A Link to John 12

The Fragrance of Perfume (12:1–11)

Six days before the Passover, Jesus comes to Bethany, to the house of the man he had raised from the dead. They make a dinner for him there. Martha serves, as she always does, and Lazarus reclines at the table. A week earlier Martha had stood outside her dead brother’s cave and protested when Jesus ordered for the stone to be rolled away.

Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days” (11:39).

The Greek verb behind “odor” is ὄζει (ozei), from ὄζω, to give off a smell. Now the man who once gave off the stench of death is sitting at a table, eating and drinking with the one who raised him from the dead.

And this is the moment when Mary takes a pound of pure nard, extravagantly expensive, and anoints Jesus’s feet, wiping them with her hair. When she does so:

The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume (12:3).

“Fragrance” here is ὀσμή (osmē), the noun built from the same root as ὄζω. John never states the contrast explicitly; the vocabulary does the work on its own. Martha feared the scent of her brother’s death; Mary, with her brother alive and present, fills the house with the fragrance of perfume.

Judas objects. The perfume was worth three hundred denarii, a laborer’s wage for about a year’s worth of work, and Mary poured it on the feet of Jesus. According to Judas, what she should have done was sell it and give the money to the poor. John tells us Judas’s real motive.

He said this, not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief, and having charge of the moneybag he used to help himself to what was put into it (12:6).

κλέπτης, thief, is the same word Jesus used three chapters earlier, when he said the thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy (10:10). Judas is not simply dishonest at this dinner; he occupies, in the flesh, the role Jesus had already named as his opposite.

Jesus answers plainly.

“Leave her alone, so that she may keep it for the day of my burial. For the poor you always have with you, but you do not always have me” (12:7–8).

The fragrance filling the house is burial spice, offered early, by a woman whose own brother had already died and been raised. Again, John doesn’t tell us, but the reader is left to wonder whether Mary bought this perfume to use on her brother’s decaying body. Since it was no longer needed for that purpose, she pours it out on the feet of the one who made such a purpose moot.

Crowds come not only for Jesus but to see Lazarus, and the chief priests respond with a plan of their own.

So the chief priests made plans to put Lazarus to death also, because on account of him many of the Jews were going away and believing in Jesus (12:10–11).

News of resurrection will not stay contained to the location where it happened; it spreads, the way a smell fills a house. The authorities could argue about sabbath-keeping and law-breaking and a host of other issues, but they could not argue with a man who used to be dead. So they not only oppose Jesus, but seek to undo the very work that he had done.

Where there was death, Jesus brings life, and he does so through his own death. Where there was supposed to be the stench of death, there was instead the sweet fragrance of perfume, for the one who had died was alive again. Indeed, the one whose feet were anointed to prepare for his own impending death would one day live again, too. His death brings life to the dead. Where there was once the stench of death, there is now the sweet fragrance of life.

The Hour Has Come (12:20–33)

Daniel saw one like a son of man approach the Ancient of Days and receive dominion, glory, and a kingdom, “that all peoples, nations, and languages should serve him” (Dan 7:14). It is Jesus’ favorite way of naming himself, and every time he uses it, he is claiming that vision as his own.

Centuries earlier, God had already promised Abraham that “in your offspring shall all the nations of the earth be blessed” (Gen 22:18). Israel’s God was never going to keep his blessing to himself. He was always going to bring the nations in through Abraham’s own offspring, and Jesus is that offspring (Gal 3:16).

Now the nations are starting to come to Jesus.

“Now among those who went up to worship at the feast were some Greeks. So these came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, ‘Sir, we wish to see Jesus’” (John 12:20–21).

Twice already in this Gospel, Jesus has said his hour has not yet come (John 2:4; 7:30). When Gentiles come asking for him, he says the opposite.

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified” (John 12:23).

Daniel’s Son of Man was promised the worship of every nation and tongue. That promise is arriving now, not as Gentiles bowing before a throne, but as a handful of Greeks looking for a Galilean rabbi at a festival. Jesus recognizes the moment because he already knows how his kingdom will actually be won.

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).

A few verses later, he explains how that death draws the nations in.

“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32).

“Lifted up” is not new language. Moses lifted a bronze serpent on a pole in the wilderness so that anyone who looked at it would live (Num 21:9). Jesus becomes that serpent. He is lifted up as sin and curse (2 Cor 5:21), so that whoever looks to him, Jew or Greek, might live. This is why he calls it ‘glory’ rather than ‘tragedy’. The Son of Man reigns from the one place no one expected, a cross planted like a grain of wheat, drawing the nations to himself as he dies.

Then he turns the pattern on his disciples.

“Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (John 12:25).

You do not get to admire this pattern from a safe distance. On the cross, the grain has already fallen, and the harvest is already secured; nothing you do adds to that. But if the Son of Man reigns by dying, following him will look the same way for his disciples. “If anyone serves me, he must follow me; and where I am, there will my servant be also” (John 12:26). We follow him not to earn what he finished, but to belong to the one who is drawing all people to himself.

The Glory that Undoes You (12:37–43)

Isaiah was a man who had seen glory. In the year King Uzziah died, he saw a vision of the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lifted up, with his train filling the temple, while seraphim cried out, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory” (Isa 6:3). The vision overwhelmed him. “Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips” (Isa 6:5). A burning coal was pressed to his mouth, and then came the call: go and preach to a people who would not listen.

John makes a startling claim about that vision. Having recorded that Jesus performed signs, and still the crowd would not believe, he cites two passages from Isaiah to explain their unbelief. The first is from the Servant Songs:

“Lord, who has believed what he heard from us, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” (John 12:38, quoting Isaiah 53:1).

The second is the hardening oracle from Isaiah’s own call:

“He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart, lest they see with their eyes, and understand with their heart, and turn, and I would heal them” (John 12:40, quoting Isaiah 6:10).

Then John writes:

“Isaiah said these things because he saw his glory and spoke of him” (John 12:41).

The pronoun refers to Jesus. The vision Isaiah had in the temple— the one that overwhelmed him and motivated him to preach— was a vision of the preincarnate Son. What Isaiah saw enthroned was the glory of the one who would one day stand in the very city where that temple had been built, performing signs the crowd refused to accept.

The irony deepens in vv. 42–43. Many of the authorities believed, but they would not admit it, fearing expulsion from the synagogue. John’s verdict is brief and precise:

“They loved the glory that comes from man (τὴν δόξαν τῶν ἀνθρώπων) more than the glory that comes from God (τὴν δόξαν τοῦ θεοῦ)” (John 12:43).

Isaiah saw the glory of God and was overwhelmed by it. The authorities caught a glimpse of God’s glory but chose a different kind of glory instead. The word δόξα carries multiple senses: radiance, honor, and reputation. The approval of the Pharisees, the standing they had spent years building, was more important to them than what God was offering.

This issue isn’t restricted to the first century. The glory that comes from men is visible, immediate, and measurable. The glory of God undoes you before it commissions you. That cost is more than most are willing to pay.

John is asking us today whether we prefer the glory of man or the glory of God. From my limited perspective, most Christians today prefer τὴν δόξαν τῶν ἀνθρώπων.

The Wrong Festival (12:12–19)

The triumphal entry is one of those events in the life of Jesus recorded in all four Gospels, an occurrence that is rarer than one might think. Along with John 12:12-19, there are parallel passages in Matthew 21:1-17; Mark 11:1-11; and Luke 19:29-40. While John makes clear that the time of year is around the Passover (John 12:1), the scene of the triumphal entry is reminiscent of another Jewish festival.

John already mentions the Feast of Dedication, as he calls it, in 10:21. Today, that festival is more commonly known as Hanukkah. This festival commemorates the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid Empire in the 2nd century BC. As part of this revolt, Judas Maccabeus and his brothers reclaimed Jerusalem and the Second Temple. Notice the similarities in the scene as Judas Maccabeus enters Jerusalem.

On the twenty-third day of the second month, in the one hundred seventy-first year, the Jews entered it with praise and palm branches, and with harps and cymbals and stringed instruments, and with hymns and songs, because a great enemy had been crushed and removed from Israel (1 Macc 13:51, NRSV).

⁶ They celebrated it for eight days with rejoicing, in the manner of the festival of booths, remembering how not long before, during the festival of booths, they had been wandering in the mountains and caves like wild animals. ⁷ Therefore, carrying ivy-wreathed wands and beautiful branches and also fronds of palm, they offered hymns of thanksgiving to him who had given success to the purifying of his own holy place. ⁸ They decreed by public edict, ratified by vote, that the whole nation of the Jews should observe these days every year. ⁹ Such then was the end of Antiochus, who was called Epiphanes (2 Macc 10:6–9).

Now here’s John’s account of the triumphal entry:

¹² The next day the large crowd that had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. ¹³ So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying out, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” (John 12:12–13).

At the triumphal entry, the people aren’t welcoming the Passover sacrifice. They are welcoming (they think) the second coming of Judas Maccabeus. They don’t want a Passover lamb. They want a king, and so they welcome him as one, expecting him to do what Judas and his brothers had done before when they brought an end to the reign of Antiochus Epiphanes in Judah.

Jesus is a king, but not like they expect. He comes low and riding on a donkey. The Jews are, in effect, celebrating the wrong festival at the wrong time. It wasn’t Hanukkah. It was Passover, and, for the most part, they failed to see the lamb of God right in front of their eyes.

A Link to John 11 (ESV)

That We May Die With Him (11:1–16)

When Jesus learns that his friend Lazarus is ill, he doesn’t go to him immediately. Instead, he says:

“This illness does not lead to death. It is for the glory of God, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it” (11:4).

Jesus stays where he is for two more days, and only then does he head to Bethany. The way John describes this moment is worth considering.

Now Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. So, when he heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer in the place where he was (11:5–6).

Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, so he didn’t come right away. His love for them was to be manifested in resurrection, not in healing.

Now, when Jesus’ disciples hear that he will be heading back to Bethany, into a territory where the Jews have been seeking to stone him, they protest. Jesus comments that Lazarus is sleeping rather than dead, and they reply that if he’s really just sleeping, he’ll wake up, and they should take the safe course of action. But Jesus expresses his resolve to go, and so one disciple, the one we know mostly for his doubt, says:

“Let us also go, that we may die with him” (11:16).

