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THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – CONSIDER YOUR VERDICT

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CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

CONSIDER YOUR VERDICT

“Then they all took Jesus to Pilate and began to bring up charges against Him. ‘We found this man undermining our law and order, forbidding taxes to be paid to Caesar, setting Himself up as Messiah-king.’

“Pilate asked Him, ‘Is this true that you’re ‘King of the Jews’?’

“‘These are your words, not mine,’ Jesus replied.

“Pilate told the high priests and accompanying crowd, ‘I find nothing wrong here. He seems harmless enough to me.'” Luke 23:1-4.

Pilate had no idea, when he opened his eyes that morning, that for him it was judgment day. A routine day, a few more Jewish prisoners to sentence; he’d done it all before. It was an unpleasant part of his role as governor and he did it with indifference. Judah had always been a troublesome province and he was quite glad to sentence a few more rabble-rousers to death.

But this man seemed different. He didn’t have the same insolent attitude. His face wore an expression of serenity, an eerie calm that disturbed him. There was none of the bravado that aroused his rage and gave him a feeling of sadistic pleasure to see condemned prisoners walking towards the execution site, backs bent under the heavy load of the crossbeam.

The mob that crowded the courtyard was in ferment. Led by the high priests, they were yelling out the charge, ‘Treason! He calls Himself ‘King of the Jews’! He’s inciting rebellion!’

Pilate looked at Jesus. Flanked by two soldiers, hands tied so tightly behind his back that dried blood stained His wrists and hands, He stood unmoved, looking steadily into his eyes, almost challenging him to consider his own verdict. ‘Pilate, you decide whether I am guilty or not guilty.’

Just as the Jewish leaders were put on trial that day, so was Pilate. He was a man to be most pitied. He had an unpleasant job to do in Jerusalem. It was Passover and the city was filled with volatile Jews from all over Israel. Although the Jewish leaders had not planned it this way to avoid a riot, Jesus had inadvertently fallen into their hands at this inopportune time through the conniving of Judas.

But it was the Father’s time. Jesus had to fulfil the role of Passover lamb, to be sacrificed for the sin of the world at the precise moment when the high priest spilt the blood of the first lamb in Jerusalem.

Pilate still had to face his own responsibility in this drama. He had the final say regarding Jesus’ guilt or innocence. He alone decided whether He lived or died. His honest verdict, even after a perfunctory examination of the prisoner was, ‘Not guilty.’ It was glaringly obvious that the charges against Jesus were trumped up.

“Is it true that you are the King of the Jews?” In answer to Pilate’s question and in true “Jesus” fashion, Jesus turned the question back on Pilate. ‘It’s not my responsibility to tell you. It’s your responsibility to make your own decision. On that rests your own fate.’ Pilate’s verdict was ‘not guilty’, but that was not the end of the story. The deciding factor would be what he would do about it.

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE – DO YOU KNOW YOU ARE SICK?

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DO YOU KNOW YOU ARE SICK?

“After this He went out and saw a man at his work collecting taxes. Jesus said, ‘Come along with me.’ And he did – walked away from everything and went with Him.

“Levi gave a large dinner at his home for Jesus. Everybody was there, tax men and other disreputable characters as guests at the dinner. The Pharisees and their religion scholars came to His disciples greatly offended. ‘What is He doing eating and drinking with crooks and “sinners”?’ Jesus heard about it and spoke up, ‘Who needs a doctor; the healthy or the sick? I’m here inviting outsiders, not insiders — an invitation to a changed life, changed inside and out.'” Luke 5:27-31.

Levi? A tax man? Jesus called him? And then Levi throws a party and invites all the scum from the underworld? And Jesus goes there?

What was He thinking? And then He actually eats with them? Isn’t that taking things a bit too far? Jesus was the God-man remember, and God was eating with them!

We are so used to reading the story that it doesn’t impact us like it impacted those religious men. How could this Jesus, who said He was God, whom Habakkuk said was of purer eyes than to look at evil, actually sit down and eat a meal with known “sinners” – people who habitually and deliberately broke the law and did nothing about it? They probably never went near the Temple, let alone offered a sacrifice to atone for their wickedness.

To share a meal with someone in that culture had great significance. You never ate with someone with whom you had issues. Eating a meal was a signal to everyone around that you were reconciled. God reconciled? To these people?

