but the point is that there is inside and outside.
And what we want is for the
light to be in us and transmit to the world.
What we don’t want is for the darkness of the world
to be in us.
And so then there’s this language about consider whether the light in you is not
darkness.
Make sure there’s not darkness in you.
Make sure that when you’re doing something like
asking a sign, it’s not coming from a dark place.
Make sure that we examine our motives.
Make sure that we examine our interior thoughts and ideas so that we could be full of light with no part in darkness.
And then we will,
like a lamp,
give light with the truth,
give light with the gospel.
So I think probably,
Michael, Matthew gives us a little easier path to get to the finish line with this idea,
but Luke works a little harder to unpack it.

And there is a connection.
I hear the point that you make about the transitions here in Luke,
but I always find even difficult
transitions offer an opportunity to see,
“Okay, well, what is the connection in the editing of a text like this?” I think one of the connections here is
the people who are unwilling to be repented,
the people who will be judged by the foreigners who
did repent at the salvation message,
they are the ones who are supposed to have the light within
them, and they’re actually musty inside.
They actually have darkness inside.
And so Jesus is
calling essentially this crowd in this moment to be mindful of the light.
If you can’t see the
world with light, if all you can see is darkness,
if that is your lens,
then Jesus is offering us
some very strong words of caution at the very least.
And if not caution,
you may be able to say
that Jesus is in many ways judging those who claim to be what they are not,
who claim to have
the light, who claim to be the blessed people,
to be in our Christian context and not the Jewish context,
the bearers of the gospel.
But if we live our lives in such a way that they resemble
darkness,
if that darkness flows from the inner life,
then at the end of the day,
regardless of what you say about the light that is in you, that is invalid.
It doesn’t square.
And Jesus,
if Jesus is consistent in all of the gospels,
one of the things that Jesus unrelentingly does,
regardless of Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John’s telling of his story,
he always tells the truth.
He always holds those around him to account.
And this is another example of him doing so.
Pete Yeah, I think what I hear in this text,
I really appreciate this call to self-examination.
We get this in several places in the gospel.
This is maybe not one of the more accessible,
but if you read carefully,
it is definitely here,
examine yourself,
hold yourself up to the light
of Christ to see if there’s darkness in you.
If there is,
be aware of it so that it can be
replaced, that it can be driven out with light.
We get a lot of this language in the gospel of John, who does
really neat things with the themes of light and darkness throughout the whole gospel.
It’s less of a,
maybe less of an obvious theme in the gospel of Luke,
but light and dark is worked
in through the gospels really in most cases.
And here,
just a reminder that each of us are to
examine ourselves, that we are to look at our motives,
our actions,
our spirits,
our souls,
and to try and root out darkness,
to try and let the light of Christ illumine all of those various
parts of us in a way so that we are completely changed,
that we are completely
recipients of the light of Christ.
And so, to have that darkness removed from us.
And I like that Luke gives us a role in that,
gives us some agency.
There’s a kind of a call to discipleship
in this that I think is helpful.
I will be very brief in this,
but I think that I’ve heard
in recent times a kind of complacency regarding sinfulness,
complacency regarding things that
Christians have historically called darkness.
And I think it’s very important that we recognize
that the answer to human sinfulness is not just saying,
well, humans are sinful and therefore
we can’t hold them to account.
We shouldn’t expect people to live in the light.
What we’re called to
do is be people who strive to the light and seek that the light would eradicate the darkness within
us.
But when we discover darkness,
we’re not surprised by it,
but rather we confess it, we repent,
we recognize it as true,
and then we recognize that in the light of day it can be dealt
with.
And this idea that we would just turn away,
we give moral license to say things against other
people that clearly are not loving of neighbor or to do things that clearly are not rooted in the
motivation to serve as Christ served.
These are situations and places of life where I think that
we’ve got to be very,
very careful to recognize that Jesus calls us to take light seriously and
therefore to take darkness seriously.
And when we find the darkness,
the answer isn’t to say, ah,
it’s just some shadows in the corner.
Now we call darkness what it is.
It’s darkness.
It’s part of who we are.
We tell the truth about that,
but it’s connected to that theme of repentance.
When we recognize the truth,
we repent, and that’s where grace steps in.
But I think, you know, we have to understand that I hear is a metaphor for whatever gets into your life,
and essentially then the question is,
are you allowing light in or are you allowing darkness in?
What is it that
guards the door of your soul,
of your spirit, of your body, in this case,
as Luke puts it,
and lets in light or darkness?
And one will drive out the other.
And so Christians have to choose,
what do I seek to be filled with?
And it’s a,
I think this is a,
again,
maybe not the easiest
path to get there.
There may be passages that, uh,
that pave that road a little better,
but I think this takes us to a good place if we’re willing,
and spend a little time with it and listen to it.
We’re glad if you’ve made it to this point in the study,
that means that you’ve invested that time
to go on that journey with us and have sought to understand what Jesus has to say in these words.
Hope that this has been helpful in your own study and in your own Christian growth.
We would love, of course, to see you tomorrow,
all of the places where you’ll find this YouTube Facebook on the podcast.
We hope that you’re blessed.
I look forward to continuing with you on the journey of Luke.

Thank you.