I’m always struck by this moment, not only because so-called Doubting Thomas seems to express the very opposite of doubt, but also because of how it fits in the subtext of this scene.

Everything in this scene before this statement is about God's glory being manifest through resurrection. Jesus waits two days to make certain that Lazarus is really dead, but he does this because he loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and because he understood that what happened to Lazarus (bodily death) wasn’t actually the end of his friend’s story. God intended to raise him up, and this is a signpost for what God will do on the last great day for all who believe in Christ.

And in that context, in which even our bodily death is for the glory of the God who will raise us from the dead, what more could a disciple say than, “Where Jesus goes, I’ll go, and if it costs me my life, so be it.” Jesus calls us to take up our cross and follow him because he knows that death is not the end of our story. We can follow, go with him, and walk the path that he walked because we know that at the end of that path, he will raise us up.

[[Bonus: This saying also stands out to me because it’s featured prominently in the finale of Lost. Spoiler warning for those who want to watch the clip.]]

Scattered Abroad (11:45–57)

Israel’s prophets never saw the exile as the end. Moses had already promised that after the scattering, the LORD “will gather you again from all the peoples where the LORD your God has scattered you” (Deut 30:3–4). A return from exile was always part of the plan.

Isaiah had pictured a signal raised for the nations, so that God would “assemble the banished of Israel, and gather the dispersed of Judah from the four corners of the earth” (Isa 11:12). Jeremiah put it more tenderly still: “He who scattered Israel will gather him, and will keep him as a shepherd keeps his flock” (Jer 31:10). And Ezekiel, in the very chapter that features dry bones coming back to life, ends with the scattered nation gathered under one king and one shepherd (Ezek 37:21–22, 24). For Israel, the promise of gathering carried the weight of hope itself.

By the time Lazarus walks out of his tomb, the chief priests and Pharisees have stopped debating whether Jesus performs signs and had started calculating what to do about it. Caiaphas, the high priest that year, cuts through their indecision:

“You know nothing at all. Nor do you understand that it is better for you that one man should die for the people, not that the whole nation should perish” (John 11:49–50).

John does not let the remark pass as mere political calculation:

He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad (11:51–52).

A high priest speaks truly while believing falsely, the way Balaam once blessed Israel with a mouth bent on cursing it (Num 23–24). Caiaphas is speaking about Rome and self-preservation. God intends his words to refer to Christ’s salvific cross. The office built for atonement, one man standing in for the many, becomes for one afternoon the mouthpiece of the very promise it was meant to serve.

That promise of one shepherd is why Jesus had already said, of sheep not yet gathered into his fold, “I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” (10:16). Ezekiel’s one shepherd has arrived, and the exile is coming to an end. All those scattered and separated from God are being called home by the death of the Good Shepherd.

Unbind Him (11:38–44)

When Ezekiel stood in the valley of dry bones, God commanded him to prophesy breath into the slain (Ezek 37:9). Bones rattled, flesh appeared, and a large multitude rose to their feet. It was a vision of national restoration, with the entire house of Israel raised from exile and despair (37:11). But it remained just a vision. By the time Jesus arrives at a sealed tomb outside Bethany, the vision is about to turn into a voice.

The Lazarus story is found only in John; it’s missing from all three Synoptic Gospels. When Jesus gets to the tomb, he tells the people to remove the stone. Martha protests:

“Lord, by this time there will be an odor, for he has been dead four days” (John 11:39).

Four days were significant in the Jewish understanding of death. Hope had not just dimmed; it had vanished. Jesus responds by highlighting the glory of God (11:40) and prays aloud, not for himself but for the crowd watching (11:42). They need to grasp that what follows comes from the Father.

Then he calls out with a loud voice (φωνῇ μεγάλῃ):

“Lazarus, come out.” (11:43)

And Lazarus comes. But he emerges still bound, his hands, feet, and face wrapped in grave linens (11:44). (Notably, this is not the case when Jesus is raised.) Lazarus is alive but not yet free. The miracle requires one more command. Jesus speaks it:

“Unbind him, and let him go.” (11:44)

Death had bound him, and Jesus releases him. The one who declared himself the resurrection and the life (11:25) doesn’t merely restore a pulse; he undoes the grip of death entirely and sends Lazarus back into the world free from his death clothes.

John doesn’t allow the reader to linger. The sign immediately triggers the Sanhedrin’s decision to put Jesus to death (11:53). The one who opens tombs will soon enter one. But he enters it as the one who commands graves, not as one ruled by them. What Ezekiel saw as a vision of scattered bones slowly gathering, Jesus performs as a living voice at a sealed stone. And the command he speaks over Lazarus, he intends to speak over all who are his.

On the last great Easter Day, the Lord will say to death about all of us, “Unbind them, and let them go.”

Even Now (11:17–27)

In the Book of Common Prayer 2019, the burial liturgy offers several options for the Gospel reading. They are all good, but my top choice is by far John 11:21-27. I am always struck by how Martha speaks to Jesus.

Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that whatever you ask from God, God will give you” (11:21–22).

I love her belief that Jesus’s presence would bring healing, but even more, I cherish those two words: “even now.” Even now, despite this loss, despite this tragedy, despite death, she knows the story isn’t over. She understands death doesn’t get to have the final say in her brother’s life because Jesus has finally arrived. His presence changes everything. 

Jesus then says that Lazarus will rise again, which Martha takes as a reference to the typical first-century Jewish belief in a general resurrection, showing how widespread this belief was. Jesus clearly has something else in mind.

It’s important to note that the Jewish belief in resurrection was primarily a collective belief rather than an individual one. It was something God would do for everyone (or at least the children of Abraham) on the last great day. The concept of an individual resurrection outside of that collective event doesn’t seem to have come into anyone’s mind.

Jesus responds to Martha:

“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (11:25–26).

This is a notable statement for several reasons. First, it references the divine name as Jesus begins with the words ἐγώ εἰμι, “I am.” Second, Jesus claims to be the resurrection and the life, and as I have said elsewhere, the order is unexpected. As ἐγώ εἰμι, he was part of the creative process. All things were made “through him,” so he is the life of the world, and he embodies this life so completely, thoroughly, and strongly that when faced with death, he is also “the resurrection.” Resurrection is the ultimate affirmation of life—and also of the goodness of creation.

Third, there is the remarkable claim that anyone who believes in him shall never die, even as Lazarus lies dead in the tomb. Earlier, Jesus said that Lazarus had “fallen asleep” (11:11), a phrase Paul also uses to describe death. I interpret Jesus to mean that those who believe in him will never truly experience death, meaning they will have no conscious awareness of it.

Fourth, and maybe most importantly, there’s the question: “Do you believe this?” Knowing what Jesus said and did matters, but the key question is still “Do you believe this?”

A Link to John 10 (ESV)

The Shepherd’s Voice (10:1–10)

Jesus opens with an image drawn from the ordinary mechanics of Judean shepherding, then turns it immediately into an accusation.

Truly, truly, I say to you, he who does not enter the sheepfold by the door but climbs in by another way, that man is a thief and a robber (10:1).

A sheepfold was typically an enclosed courtyard with a single opening, sometimes watched overnight by a hired gatekeeper. A shepherd uses the door because he has nothing to hide from the paid gatekeeper. Someone who scales the wall almost certainly has something to hide.

But Jesus is the Good Shepherd, and so he says of the shepherd:

To him the gatekeeper opens. The sheep hear his voice, and he calls his own sheep by name and leads them out (10:3).

“Leads them out” translates the Greek verb, ἐξάγω (exagō). The Pentateuch uses this exact verb, repeatedly, for the exodus itself: “the LORD your God, who brought you out [ἐξαγαγών] of the land of Egypt” is the Torah’s own shorthand for who God is to Israel (Deut 5:6; cf. Exod 20:2; Deut 6:12). The Good Shepherd is one again leading his sheep out of their slavery.

When he has brought out all his own, he goes before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice. A stranger they will not follow, but they will flee from him, for they do not know the voice of strangers (10:4–5).

The Shepherd goes before the sheep, and the sheep follow. They don’t follow because he makes the most convincing argument. They follow because they hear his voice when he calls to them. This says something profound about what it means to follow Jesus, and also what it should mean to call out to other sheep.

Too often modern shepherds, i.e., pastors, want the sheep to hear their voice and follow them. But what if ecclesial shepherds aren’t meant to amplify their own voice, but the voice of the Good Shepherd? The sheep aren’t supposed to be following us or our voice. They’re supposed to hear his voice and follow him, so pastoring and evangelism are at their very best when we echo and repeat the voice of the Good Shepherd rather than amplifying our own voice and brand.

Jesus then shifts the metaphor.

So Jesus again said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, I am the door of the sheep. All who came before me are thieves and robbers, but the sheep did not listen to them” (10:7–8).

He moves from describing the shepherd to naming himself the entrance, the one fixed point any legitimate claim on the flock must pass through.

I am the door. If anyone enters by me, he will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture (10:9).

Going in and out to find pasture is a life that moves, grazing and returning, not a life spent huddled behind a wall for safekeeping.

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly (10:10).

The metaphors are mixed, but the point is clear. Jesus is the Good Shepherd of the sheep, and he is leading his people out again in a new Exodus so they may have life, and have it abundantly. But he is the only way into this new community of sheep. He is the door that the sheep who hear his voice must pass through. He is calling them. They must follow, for the path he leads them on is the only path to eternal life.

“I Said, You Are Gods” (10:31–39)

Psalm 82 is a courtroom scene. God stands in the divine assembly and pronounces judgment on Israel’s own judges, the men entrusted to act in his name and defend the weak. They have failed. They have shown partiality to the wicked while the fatherless and the afflicted go undefended, and the psalm says the result is cosmic: “all the foundations of the earth are shaken” (Ps 82:5). It is in the middle of this indictment that God addresses the judges directly.

I said, you are gods, sons of the Most High, all of you. Nevertheless, you shall die like men, and fall like any prince (Ps 82:6–7).

These men bear the title “gods” because the word of God came to them for the office of judgment, not because they possess a divine nature. The psalm ends by asking God himself to do what the human judges would not:

“Arise, O God, judge the earth” (Ps 82:8).

Psalm 82 is the text Jesus quotes after the Jews pick up stones against him for saying, “I and the Father are one” (10:30–31). They charge him with blasphemy: “You, being a man, make yourself God” (10:33). Jesus answers from their own law.