By celebrating with the “outsiders”, Jesus was making a profound statement. God and sinners were reconciled! But how could that be? Where was the sacrifice? He was there, with them, right before their eyes – the Lamb of God, slain from before the foundation of the world, taking away the sin of the world. The world? Yes.

These despised outcasts were just as much sons of God as the scribes and Pharisees who thought they had exclusive rights to God because of their “performance”. In Jesus’ story of the “prodigal son”, both sons were in the far country, the younger one in body and the older one in attitude. For the father, it was more difficult to win his older son back than the younger because he was so convinced that he was right.

Jesus not only taught but He showed that God is far less concerned about what people do as He is about who they are. On the basis of the atoning sacrifice of His Son, the Father receives whoever is willing to come home because they are sons and daughters – wayward yes, but nevertheless His children.

“‘For in Him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your poets have said, ‘We are His offspring.'” Acts 17:28 (NIV).

That was something the Pharisees could not understand because they based everything on their performance, especially what they did for public scrutiny. What was in their hearts was unseen and therefore irrelevant, so they thought.

Jesus’ little barb must have hit home because they had nothing more to say. ‘It’s the sick who need healing, not those who think they are well.’ The greatest of all tragedies was that they were blissfully unaware of how sick they really were. It’s those who think they are okay who need the healing the most.

It’s better to be honest than to be fooled. The riff-raff of society in Jesus’ day welcomed Him because they knew how sick they were. There was a connection because He responded to their honesty. He could not connect with the religious people because they had built a wall of pretence they were not willing to demolish and only they could break it down.

What about you? Draw near to God and He will draw near to you.

Give God What is His

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GIVE GOD WHAT IS HIS

“Watching for a chance to get Him, they sent spies who posed as honest enquirers, hoping they could trick Him into saying something that would get Him in trouble with the law. So they asked Him,…’Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?’

“He knew they were laying for Him and said, ‘Show me a coin. Now this engraving, who does it look like and what does it say?’

“‘Caesar,’ they said.

“Jesus said, ‘Then give Caesar what is his and give God what is His.’

Try as they might, they couldn’t trap Him into saying anything incriminating. His answer caught them off guard and left them speechless.” Luke 20:20-26 (The Message)

Got them again!

Jesus was no push-over. These so-called ‘spiritual’ men had still not learned not to mess with Him. They always came off second best. This time it was about taxes. The Jewish people chafed at their Roman overlords’ taxation on top of the tithes, offerings and temple taxes they had to pay. It was a heavy burden on them and brought many of them into poverty.

But there was a more sinister issue at stake. Jesus was a rabbi with authority which meant that His disciples were obliged to copy everything He said and did. What He said about paying taxes would reveal His heart attitude to the Roman government which He would pass on to His disciples with possible serious results.

If He showed any antagonism towards Rome, He would be suspected of treason. His opponents were trying to catch him off guard so that He would unwittingly incriminate Himself and open Himself to arrest by the Roman soldiers.

But Jesus was too smart to be caught out. His response was not a spur-of-the-moment reaction. He was not only on guard; He was also well-prepared because of His complete understanding of God’s kingdom and how to live in it in the earthly environment. In every situation He faced as an earthling, He viewed His life from God’s perspective and taught His disciples to do the same.

Unlike us, who easily forget God, He lived His life with His Father in the centre. Everything He thought and did came out of His union with the Father. His answer to their question gives us insight into the way we should live in the kingdom of God so that we best represent Him in an ungodly environment.

In His high-priestly prayer He put in a nutshell what our attitude should be to the world system in which we live. “‘My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it.'” John 17:15-16 (NIV).

As long as we live in the world, we are subject to the systems humans have put in place, including submission to earthly government, and God expects us to fulfil our obligations as unto Him. However, we have a different disposition from the people of the world, the nature and presence of God infused into us by the Holy Spirit. Not to be ‘of the world’ implies that we bring the disposition of Jesus into the way we live.

He showed us how by the way He honoured and respected all people, treating them with compassion and generosity and revealing the love of the Father by His loving and caring attitude.

To ‘give to Caesar’ implied civil obedience while to ‘give to God’ meant not only submitting to His supreme authority over everything, but also living in such a way that we make ‘up there’ come ‘down here’. We are, first and foremost, representatives of the way God runs things, and that includes loyally submitting to the government in everything that does not clash with God’s kingdom and His ways.