This excerpt comes from Luke (BTCB) by David Lyle Jeffrey, commenting on Luke 24:1-12:

The difficulty of conveying such a momentous thing as the resurrection verbally is instanced by Luke in his depiction of the women’s own immediate frustration, even as they become the first to proclaim the very essence of the good news.

Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and all the others have returned breathless to “the eleven” (24:9-10), yet their words seem to the grieving men as “idle tales” . . . . Thus, in sharing this most important news imaginable, the women are disbelieved and ignored (24:11).

These women are soon, of course, to be vindicated. Peter will be troubled and eventually leap up and run to the tomb to see for himself. John will record that he also, having been approached by Mary Magdalene, then runs toward the tomb, where he and Peter likewise find it empty (John 20:1-10) and that meanwhile, Mary Magdalene, having returned to the area to search, queries one she takes to be the gardener about the body of Jesus and discovers herself to be both seeing and speaking with the risen Lord (20:11-18).

So it is the women who first learn of the resurrection, and Mary Magdalene among them who first sees and speaks with the Lord before he has “risen to the Father.” There is just no getting around this, as Augustine says: “So in this fact we have to reflect on the goodness of the Lord’s arrangements, because this, of course, was the doing of the Lord Jesus Christ, that it should be the female sex which would be the first to report that he had risen again.”

Augustine goes on to emphasize this fact too, in the narrative symmetry reflected in Luke’s Gospel especially, that though “humanity fell through the female sex, humankind was restored through the female sex. A virgin gave birth to Christ; a woman proclaimed that he had risen again. Through a woman death; through a woman life. But the disciples didn’t believe what the women had said. They thought the women were raving, when in fact they were reporting the truth” (Sermon 232.2).

One persuasive indicator that we are dealing with facts as they happened is that the revelation comes first to women, so unconventional and imagination for this culture. This is both confirmed and reinforced by the other Gospel accounts.

So many “walls of partition” have been broken down by Jesus in his life and, now, after his death and in his resurrection. Think of it: not only is his resurrection made known first to the women, but he also reveals himself in his resurrection body first to a woman—and to a woman who is not his mother or a relative—something perhaps almost unthinkable in first-century Palestine.

One powerful theme to emerge in Luke’s Gospel is just this: Jesus is no respecter of persons. He does not conform to our social hierarchies and sorry prejudices.

©2012 by David Lyle Jeffrey. Published by Brazos Press. Unauthorized use of this material without express written permission is strictly prohibited.

This excerpt comes from Luke (BTCB) by David Lyle Jeffrey, commenting on Luke 22:14-20:

Jesus, as Luke has learned from many witnesses, is the farthest thing from a dispassionate sage or cool-medium rabbi. He is as passionate as the God of the prophets, as passionate as his predecessor the poet David, and we cannot, unlike Michal in her famous disdainful scorn, begin to imagine Jesus being anything other than immensely please with the heart of that true lover of God when he danced naked before the ark. His desire is real; a passionate heart loves a passionate heart.

When he says just at the beginning of the Passover meal that, in effect, he has long been yearning toward this moment, this feast of love with his cherished friends and the students who must carry on his work, only such an intensified expression makes sense, and it is a Hebraism entirely consistent with everything we have learned about the love of Jesus. It also makes sense, or begins to make sense, of the astonishing and utterly extravagant language he is now about to use with respect to his own self-giving and their sharing in it, now and forever.

It is at this point that the reader begins to see, as did the Twelve themselves, that in relation to fulfillment Jesus is here speaking of the ultimate redemption of which the Passover has been a sign. The Passover ritual is now about to take on a future as well as past significance. The Lord will not participate again in this high festive meal, he says, until some future date. Yet there is, in the ritual meal, a sense of sacramental transposition that the apostles will later recognize retrospectively, in the words of the ancient liturgy: “Christ, our Passover, is sacrificed for us.”

It is absolutely clear that considered, thoughtful retrospect is crucial to the realized theological understanding of the disciples, and Luke’s narrative is full of evidence that he as narrator had been all along actively participating in this sort of remembering—putting events back together in such a way that their fullness of expression gathers in a proper register of abiding theological significance for all subsequent Christian history.

Anamnēsis (“remembering”) is thus the heart of Christian celebration of the Eucharist and serves for us to make Christ eternally present to us and us to him, in what he has done and still does for us as we live in him and he in us. It is also propaedeutic, “until he comes” in glory, to take unto himself his faithful and beloved for the final, everlasting eucharistic feast in the celestial Jerusalem that will have no end.