Is it not written in your Law, “I said, you are gods”? If he called them gods to whom the word of God came, and Scripture cannot be broken, do you say of him whom the Father consecrated and sent into the world, “You are blaspheming,” because I said, “I am the Son of God”? (10:34–36).

The argument moves from lesser to greater. Jesus is not lowering his divine claim to the level of Israel’s judges. They only received the word of God for a temporary office. He has not merely received the word. The Father consecrated him and sent him into the world. If an inherited office was enough to earn Israel’s judges a divine title without blasphemy, the one the Father set apart before he ever came into the world has far greater warrant to be called Son of God.

The judges of Psalm 82 were indicted for failing to defend the weak. The men holding stones in the temple make the same failure, refusing the very scripture they claim to uphold, rather than submit to the judgment standing in front of them. Jesus does not answer their second attempt to seize him (10:39) by retreating from the claim. He will go to the cross still consecrated, still sent, still doing his Father’s works, and there he will do what Psalm 82’s judges never could: give account for the weak, in his own body.

The Shepherd-King (10:22–30)

For centuries, Israel had been waiting for a shepherd. The prophet Ezekiel announced that God’s appointed shepherds had failed, scattering the flock across the nations (Ezek 34:1–6). In their place, God made a promise:

I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd (Ezek 34:23).

The coming shepherd would be a king from the line of David, someone who would gather the scattered sheep and lead them on behalf of God himself.

The scene in John 10:22–30 is unique to the Fourth Gospel. It is winter, and Jesus is walking in Solomon’s Portico. John takes care to tell us that it was “the Feast of Dedication” (10:22). Protestant and Jewish readers will search their Old Testaments in vain for this feast. The Feast of Dedication, known today as Hanukkah, commemorated the Maccabean rededication of the Jerusalem Temple in 164 BC, after Antiochus IV Epiphanes had desecrated it. Judas Maccabeus, “the Hammer,” led a military revolt, recaptured the temple mount, and restored Israel’s worship (1 Macc 4:36–59). He was, by any measure, the kind of shepherd-king Israel celebrated: a warrior who fought for his sheep.

It is in this theologically charged atmosphere that the crowd presses Jesus:

How long will you keep us in suspense? If you are the Christ, tell us plainly (John 10:24).

They have heard him speak of the Good Shepherd. They understand what he is hinting at. If he is the shepherd, he is claiming to be the Christ, and they want him to say so clearly. What better time could there be than the Feast of Dedication for another Judas Maccabeus to reveal himself?

Jesus’s reply cuts to the heart of the misunderstanding:

I told you, and you do not believe. The works that I do in my Father’s name bear witness about me, but you do not believe because you are not among my sheep (John 10:25–26).

He is the Messiah, and he has shown them plainly. But his works tell a very different story from the one celebrated by the Feast of Dedication. In John’s Gospel, Jesus has already done what Judas did. He has already made his way to the temple and cleansed it. But where Judas went to drive out the pagans, Jesus drove out his fellow Judeans. Jesus will go again to Jerusalem, but this time he goes to lay down his life. Where the Maccabean shepherd took up the sword to bring political freedom, the Good Shepherd will stretch out his hands on a Roman cross to bring ultimate redemption. The feast celebrating military liberation has become the backdrop for a redefinition of what true liberation really looks like.

Ezekiel’s promised shepherd had come, but he was not the kind of shepherd Israel had expected. He was far better.

Other Sheep (10:11–18)

Since we are in the season of Epiphany, I want to consider what Jesus says in verse 16.

And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd (John 10:16).

Jesus, among other roles, was a prophet to Israel. He is calling to them, and those who respond positively are his sheep, who hear the voice of the Good Shepherd and follow him. But the prophets had always hinted — actually, more than hinted — that God’s plan was not limited to the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Part of God’s original promise to Abraham included the words, “and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:3).

What God was doing in and through Jesus was not just for Israel but for the whole world, so he has “other sheep that are not of this fold.” These sheep are those who respond positively to Jesus from every tongue, tribe, race, and people around the globe. I won’t delve into theories about the doctrine of election, but there’s something significant about the words “I have other sheep” and “I must bring them also.” Either way, the goal, as we see elsewhere in the New Testament, is to create one new humanity from these many sheep, so that there will be one flock and one shepherd. I can’t help but think of the powerful scene from Revelation 5.

After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands, and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!” And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen” (Rev 5:9–12).

We see here not just one nation, but representatives from all of humanity, united as one flock praising the one shepherd (who is the Lamb!) and our creator God, and to that I say, “Amen!”

A Link to John 9 (ESV)

Your Guilt Remains (9:35–41)

Jesus hears that the man he healed has been thrown out of the synagogue, so he goes to look for him. The man has just lost his place in the community for telling the truth about what happened to him, and Jesus asks him directly, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” The man does not know who that is until Jesus tells him, and then he worships him on the spot (9:35–38).

Jesus then explains why he came: “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind” (9:39). On its own, the statement sounds paradoxical unless we remember what just happened in the chapter. A man born blind now sees. The Pharisees who interrogated him, men who could see perfectly well and who prided themselves on knowing the law of Moses, have just told him, “You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” (9:34). The reversal Jesus names is not theoretical.

Some of the Pharisees overhear him and ask, “Are we also blind?” Jesus answers, “If you were blind, you would have no guilt; but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your guilt remains” (9:40–41). The line does something Jesus rarely does this plainly. He names the exact mechanism of judgment. The guilt lies in the claim to sight, not in blindness itself.

Three chapters later, when the crowds refuse to believe despite the many signs Jesus performed in front of them, John explains the unbelief by quoting Isaiah: “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their heart” (12:40), the same prophet who was told at his commission to go and preach to a people who would keep seeing but never perceive (Isa 6:9–10). John signals this in chapter 9 and names it outright in chapter 12: Isaiah’s commission describes exactly what is happening to the people standing before Jesus.

Jesus’s warning falls hardest on people whose vocation is to see clearly. We study, we learn the Scriptures, we form settled convictions about God and what he requires, and all of that is good. None of it protects us from the sin the Pharisees commit in this scene. The danger does not come from lacking knowledge. It comes from the certainty that we already have what we need and no longer need to be shown anything. The man born blind was in no position to defend what he thought he knew. That turned out to be exactly the position from which he could see Jesus for who he is.

The Closed System (9:8–34)

The man who left the pool of Siloam, now able to see, walks straight into a hearing he never asked for. His neighbors, the people who watched him beg for years, can't reconcile what they knew with what they see.

“Is not this the man who used to sit and beg?” (John 9:8).

He plainly explains what happened. They take him to the Pharisees, and the serious questioning starts.

The first round hinges on a technicality. Jesus made mud and healed on the Sabbath, and for some of the Pharisees, that single fact settles the case before the evidence is heard.

“This man is not from God, for he does not keep the Sabbath” (9:16).

Others emphasize the more obvious point that sinners do not perform this kind of sign, and the group splits. Unable to settle the matter among themselves, they summon the man’s parents, who only confirm the basic facts of his birth and blindness. They refuse to say more.

“His parents answered, ... but how he now sees we do not know, ... for they feared the Jews” (9:20–22).

The healed man is called back a second time. What he says to them is not evasive. It becomes bolder with each exchange.

“Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (9:25).

When they press him again, he turns the interrogation back on his questioners, then he reasons past them entirely: no one has ever opened the eyes of a man born blind, so a man who can do this cannot be what they claim he is. Their answer to that argument is not an argument at all. It is a verdict.

“You were born in utter sin, and would you teach us?” And they cast him out (9:34).

What is remarkable throughout this scene is how each side responds. The man’s testimony does not weaken under pressure; it becomes sharper. Every round of questioning provides him with another point to stand on, until he's debating theology with men who have spent their entire lives arguing about it. The Pharisees, on the other hand, go in the opposite direction. Every new piece of evidence—whether it's the healing itself, the man’s reasoning, or his parents’ fear—only confirms what they had already decided before the hearing even began. Their conclusion was set at verse sixteen, and everything afterward was just a search for a way to support that conclusion.

We understand this pattern because we've experienced both sides. We've held beliefs that couldn't be changed by any evidence, and called that faithfulness. We've also had someone else’s fixed mindset judge who we were before we ever spoke. The Pharisees weren’t wrong to care about the Sabbath. They were wrong to let one fixed idea guide all their perceptions, so that a man they should have celebrated became a man they felt they had to reject.

No Longer (9:1–7)

For centuries, Israel had lived with a painful proverb:

The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge (Jer 31:29; Ezek 18:2).

The idea ran deep. God himself had warned in the Torah:

I the Lord your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me (Exod 20:5).

Suffering, in this framework, was traceable to sin, whether your own or your ancestors’.

Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah pushed back. Ezekiel declared that the soul who sins shall die, each person accountable before God alone (Ezek 18:4). Jeremiah, writing in what is the new covenant chapter of the Old Testament, announced that the day was coming when the proverb would be retired:

In those days they shall no longer say: “The fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.” But everyone shall die for his own iniquity (Jer 31:29–30).

The very next verses announce the new covenant (Jer 31:31–34). The question of who pays the penalty for sin and the promise of a new covenant stand side by side in Jeremiah’s vision.

That is the world the disciples inhabit when they encounter the man born blind. Their question is not foolish. It is the only question their theology allows:

“Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2).

They want to know why.

Jesus refuses the premise entirely:

“It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be displayed in him” (John 9:3).

He is not merely redirecting the conversation. He is enacting what Jeremiah promised. The age in which suffering is always read as divine retribution is giving way to something new. Jesus doesn’t look back to assign blame. He looks forward to what God is about to do.

He makes mud, anoints the man’s eyes, and sends him to wash in the pool of Siloam (John 9:6–7). The man goes, washes, and comes back seeing.

When the Pharisees press the healed man to renounce Jesus, he won’t be moved:

“Whether he is a sinner I do not know. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (John 9:25).

He makes no theological argument. He doesn’t appeal to Scripture to explain who Jesus is. He just gives the testimony of a changed life, and it is more convincing than anything the Pharisees can muster. Changed lives change hearts.

Jesus never answered the disciples’ question. He replaced it with a better one. Not “why is this man suffering?” but “what will God do here?” And then he showed them.

As Christ’s disciples, we need to start seeing the world the way Jesus did rather than through our theological systems. Everywhere there is pain, there is potential for the works of God to be displayed. When God’s people work to bring God’s healing, justice, and mercy into the world, that witness to Jesus is more persuasive than any theological or rational argument we could ever construct.

For Judgment (9:35–41)

John 9 focuses on the healing of a man born blind and the consequences of that miracle. In the Gospels, while these are literal miracles, the acts of restoring sight to the blind are almost always also metaphors and signs. Verse 39 highlights this when Jesus says, “For judgment I came into this world, that those who do not see may see, and those who see may become blind.”

Jesus clearly isn’t speaking about literal blindness here. Instead, he uses the language of blindness and sight metaphorically to describe the great reversal that his ministry will bring to the world. Those who believe they see the truth will become blind, while those considered blind by the world to God’s truth will see.

When questioned by the Pharisees (who claimed to see), the man born blind said, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see” (9:25). He didn’t understand everything about who Jesus was and is. Neither do I, and neither do you. But what he did know was how Jesus had changed his life, and that was enough for him. Focus today on how Jesus changed your life, and then, like the man born blind, worship him.

A Link to John 8

A Murderer from the Beginning (8:31–47)

Jesus says to the crowd, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (8:31–32). Their reply comes quickly: “We are offspring of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone” (8:33). Set against Israel’s experience in Egypt and Babylon, the claim is startling. This requires a bit of mirror reading, but I suspect they considered themselves privileged to have been born in the land of Judah at a time when the nation wasn’t independent, but the people weren’t slaves either. They were the descendants of those who had returned from exile, and unlike their ancestors, they had never been enslaved.

Jesus disputes their claim by redefining slavery. “Everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (8:34), and a slave has no permanent place in the house; only a son does (8:35). Freedom, when it comes, comes from the son: “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (8:36).

The argument moves from slavery to sonship. “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works Abraham did” (8:39), Jesus says, but his hearers are doing something else: “you seek to kill me” (8:37, repeated at 8:40). Jesus names the conclusion already enacted: “you are doing the works your father did” (8:41). They answer with Scripture’s own language, going past Abraham to divine ancestry: “We have one Father, even God” (8:41). It is probably worth remembering here that Israel is first called God’s son at the exodus.

Jesus disputes this claim too. He says, “If God were your Father, you would love me” (8:42), since he comes from God. Instead, “my word finds no place in you” (8:37) and “you are not able to bear to hear my word” (8:43). They claim to be God’s children, the children of the exodus, or more probably, the second exodus, who had come back to the land just as God promised. But Jesus says, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth, because there is no truth in him” (8:44).

John supplies his own commentary on that verse later, in a letter to his own churches. “Whoever makes a practice of sinning is of the devil, for the devil has been sinning from the beginning” (1 John 3:8), he writes, using the identical phrase, ἀπ’ ἀρχῆς, “from the beginning.” He then goes all the way back to the first murder: “We should not be like Cain, who was of the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s righteous” (1 John 3:12). Cain murdered Abel not because Abel accused him of anything, but because his brother’s righteousness was itself the rebuke he could not bear. The men seeking to kill Jesus are not inventing a new sin. They are repeating the story of Cain and Abel.

The Light of the World (8:12–20)

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life” (John 8:12).

Jesus says this during the Feast of Tabernacles, the same festival that has filled the previous chapter with debate about his identity. Each night of the feast, four golden lampstands stood in the temple’s Court of the Women, and their light was said to reach every courtyard in Jerusalem. The Mishnah remembers pious men dancing before them with torches while the Levites sang. The feast itself commemorated Israel’s wilderness years, when a pillar of fire went before the people by night (Exod 13:21). Jesus speaks these words in that same court and claims for himself what the pillar once was for Israel: light that does not merely show a path but leads a people through the dark toward life.

Jesus’ claim also picks up a promise Isaiah made to a nation that had lost its way. Yahweh’s servant would be “a light for the nations,” opening blind eyes and bringing prisoners out of darkness (Isa 42:6–7; 49:6). What the festival lamps could only represent for a single week, Jesus claims to be without interruption. Whoever follows him receives not a memory of guidance but its substance.

The Pharisees do not dispute the imagery. They dispute the witness. “You are bearing witness about yourself; your testimony is not true” (John 8:13). Behind their objection stands the law’s own requirement that testimony be established by two witnesses, not one (Deut 19:15). Jesus does not deny the principle. He supplies the second witness. His testimony and the Father’s testimony agree, because the Father sent him and knows exactly what is being testified to (8:16–18).

Their reply exposes the actual problem. “Where is your Father?” (8:19). They are standing in front of the light and asking where it comes from. Jesus tells them plainly that knowing him and knowing the Father are not two separate achievements. To see one is to see the other. Their question is not a failure of information. It is a failure of sight.

John notes, almost as an aside, that no one arrested Jesus because his hour had not yet come (8:20). The light that exposes the darkness will eventually be extinguished, and when it is, the world will discover that the darkness could not hold it.

Before Abraham Was (8:48–59)

When Moses asks the name of the God who speaks from the burning bush, the answer comes back in the first person: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exod 3:14). The Greek translation renders this ἐγώ εἰμί ὁ ὤν, the self-existent one whose being depends on nothing outside himself. Centuries later, Isaiah records Yahweh returning to that same name in a courtroom scene in which the nations are summoned to produce witnesses for their gods. Yahweh’s own testimony is decisive:

“You are my witnesses,” declares the Lord, “and my servant whom I have chosen, that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he. Before me no god was formed, nor shall there be any after me" (Isa 43:10).

The Hebrew אֲנִי הוּא, rendered in the Septuagint as ἐγώ εἰμι, marks Yahweh’s absolute uniqueness across Deutero-Isaiah (41:4; 43:25; 46:4; 48:12). From Sinai to the exile, the name belongs to Yahweh alone. No creature shares it.

Then Jesus claims that name.

The exchange leading to v. 58 has the character of a hostile interrogation. Jesus’s opponents open with a double insult:

“Are we not right in saying that you are a Samaritan and have a demon?” (8:48).

Jesus does not defend his honor. He defers it entirely to the Father (8:50) and advances a claim his opponents find more dangerous than any slur: that keeping his word delivers a person from death (8:51). When they protest that Abraham himself died, Jesus does not yield. He names Abraham as a witness: “Your father Abraham rejoiced that he would see my day. He saw it and was glad” (8:56). John does not specify where Abraham saw it. However, Second Temple traditions associated the patriarch with prophetic sight of future redemption. What matters is that Abraham saw and rejoiced, while Jesus’s opponents see and rage.

The crowd hears a man not yet fifty claiming acquaintance with a patriarch dead for centuries, and they press him: “You have seen Abraham?” (8:57). The answer is the climax of the chapter and of the entire interrogation:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, before Abraham was, ἐγώ εἰμι” (8:58).

The words ἐγώ εἰμι are not a grammatical accident. They are the name from the burning bush and the name from the Isaianic courtroom, spoken now by Jesus without qualification or apology. He does not claim merely to predate Abraham. He claims the mode of existence that belongs to Yahweh alone, the uncreated, self-existent being before whom no other god stands.

The crowd understands perfectly. They pick up stones (8:59). In moving to execute him for blasphemy, they become the most honest witnesses in the chapter. The name that Yahweh spoke from Sinai and that Isaiah said belonged to no creature has been claimed by the carpenter from Nazareth.

January 9, 2026

You might notice (or have noticed yesterday) the double brackets around John 7:53–8:11, along with a note indicating that the earliest manuscripts do not include this well-known passage. This is true, and it has led some to argue that the story of the woman caught in adultery should be removed from our Bibles and not preached on because it was likely not part of the original composition of John.

But consider this: many of the early church fathers were aware of this story and cited it authoritatively, and someone in the early church was so convinced that it was an authentic account from the life of Jesus that they felt compelled to include it in John’s Gospel (as well as Luke’s, actually; some even argue it fits more appropriately in Luke).

The question here concerns authority. Are the sayings and actions of Jesus authoritative because they are in the Bible (meaning the original writings of the books), or because Jesus said and did them?

The story of the woman caught in adultery is likely not original to John but is nevertheless still an authentic Jesus tradition. Should we cut this remarkable story of forgiveness from our Bibles, or give thanks for the mercy that Jesus showed the woman and model that same mercy in the world?

A Link to John 7 (ESV)

Making Whole on the Sabbath (7:14–24)

Halfway through the Feast of Booths, Jesus goes up to the temple and begins to teach. The crowd is caught off guard. “How is it that this man has learning, when he has never studied?” (John 7:15). Jesus answers by relocating the source of his teaching: “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me” (7:16). Whether anyone can tell the difference, he says, depends on obedience rather than education. “If anyone’s will is to do God’s will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority” (7:17). The test is not academic credentials. It is a willingness to do what God asks.

Jesus then presses the crowd on a specific case. “Did not Moses give you the law? Yet none of you keeps the law. Why do you seek to kill me?” (7:19). The crowd answers with an accusation of its own: “You have a demon! Who is seeking to kill you?” (7:20). But Jesus is referring to the healing of the paralytic at Bethesda two chapters earlier (5:1–9), which had provoked exactly this murderous response (5:16, 18).

Jesus doesn’t answer them directly but turns instead to a problem within the Mosaic Law. “Moses gave you circumcision (not that it is from Moses, but from the fathers), and you circumcise a man on the Sabbath” (7:22). Leviticus requires that a male child be circumcised on the eighth day without exception (Lev 12:3), and when the eighth day fell on a Sabbath, the ritual law of circumcision was understood to override the Sabbath rather than wait. If the law permits altering one part of a man’s body on the Sabbath to keep a single commandment, Jesus argues, how much more should the Sabbath permit making a man’s whole body well.

“If on the Sabbath a man receives circumcision, so that the law of Moses may not be broken, are you angry with me because on the Sabbath I made a man’s whole body well?” (7:23).

The argument is a recognized form of rabbinic reasoning, moving from the lesser case to the greater, later associated with Hillel’s exegetical rules. Jesus is not evading the law. He is reasoning from inside it, more carefully than his accusers.