©2012 by David Lyle Jeffrey. Published by Brazos Press. Unauthorized use of this material without express written permission is strictly prohibited.

This excerpt comes from Luke (BTCB) by David Lyle Jeffrey, commenting on Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32:

The familiarity of this version of “the old, old story” should not cause the modern reader too lightly to overlook an important reason for its perdurable pedagogical power: it is a précis of the central thesis of the gospel, an emblem of the literary power of Jesus’s teaching, and as much as anything it reveals our need to read and reread scripture in company with the faithful of all ages.

The parable also shows well how at its deepest reach the teaching of Jesus is a species of poetics; its concession to our woodenmindedness is by way of a story that draws us out, teases us into interpretation, only to find that we will need to reinterpret it again and again if we are to approach so much as a semblance of its larger truth and power.

Whether we read it literally, morally, allegorically, or indeed as anagogy or eschatology that sees the divine plan for human salvation in terms of redemption of the lost, calling them to the heavenly banqueting table through the unimaginable mercy and grace of the Father, we are reading through partial understanding a text that nonetheless will always yield truth—as long as we do not reduce it to our own partiality.

Luke 15 is at the very heart of the gospel message. It has seemed to preachers in all times that the parable answers one question definitively, and that is through its depiction of God as a father who “wills not that any one should perish” but that all should come to repentance. In Spurgeon’s hallmark one thousandth sermon, the parable of the prodigal “puts plainly before every sinner . . . the exceeding abundance of the grace of God in Christ Jesus.”

Surely it has very often been preached, as Spurgeon puts it, in the hope “that the Lord will find out those who are his sons, and that . . . as they hear of the abundance of bread in the father’s house, [they] may say, ‘I will arise and go to my Father.’” That is the spiritual level of understanding in this parable that opens the door to all separated brothers everywhere.

©2012 by David Lyle Jeffrey. Published by Brazos Press. Unauthorized use of this material without express written permission is strictly prohibited.

This excerpt comes from Luke (BTCB) by David Lyle Jeffrey, commenting on Luke 13:1-9:

The question about evil and its causes—or about evil and its relation to justice—can of course be asked in many ways. The epitome in biblical literature for theodicy examined from the perspective of unjust suffering is surely the book of Job; looked at from the other end, as a question about why the practitioners of evil seem to prosper as their victims suffer, it take theological form in Ps. 73.

Here it is the first perspective in which the question is raised, though the second hovers over it, since the Roman oppression was on everybody’s mind. In order to address the issue more fundamentally, Jesus adds to it the fate of some people killed in an accidental manner, perhaps through a flaw of engineering long unnoticed. Talbert suggests that the issue might well have been raised because some in the audience took absence of tragedy as a sign of God’s blessing, while thinking that “trouble is God’s punishment for sin”; the effect would be as much as to say, “Our lives are tranquil. . . why should we repent?” (2002: 145).

Whatever the motives of “some” in the crowd for turning to this subject, Jesus has an astringent answer: “Do you suppose that these Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans, because they suffered such things? I tell you, no.” The idea of a necessary causal connection between personal sin and the experience of suffering is here dismissed in a word.

But there is a more pressing, more universal question, and that is the question of the human sinfulness, from which no one is free, and its deeper consequences, from which no unredeemed person is exempt. Accordingly, “Unless you repent you will all likewise perish” (Luke 13:3). In the context of Jesus’s immediately preceding eschatological remarks, this almost certainly means “perish eternally.”

The fig tree parable (13:6-9), as Cyril of Alexandria observed sixteen hundred years ago, is such that “the literal sense. . . does not need a single word of explanation” (1983: Homily 96). The fig tree has captured the attention of many an allegorist, however, and in the spiritual sense it has been associated with Israel, the synagogue, and even all humanity. Perhaps (as Bock 1994-96: 2.1208 and others suggest) it involves an allusion to Mic. 7:1-6, a passage already invoked in Luke 12:53.

Regardless, the net interpretation is unmistakable: God’s judgment regarding fruitfulness is imminent. This seems to weigh in favor of it being in its context a parable primarily about Israel.

©2012 by David Lyle Jeffrey. Published by Brazos Press. Unauthorized use of this material without express written permission is strictly prohibited.