The exchange ends with a command that reframes the whole dispute. “Do not judge by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (7:24). The language echoes the standard the law itself gives Israel’s judges, who are told to judge righteously and without partiality (Deut 1:16; Lev 19:15). The crowd has applied the Sabbath law correctly on the surface and missed what the law was for. A rule that makes room for a cut on the skin has no coherent reason to forbid a cure for the whole body.

It’s very easy for us to fall into this same kind of rule-keeping. (Or should it be rule-reading?) Jesus didn’t fulfill the Law and the Prophets a new set of rules for us to keep instead. And even within the Law, there’s an inner-dialogue happening that requires wisdom to sort through. This is why I’m always leery of anyone who wants to quote a single verse of the Bible at me for just about any reason. I’m just as leery when someone quotes a single verse and says that they’re position or interpretation is Biblical, implying that anyone who disagrees with them is really disagreeing with the Bible. Christian ethics and theology simply don’t work like. Don’t start (and end) your ethical debates with a verse from anywhere in the Bible usually quoted without context. Start those coversation by looking at and following Jesus, and then work out from there. He is the center of the concentric circles that make up Christian ethics and theology.

From the Father (7:40–44)

Jesus’s words at the feast split the crowd into three basic groups. Some said, “This really is the Prophet” (John 7:40), reaching for the promise that God would raise up “a prophet like [Moses]” (Deut 18:15, 18). Others said simply, “This is the Messiah” (7:41). But a third group objected to the claims of the second:

“Has not the Scripture said that the Christ comes from the offspring of David, and comes from Bethlehem, the village where David was?” (John 7:41–42).

The objection is not without merit. Micah had named the town where the coming Davidic king would be born centuries earlier:

“But you, O Bethlehem Ephrathah... from you shall come forth for me one who is to be ruler in Israel” (Mic 5:2).

Samuel had anointed David there as a shepherd boy (1 Sam 16:1, 4, 13), and the Lord had promised David an heir whose kingdom would never end (2 Sam 7:12–13). By the first century, the Davidic-Bethlehem link was common among those waiting for a coming king. The crowd cites Scripture correctly, but their conclusion goes wrong at a single, ordinary point: they do not know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (cf. Matt 2:1; Luke 2:4–7).

John could have ended the debate in a sentence. He does not. He lets the objection stand and moves straight to the temple guards returning empty-handed (John 7:45). His silence is interesting.

Fifteen verses earlier, the same crowd argued that the Messiah’s origin must stay hidden, then ruled Jesus out because they assumed they already knew where he came from. Jesus answered that his real origin was not Galilee but the Father who sent him (7:27–29). Now the crowd argues that the Messiah’s origin must be Bethlehem, and gets tangled in geography again. John will not correct their facts, because facts were never the real question. Whether the crowd traces Jesus origin to Nazareth or to Bethlehem, they are still asking the wrong question. The answer Jesus has already given stands: he comes from the Father, and to the Father he goes (7:29; 13:3).

We do something similar when we treat faith as a matter of getting the right facts straight. We call this wisdom, discernment, and even spiritual maturity, and sometimes it is. But it can also be a more sophisticated version of the crowd’s mistake, reciting Scripture correctly while missing the one it was written to identify. Bethlehem matters, and Micah was not wrong. But knowing where Jesus was born does not answer the question the crowd actually needed answered. Only knowing the Son who has come from the Father can do that.

The Origin They Missed (7:25–31)

Israel’s hope for a Messiah took on a particular form. By the Second Temple period, many Jews believed that when the Messiah finally arrived, his origins would be concealed, and his true identity would remain hidden until the moment he suddenly appeared and was revealed. It was this hiddenness that would define him—no one would see him coming.

This expectation appears in several texts from that period: the figure rising from the sea in 4 Ezra is hidden and unknown until his revelation (4 Ezra 13:51–52), the Son of Man in 1 Enoch is described as chosen and concealed from God before creation (1 En. 48:6), and Justin Martyr’s second-century dialogue with Trypho preserves the tradition that the Messiah remains unknown even to himself until Elijah comes to reveal him (Justin Martyr, Dial. 8.4).

The Jerusalem crowd in John 7 is aware of this tradition, and they use it to settle the question of Jesus once and for all.

“But we know where this man comes from, and when the Christ appears, no one will know where he comes from” (John 7:27).

The logic appears sound. They believe Jesus is from Galilee, yet the Messiah’s origins are meant to be unknown. So, Jesus cannot be the Messiah. Case closed.

John, however, is doing something precise here. The crowd is correct that the Messiah’s origins would be concealed from them. They are simply mistaken about which origins are important. Jesus responds with sharp irony:

“You know me, and you know where I am from. But I have not come of my own accord. He who sent me is true, and him you do not know. I know him, for I come from him, and he sent me” (John 7:28–29).

The geographic location, Galilee, isn’t the main point. The important origin is the Father, who is completely hidden from them. They dismiss Jesus based on a tradition that, applied correctly, would have identified him. The crowd reaches for the right criterion and misses the right answer.

This pattern runs throughout John’s Gospel. Characters often speak more truth than they realize. Caiaphas later states it is more convenient for one man to die for the people, meaning something much smaller than what John records (John 11:49–52). Pilate asks, “What is truth?” while standing in front of it (John 18:38). The Jerusalem crowd references the hidden Messiah and describes him perfectly without actually recognizing him.

Jesus’s true origin is not a village in Galilee. It is the Father who sent him. And because they do not know the Father, they cannot recognize the Son. The hiddenness they expected was always theological, not geographical. The Messiah came from exactly where no one was looking.

The Water that Waits (7:37–39)

Israel had not forgotten the rock. In the wilderness, when the people were dying of thirst, God told Moses to strike it, and water poured out to sustain the whole congregation (Exod 17:6). The memory of that moment shaped the Feast of Booths, which commemorated God’s provision during the wilderness years. Each morning of the feast, priests drew water and carried it in procession to the temple, enacting Israel’s hope that God would provide once again.

But the prophets had promised something greater than water from a rock. Zechariah had envisioned a day when living waters would flow from Jerusalem itself (Zech 14:8). Isaiah had made an explicit connection between water poured on the land and the Spirit poured on God’s people: “I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground; I will pour my Spirit upon your offspring” (Isa 44:3). The wilderness provision pointed forward to a final, eschatological outpouring.

On the final and most important day of the Feast of Booths, Jesus stands and proclaims boldly, using language unique to John’s Gospel:

“If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart will flow rivers of living water’” (John 7:37–38).

Jesus appears to quote the Old Testament, although his exact words aren’t found in any single passage. He is summarizing a broad stream of prophetic hope, from the water at the rock to Zechariah’s vision of living water flowing from the eschatological Jerusalem. He has already described himself as the bread of life (John 6); now he portrays himself as the source of living water. He is both the typological fulfillment of what God did in the wilderness and the direct fulfillment of what the prophets envisioned.

John then provides the interpretive key: “Now this he said about the Spirit, whom those who believed in him were to receive, for as yet the Spirit had not been given, because Jesus was not yet glorified” (John 7:39). Glorification here means resurrection and ascension. The living water cannot flow until Jesus has passed through death, been raised, and seated at the Father’s right hand. When that moment arrives, the Spirit falls on Jerusalem, the followers of Jesus are filled, and the eschatological outpouring the prophets foretold finally occurs (Acts 2).

Jesus embodies Israel’s entire story and brings it to its climax. The water from the rock always pointed here. Give thanks today for the Holy Spirit. His presence in you is living water, cleansing, refreshing, and renewing.

A Link to John 6

That Nothing May Be Lost (6:1–15)

John tells the feeding of the five thousand with several details that are uinque to his Gospel. One of the more interesting unique details comes comes after everyone has eaten. The other Gospels report twelve baskets of leftovers, but only John records the reason. Jesus tells his disciples, “Gather up the leftover fragments (κλάσματα), that nothing may be lost (ἀπόληται)” (6:12).

On a first reading, the command sounds like good stewardship. Bread was precious, and no one in Galilee threw it away. But the verb Jesus uses, ἀπόλλυμι (apollymi, “to lose” or “to perish”), becomes one of the key words of the chapter, though English translations render it in several ways. A few verses later, Jesus warns the same crowd, “Do not work for the food that perishes” (6:27), and “perishes” translates the same verb. Then he describes his own mission by saying that it was the will of the one who sent him “that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me” (6:39).

John carries the thread to the night of the arrest. Jesus prays that “not one of them has been lost except the son of destruction” (17:12), and in the garden he secures the disciples’ release so that his word might be fulfilled: “Of those whom you gave me I have lost not one” (18:9). The language of gathering runs the same course. Caiaphas unknowingly prophesies that Jesus will die “to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad” (11:52).

The earliest Christians heard the connection. The Didache, the earliest non-canonincal Christian writing, which dates to the late first or early second century, gives this prayer over the broken bread of the eucharist: “As this broken bread was scattered over the mountains, and being gathered together became one, so let your church be gathered together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom” (Did. 9:4). The word for “broken bread” in the prayer is κλάσμα (klasma), the same word John uses for the “fragments” in 6:12–13. The church saw itself in the bread the disciples gathered.

The crowd sees something else. They see the multiplication and conclude that Jesus is “the Prophet who is to come into the world” (6:14), and they intend to take him by force and make him king (6:15). Jesus later names their motive: they came looking for him because they “ate [their] fill of the loaves” (6:26). They want a king who keeps the bread coming. Jesus is offering something else.

It’s very easy to look to Jesus and see only what we want to see. The people saw someone who could multiply food and wanted to make him king. It’s not easy to feed an army. But Jesus wasn’t interested in providing the meals for an insurrection. He was gathering the whole world to himself and offering them a spiritual meal of his body and blood. He does this not just for the children of Abraham, but so that nothing and no one may be lost.

The Spirit Who Gives Life (6:60–71)

Many of Jesus’ disciples call his teaching about eating his flesh and drinking his blood “a hard saying” (6:60), and by the end of the chapter, many stop walking with him altogether (6:66). Between those two verses sits Jesus’ explanation for why the teaching is hard for so many people:

“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all” (6:63).

That line might sound harsher than Jesus intended if we hear it as a rejection of physicality in favor of spirituality. But that’s not what Jesus is getting at. He is locating the actual source of life. Think of creation. Adam doesn’t become a living being until God breathes into him the breath of life (Gen 2:7). Likewise, Ezekiel saw a valley of dry bones and watched the Lord promise to lay flesh on them, but the bones did not live until God’s breath entered them:

“I will put my Spirit within you, and you shall live” (Ezek 37:14).

Flesh in and of itself is not the problem; flesh without spirit is. Eating his flesh and drinking his blood is never a merely physical transaction, whatever the crowd assumed back in verse 26 when they came looking for another meal. Apart from the spirit, even Jesus’ own flesh gives nothing. With the spirit, it gives everything, because the spirit alone raises the dead.

It’s worth noting that this is especially prominent in the eucharist. The epiclesis (from Greek epiklēsis, "invocation") is the portion of the eucharistic prayer in which the celebrant, typically with hands extended or placed over the elements, invokes the Holy Spirit to sanctify the bread and wine so that they may become, for the people, the body and blood of Christ. Physicality without the Spirit won’t give the food that we most truly need.

Some who hear Jesus’ teaching decide the cost is too high and turn back (6:66). John does not soften the moment. Jesus does not chase after them or revise his terms. He turns instead to the twelve and asks whether they intend to leave as well (6:67), and Simon Peter answers with the only logic left available to someone who has actually understood the alternative:

“Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (6:68).

Peter’s confession is the correct conclusion once the options are named honestly. If Jesus’ words are what he has just said they are, spirit and life (6:63), then walking away does not lead anywhere better. It leads back to death.

John closes the scene by noting that Jesus already knew who would not believe, and who would betray him (6:64, 71). The twelve include Judas from the start, and Jesus names that fact without alarm. The presence of unbelief inside the community that confesses rightly is not a flaw in the story. It is the story John keeps telling. Some hear the same words and receive life. Some hear the same words and walk away. The difference is never explained by better information.

The Bread That Manna Could Never Be (6:37–51)

For forty years in the wilderness, God provided Israel with manna. Every morning, it appeared on the ground, and each day, the people gathered what they needed (Exod 16:14–18). It was miraculous. It was merciful. Yet, manna was always temporary. The bread itself was never the goal; it was a sign pointing beyond itself.

Jesus makes the provisionality of manna explicit in a discourse found only in John’s Gospel (6:22–59). In 6:49–50, he says:

“Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.”

The contrast is stark. Even manna, God’s own supernatural gift, was food that perishes. Those who ate it still died. The living bread is set apart by one thing manna could never provide: life that never ends.

The crowd, however, cannot see this. They γογγύζω, they grumble (6:41), and the word is the same one that trails Israel through the wilderness in the LXX (Exod 16:2; Num 14:2; Ps 78:18–20). A people who cannot receive what God offers will always find reasons to grumble at what he provides.

But Jesus does not respond to their grumbling with another reference to manna. Instead, he references the Prophets: “And they will all be taught by God” (6:45; Isa 54:13). This citation carries new-covenant significance (Jer 31:33–34). The wilderness generation’s failure was not just a failure of nerve; it was a failure of the heart. The New Exodus calls for more than just new provision. It demands a people drawn and taught by the Father himself.

What the Father draws them toward is indicated by a refrain that echoes four times throughout the discourse: “I will raise him up on the last day” (6:39, 40, 44, 54). The new Promised Land of the New Exodus is not Canaan; it is resurrection. Manna sustained Israel on a journey to a land where they would still face death. The living bread sustains toward a destination that death cannot claim.

Manna was always a sign. The living bread is what that sign was always pointing toward, and those who eat it will not merely survive the wilderness. They will be raised.

January 7, 2026

We’re back to reading sequentially through John, so today’s reading is John 6. Remember, as you read the feeding of the five thousand and hear Jesus say, “Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day” (6:54), that the church was already celebrating communion for decades by the time John writes his Gospel. It would have been impossible for John’s Christian readers to hear Jesus’ words in any context other than an explicitly eucharistic one.

A Link to John 5 (ESV)

Four Testimonies (5:30–47)

Jesus has just healed a man on the Sabbath and told him to carry his mat, and the charge against him has escalated past Sabbath-breaking. He has called God his own Father, “making himself equal with God” (5:18). It is a capital charge, and Jesus answers the charge strangely.

“I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge, and my judgment is just, because I seek not my own will but the will of him who sent me” (5:30).

He then states the rule regarding testimony:

“If I alone bear witness about myself, my testimony is not true” (5:31).

Jewish law did not accept a single, self-interested witness. A charge required two or three witnesses (Deut 19:15). Rather than confessing that his own word is untrustworthy, Jesus refuses to rest on it alone, and he calls witness after witness until the docket is full.

First, John the Baptist, “a burning and shining lamp,” whose light they were once glad to enjoy for a while (5:35). But Jesus sets this testimony aside almost as soon as he raises it. “Not that the testimony I receive is from man” (5:34). There are greater witness still to come.

Second, the works themselves, which the Father gave him to accomplish, the very works he is doing right now in front of them (5:36). The man at the pool, still carrying his mat, is exhibit A.

Third, the Father’s own testimony (5:37–38). They have just accused Jesus of making himself equal with God. Jesus answers that they have never heard the Father’s voice nor seen his form, and that his word does not abide in them. They are zealous for God’s honor, yet they are unable to recognize God’s testimony standing in front of them, healing a paralytic.

Fourth, the Scriptures, and this is where the discourse turns.

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me” (5:39–40).

He adds a few verses later:

“Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope” (5:45).

Moses was supposed to be their defense, the credential that secured their standing before God. Jesus tells them their own witness has turned against them.

“If you believed Moses, you would believe me, for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (5:46–47).

John the Baptist, Jesus’ own works, the testimony of the Father (the voice from heaven), and the Scriptures themselves all point to who Jesus is. We would do well to listen to them and then follow Jesus, otherwise, the book we cling to so dearly may be the very thing that condemns us in the end.

Two Resurrections (5:19–29)

Daniel’s night vision gave Israel two convictions about the last days. First, one like a son of man would come with the clouds of heaven, be presented before the Ancient of Days, and receive an everlasting dominion that would not pass away (Dan 7:13–14). Second, resurrection would not be just for the righteous, but “many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt” (12:2).

In John 5, Jesus draws on these two eschatological claims. Having just healed a man on the Sabbath and been charged with making himself equal with God (5:18), Jesus leans into the accusation. The Father has granted the Son authority to give life and to execute judgment, “because he is the Son of Man” (5:27).

Then Jesus refers to Daniel’s prophecy: “the hour is coming when all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and come out, those who have done good to the resurrection of life, and those who have done evil to the resurrection of judgment” (5:28–29). The duality Daniel foresaw remains, but it is not attached to the voice of the Son of Man.

Readers accustomed to thinking of eternal life as a future reward tend to miss that Jesus has already collapsed the timeline. “Whoever hears my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life. He does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life” (5:24). The resurrection of the last day has already begun in whoever believes; the verdict is not deferred to a distant tomb but rendered now, in the hearing of his voice.

How Many Years? (5:1–9)

It’s the theology, not the devil, that’s in the details.

Israel’s story is, at many of its crucial turns, a story of waiting. From Egypt to Canaan, from exile to return, the people of God find themselves repeatedly suspended between promise and fulfillment, unable to cross into what God has prepared. John places Jesus in the midst of that long story when he brings him to the Pool of Bethesda, where a man has lain, unable to move, for 38 years (John 5:5).

The number is not incidental. Deuteronomy 2:14 states that Israel spent 38 years in a weakened state between Kadesh-barnea and the brook Zered, the period of divine judgment after the spies’ failure, when the generation that left Egypt died and Israel could not advance. The total wilderness sojourn rounded to forty, a number so familiar it has become shorthand for the whole. However, thirty-eight years was the precise period of stagnation. John’s detail is intentional: the man at Bethesda isn’t just a sick person; he symbolizes Israel, waiting at the waters, unable to cross into God’s rest in the Promised Land.

The Pool of Bethesda, found only in John’s Gospel, was surrounded by five porticoes filled with the blind, the lame, and the paralyzed (John 5:2–3). Into that scene of accumulated suffering comes Jesus. He approaches one man and asks a question that can sound almost cruel: “Do you want to be healed?” (John 5:6). The question probes something deeper than physical desire. The man’s answer reveals his disorientation; he explains only why healing has been impossible, cataloging his lack of help (John 5:7). He does not answer the question. He cannot yet see the one standing before him clearly enough to ask.

Jesus does not wait for a better answer. He commands, and the man is healed immediately, picks up his mat, and walks (John 5:8–9).

John notes, almost as an aside, that the day was a Sabbath (John 5:9). The detail will ignite the controversy ahead, but it carries its own weight here. The Sabbath was Israel’s sign of covenant rest, the day that pointed toward the completed work of God (Gen 2:2–3). That Jesus heals on the Sabbath is not a violation of it but a fulfillment of what it always signified. The thirty-eight-year wait is over. What the law could not accomplish, Jesus does in a word.

The Sabbath and National Identity (5:10–17)

John 5 begins with Jesus healing a man at the pool on the Sabbath. The Jews tell the man who had been healed that it was not lawful for him to carry his bed on the Sabbath. Likewise, John states that they were persecuting Jesus “because he was doing these things on the Sabbath” (5:16).

It seems unbelievable to us that anyone could be angered by a miraculous healing simply because it happened on the Sabbath, but we need to keep two historical points in mind. First, the people went into exile because they broke God’s commandments, including the Sabbath laws. In fact, the exile punishment is directly linked to the Sabbath in Lev 26:34-35. Second, just a few hundred years earlier, practices that were clearly Jewish—such as food laws, circumcision, and Sabbath observance—had been explicitly banned by the Greeks in an effort to erase Jewish identity. As a result, these practices became a key part of Jewish national and religious identity.

So the Jewish concern with Sabbath keeping isn’t just about “Hey, you’re not supposed to be doing that on this day.” It’s deeper than that. Breaking the Sabbath law not only caused exile but also represented a break from national and religious identity. There’s much more at stake with the Sabbath than just following or breaking a commandment, which is why the Jewish people in Jesus’ day reacted so strongly.

A Link to John 4 (ESV)

The One who Speaks (4:19–26)

The woman at the well deflects from her own past and turns the conversation to the old argument between the mountains of Gerizim and Jerusalem, and on which mountain worship actually counted. Jesus does not refuse the question so much as outrun it.

“The hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father” (4:21).

Both sites have their claim: the Samaritans from the patriarchs who built an altar on Gerizim, the Jews from the temple where the sacrifices are still offered; and Jesus tells her that both claims are about to expire.

“The hour is coming, and is now here” (4:23).

John likes that collision of tenses, a future already arriving. The true worshipers Jesus describes will worship the Father “in spirit and truth” (4:23, 24) because the Father is seeking such worshipers, and what he seeks has nothing to do with favorite mountains, even the temple mount.

The woman changes the topic again.

“I know that Messiah is coming (he who is called Christ). When he comes, he will tell us all things” (4:25).

It’s another deflection, an attempt to put off resolving her earlier question until later. Jesus shuts down her delay tactic.

“I who speak to you am he” (4:26).

In Greek, Jesus says, Ἐγώ εἰμι, ὁ λαλῶν σοι; “I am, the one speaking to you.” Isaiah’s God makes the identical claim in nearly identical words: “my people shall know my name... that I am he who speaks” (Isa 52:6 LXX, ἐγώ εἰμι αὐτὸς ὁ λαλῶν). The God who announces Zion’s coming salvation names himself the one who speaks, and Jesus takes that name as his own.

We can sometimes get so hung up on the formalities of worship, like styles, music preferences, and all sorts of other decisions that go into a Sunday morning. But Jesus wants people who will worship in spirit and in truth. Worshipping in truth begins with listening to what Jesus says. He is I am, and he has spoken. We should listen. Worshipping in spirit begins with recognizing that however we choose to worship, our connection to God doesn’t come through the forms of worship but through the Holy Spirit who now dwells inside us.

Believing Without Seeing (4:43–54)

His son is dying in Capernaum, and the official has come the better part of a day’s journey to find Jesus in Cana. He does not waste words.

“Sir, come down before my child dies” (John 4:49).

Jesus has already met that urgency once, at verse 47, and answered it strangely.

“Unless you see signs and wonders you will not believe” (John 4:48).

The reply sounds harsh for a father racing to prevent his son’s death, but Jesus is not really talking about this one father. σημεῖα καὶ τέρατα (sēmeia kai terata), “signs and wonders,” is the set phrase Israel’s scriptures use for the plagues and the exodus itself (Deut 6:22; Ps 135:9). When the people who had already crossed a sea on dry ground still would not trust him, Yahweh said:

“How long will this people despise me? And how long will they not believe in me, in spite of all the signs that I have done among them?” (Num 14:11).

Signs multiplied in the wilderness, and unbelief kept pace with them. Jesus comes to a Galilee shaped by the same instinct, a crowd that will follow him for what he produces, not for who he is.

Then he gives the official something smaller and harder than a miracle to witness. No blessing over the boy, no trip to Capernaum, no touch.

“Go; your son will live.” The man believed the word that Jesus spoke to him and went on his way (John 4:50).

Nothing has happened yet that he can see. No procedure, no incantation. The word goes out and does exactly what Jesus says.

Confirmation comes a day later, on the road, when his servants meet him with the news that the fever broke at the very hour Jesus spoke. Belief, for this man, runs in the opposite order from what we would choose. He believes, then he sees, and his whole household believes with him (4:53). We prefer it the other way. We want the fever gone, the diagnosis changed, the relationship mended, before we will believe what God has said.

John counts this as the second sign Jesus did after coming from Judea into Galilee (4:54). The deeper miracle was a royal official learning to walk home on nothing but a verb spoken in the future tense because he trusted the one who spoke it.

Living Water (4:7–15)

The prophets had dared to hope that God’s presence would return. When the glory of the Lord departed the Jerusalem temple in Ezekiel 10–11, it was one of the most devastating moments in Israel’s history. But Ezekiel saw a future when a new temple would rise, and from its threshold, living water would flow outward, making everything flourish wherever it reached (Ezek 47:1–12). Zechariah shared this hope: “On that day living waters shall flow out from Jerusalem” (Zech 14:8). God’s return would bring nothing less than living water flowing from the new temple to renew creation.

It is into this stream of expectation that Jesus steps beside a well in Samaria and says something remarkable.

Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).

The woman hears a practical claim about water, but Jesus speaks about something much larger. John’s prologue had already set the foundation: “the Word became flesh and ἐσκήνωσεν [tabernacled] among us, and we have seen his glory” (John 1:14). The tabernacling of God’s glory among his people, marked by filling of the tabernacle (Exod 40:34–35) and the dedication of Solomon’s temple (1 Kgs 8:10–11), has been fulfilled again in the person of Jesus. He is the new temple, the place where heaven and earth meet. And from this new temple, living water flows.

“Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again. The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life” (John 4:13–14).

This exchange appears only in John’s Gospel. Its significance grows later in the Gospel, when Jesus proclaims at the Feast of Tabernacles, “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink” (John 7:37), and John clarifies: the living water is the Spirit (7:39). The water Jesus offers the Samaritan woman at this ordinary well is the Holy Spirit, the very presence of God that once filled the tabernacle and the temple, now flowing freely from Jesus and filling his disciples.

The woman went to draw water and met the one from whom the prophets said living water would someday flow. What Ezekiel and Zechariah envisioned as the great renewal of all things, Jesus offers in a quiet conversation beside a well in Samaria.

Forsaken (4:16–18)

It’s common to read John 4 and view the Samaritan woman negatively. She’s drawing water at an unusual time, which some interpret as an indication that she’s an outcast, and she’s had five husbands and is now with a man who isn’t her husband.

However, we must remember that men held all the power in her context. Having a husband was how women stayed out of poverty, and a woman couldn’t divorce her husband under biblical law. So, if she’s had five husbands, she’s either been bereaved or abandoned five times by presumably different men, and quite likely for her own protection, she is now forced to live with a man who is not her husband.

Maybe she’s not the sexually promiscuous woman most readers assume she is, but rather someone who has been abandoned and forsaken multiple times and has been forced to make a difficult choice for her own protection. We don’t have enough information to make a definitive judgment. Still, it’s always valuable to slow down and read familiar texts from different angles to see if any new insights emerge.

A Link to John 3 (ESV)

Born Again (3:1–13)

A ruler of the Jews named Nicodemus came to Jesus one night and said:

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do unless God is with him” (John 3:2).

He was a Pharisee, a member of the ruling council, and Jesus refers to him as “the teacher of Israel” (3:10). He was a son of Abraham, born into the line God had chosen out of all the families of the earth. Nicodemus had the best possible credentials for approaching God.

And yet Jesus says to him:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (3:3).

To tell a son of Abraham he must be born anew was to tell him that his ancestry counted for nothing in the kingdom of God. Interestingly, this is not dissimilar from the initial call of Abrah:

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1).

Country, kindred, and his father’s house were the three things that told a person in the ancient world who he was, and Abraham surrendered them all to follow God. Jesus asks the same surrender of Abram’s heir. Descent from Abraham had made Nicodemus secure. It would not make him born again.

Nicodemus thinks Jesus is talking about physical birth (3:4). So Jesus addresses the matter plainly:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God” (3:5).

Through the prophet Ezekiel, the Lord had already promised Israel this mark of her restoration: “I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you shall be clean from all your uncleannesses” and “I will put my Spirit within you” (Ezek 36:25, 27). Yahweh pledges to wash away the defilement that sent Israel into exile and give her his own Spirit so she could finally keep covenant.

Part of being born again is letting go of what defines us. When we are baptized into the Christ through the power of the Spirit, what previously defined us is buried in the baptismal waters. So much of our identity is tied to things like our nationality, ethnicity, language, and social standing, but for those who are born again, what must define us most is our membership is this new people, this new family, that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is forming in Jesus Christ.

He Must Increase (3:22–36)

One of the metaphors the prophets used to describe the relationship between Israel and Yahweh was that of a husband and a bride.

“I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy. I will betroth you to me in faithfulness. And you shall know the LORD” (Hos 2:19–20).

Isaiah likewise spoke of the day when the groom would arrive for his bride: “as a bridegroom rejoices over his bride, so will your God rejoice over you” (62:5). In Israel’s scriptures, the bridegroom who claims Israel as his own was never a human figure. The groom was Yahweh himself.

John the Baptist draws on this language when his own disciples come to him troubled. Jesus is baptizing, and the crowds are leaving John for him (John 3:26). John does not defend his territory. Instead, he locates himself inside a wedding he did not host:

“The one who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice. Therefore this joy of mine is now complete. He must increase, but I must decrease” (3:29–30).

Read alongside Hosea and Isaiah, John’s answer carries more weight than mere modesty. He tells his own followers that the role reserved for Yahweh now belongs to Jesus. John is not the bridegroom. Jesus is, and he has come for his bride. John is the bridegroom’s friend. It was time for him to decrease so that Jesus might increase.

The passage closes with the Evangelist editorializing and making the stakes: the one from above speaks the words of God and holds the Spirit without measure (3:34), and “whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him” (3:36). The wedding language is tender, and it carries a summons at the same time. The bridegroom has come. The wedding is about to begin. But those who will not listen to the Son will find themselves outside the party when it begins.

The Lifted Serpent (3:14–21)

Long before Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in the shadows of a Jerusalem night, Israel had already learned what it meant to look to an unlikely source of salvation. In the wilderness, God’s people complained against Moses and against God, and the Lord sent fiery serpents among them (Num 21:5–6). Many died. When the people cried out, God did not remove the serpents. Instead, he provided a remedy that matched the wound: a bronze serpent lifted on a pole, so that anyone who looked at it would live (21:8–9). This strange, counterintuitive act of deliverance is what Jesus references when he explains to Nicodemus what must happen to the Son of Man.

The comparison is startling. One might expect Jesus to compare himself to Moses, the deliverer. Instead, he compares himself to the serpent:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life (John 3:14–15).

This image is unique to John’s Gospel and is meant to unsettle us. The serpent was the problem. The serpent in the garden introduced the venom of sin and death into the human story (Gen 3:1–19). Yet Jesus says that when he is lifted up on the cross, he will take the serpent’s place. Paul expresses the same idea: God made the sinless one to become sin for humanity, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor 5:21). The curse does not simply disappear; it goes to the cross.

Only in this light does the meaning of the most familiar verse in all of Scripture become clear.

For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).

The “for” at the beginning of the verse points backward. John 3:16 is not a standalone promise. It explains a substitution: the Son will be lifted up in place of the serpent, taking the venom of sin out of the world and into himself. To crush the serpent’s head, he will take the serpent’s place.

To believe, then, is to look. It is to fix one’s gaze on the one who was lifted up in the serpent’s place and to discover there, not condemnation, but life.

January 3, 2026

John 3:16 is arguably the most famous verse in the Bible, but the entire paragraph is fascinating. These words especially stand out to me: “This is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil” (v. 19).

The light of Christ has come into the world. But light exposes. It reveals. Some people prefer darkness. Some people prefer to keep themselves (or maybe parts of themselves) hidden from the revealing light of Christ. This is judgment: to see the light, but prefer the darkness more. May we who have been born again of the Spirit never prefer darkness to light.

A Link to John 2 (ESV)

On the Third Day (2:1–11)

“On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee, and the mother of Jesus was there” (2:1).

The Evangelists often use chronological indicators as signposts. The phrase “the third day” (τῇ ἡμέρᾳ τῇ τρίτῃ) matches, word for word, the Septuagint’s account of Israel’s encounter with God at Sinai. Moses told the people to consecrate themselves, “for on the third day the Lord will come down on Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people” (Exod 19:11), and the narrative delivers on the promise: “on the morning of the third day there were thunders and lightnings and a thick cloud on the mountain” (19:16). John opens the first sign of Jesus’s ministry with the same words the Greek Old Testament uses to open Israel’s defining theophany.

After the miracle at the wedding occurs, John names what has happened plainly:

“this, the first of his signs, Jesus did at Cana in Galilee, and manifested his glory” (2:11).

The word behind “glory” is δόξα, the same word the Septuagint uses for what appeared on Sinai once the covenant had been ratified. “The glory of the Lord dwelt on Mount Sinai,” and its appearance “was like a devouring fire on the top of the mountain” (Exod 24:16–17). At Sinai, that glory stayed behind a fence, with limits set around the base of the mountain: “whoever touches the mountain shall be put to death” (19:12–13). It arrived loud, dangerous, and untouchable. At Cana, on the third day, the same glory arrives at a wedding and is served to all who would like a drink.

John has already told his readers to expect this reversal.

“The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ” (1:17).

The jars built for washing hands under the law are filled instead with wine for a celebration, and the water kept for ritual purity becomes the drink of a party no one has to qualify to attend. In Jesus, purity laws are giving way to a party, and glory brings grace and truth, not the risk of death. Something is changing in Christ, and a wedding feast is a great signpost for where those changes are headed.

Saving the Best for Last (2:1–11)

Isaiah pictured the end of the covenant story as a banquet. On his mountain, the LORD of hosts would spread a feast “of rich food... of aged wine well refined,” and he would swallow up death forever (Isa 25:6–8). The prophecy ends with recognition: “Behold, this is our God; we have waited for him” (Isa 25:9). Israel’s hope for the age to come was pictured as people finally sitting down to eat with their God.

John opens Jesus’ public ministry on a similar note. “On the third day there was a wedding at Cana in Galilee” (2:1). The wine runs out, an ordinary failure at an ordinary wedding, until Jesus tells the servants to fill six stone jars with water and draw some out. The wine that comes out is better than what was served before. When the master of the feast tells the bridegroom he has saved the best for last (2:10), the inauguration of Isaiah’s mountain feast has arrived at a wedding in Galilee.

John calls this “the first of his signs,” by which Jesus “manifested his glory” (2:11). The glory that once filled the tabernacle and the temple now shows itself through a wine miracle at a wedding party. But the sign points further than its immediate fulfillment. When Mary tells Jesus the wine has run out, he answers, “My hour has not yet come” (2:4). That phrase returns only once more in this Gospel, on the night before the cross, when Jesus prays, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son” (17:1). Mary herself disappears from John’s narrative until she reappears standing at the foot of that same cross (19:25). The wine at Cana and the hour of the cross are bound together from the very first sign Jesus performed.

The hour that had not yet come at Cana did come, and it came at the cross. The best was saved for last, not a wedding party in Galilee, but a body broken and a cup poured out, so that the feast Isaiah saw from a distance might actually be set before us now and in the age to come.

Zeal for Your House (2:13–22)

The prophets of Israel never tired of pronouncing judgment on corrupt worship. Jeremiah stood at the temple gates and declared its destruction (Jer 7:1–15). Malachi foretold a messenger who would prepare the way, but it was the Lord himself who would arrive suddenly at his temple, and Malachi asked who could endure the day of his coming, “for he is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap” (Mal 3:1–2). Ezekiel watched as the glory of God left a sanctuary polluted by idolatry (Ezek 10:18–19). When Jesus entered Jerusalem and expelled the merchants and money-changers, he was not acting without precedent. He was acting as a prophet.

The Synoptic Gospels place this event during the final week of Jesus’s ministry, where it sets off the plot to arrest him (Matt 21:12–13; Mark 11:15–17; Luke 19:45–46). John, however, places it right at the start of his ministry, immediately after the Cana miracle. This change in position is almost certainly intentional. Such a rearrangement of events would not have surprised ancient readers. Biographers in the Greco-Roman tradition often moved events for thematic reasons, and the Gospel writers followed these same conventions.1 By positioning the cleansing here, John presents Jesus’s entire public ministry as a form of judgment against the corruption of the old way of worship. From the very first public action, the issue of the temple looms over everything that follows.

The interpretive weight of the passage rests on a citation from the Psalter. As Jesus drives out the merchants, a line from the Psalter comes to the disciples’ minds:

“Zeal for your house will consume me.” (Ps 69:9, quoted in John 2:17)

Psalm 69 functions in John mainly as a passion psalm. Its verses appear at the cross: the offer of vinegar to the thirsty Jesus (Ps 69:21; cf. John 19:28–29), the hatred without cause directed at him (Ps 69:4; cf. John 15:25), and the alienation from his own household (Ps 69:8; cf. John 7:5). The psalm is the cry of the suffering righteous one, and John references it here at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry.

What makes the citation in John 2:17 notable is a change in tense. The Septuagint reads κατέφαγέν με, an aorist: “has consumed me.” John’s quotation has καταφάγεταί με, a future: “will consume me.” The consumption is not yet finished. The zeal that drives Jesus to cleanse the temple will not end at the temple gates. It will lead him to the cross. From the moment the first table overturns, the shadow of the passion falls over the story.

The zeal that consumes Jesus, however, is not only zeal for a building. When his opponents demand a sign to justify his actions, Jesus replies:

“Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up” (John 2:19).

The Evangelist clarifies: “he was speaking about the temple of his body” (v. 21). The physical sanctuary is not the ultimate referent. Jesus himself is. The destruction he enacts in the courtyard points forward to the destruction of his own body, and the raising he promises points to resurrection. Ezekiel watched the glory of God depart from a defiled sanctuary. John has already announced that the glory has taken up residence in a new one (John 1:14).

The disciples did not understand this at the time. John is careful to say that they remembered the scripture only after the resurrection (v. 22). The citation is retrospective christology: the disciples see clearly only once they know how the story ends. Zeal for the Father’s house consumed the Son, and the consumption was his death and rising again. Psalm 69’s suffering righteous one, it turns out, was always pointing here.

January 2, 2026

In today’s reading, we explore the wedding at Cana and the cleansing of the temple. At the wedding, Jesus turns water into wine. In the temple, Jesus links his body to the temple and predicts his resurrection.

Two things stand out to me. First, because of Jesus, it’s time to celebrate. When the wine was all gone, Jesus made more. Because of what God has done in Christ, the world (and especially Christians!) should be celebrating!

Second, the link between Jesus and the temple isn’t random. The Spirit of God now dwelt on and in Jesus, not in the temple. The temple was a sign pointing to him, and both would share the same fate — destruction. One would be raised, and the other would be left with not one stone upon another. The true temple is here, so let us rejoice!

A Link to John 1

Come and See (1:35–51)

John has already named Jesus the Lamb of God once (1:29). When he says it again the next day, it costs him two of his own disciples (1:36–37). They leave John and follow Jesus, and Jesus turns and asks the first question he puts to anyone in this Gospel:

“What are you seeking?” (1:38).

The disciples do not answer him directly. It makes me wonder if the question is really for the reader. Instead, the disciples ask where Jesus is staying. Jesus does not explain himself. He simply says, “Come and you will see” (1:39), and they do, staying with him until evening.

That reference to seeing repeats throughout the remainder of the chapter. Andrew finds his brother Simon and tells him they have found the Messiah (1:41), and brings him to Jesus (1:42). The next day Jesus finds Philip and tells him to follow (1:43), and Philip finds Nathanael and makes the same basic claim that Andrew had made, that they have found the one about whom Moses and the prophets wrote (1:45). Nathanael is not impressed. Nazareth has no reputation worth mentioning (1:46). Philip does not argue the point. He repeats the invitation that Jesus extended to him: “Come and see” (1:46).

Jesus already knows Nathanael before Philip brings him. He saw him under the fig tree (1:48), and whatever that detail means to Nathanael, it is enough. Nathanael confesses Jesus as Son of God and King of Israel in a single breath (1:49). Jesus’s answer is not quite a compliment.

“Because I said to you, ‘I saw you under the fig tree,’ do you believe? You will see greater things than these” (1:50).

Then he says what those greater things are:

“You will see heaven opened, and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man” (1:51).

Centuries earlier Jacob dreamed of a ladder reaching from earth to heaven, and “the angels of God were ascending and descending on it” (Gen 28:12). He woke up and named the place Bethel, the house of God, the spot where heaven and earth meet. Jesus takes that image and moves it. The angels no longer ascend and descend on a ladder. They ascend and descend on Jesus. He is the place where heaven and earth now meet, and Nathanael, along with Andrew, Simon, and Philip, are invited to see it happen.

The whole pericope follows this shape. Nobody in it is argued into faith. Andrew does not debate his brother; he tells him what he found and brings him along. Philip does not out-argue Nathanael’s objection about Nazareth; he repeats the invitation he was given himself. We tend to assume the people around us need better reasons before they will consider Jesus, so we rehearse arguments instead of making the simpler offer that was made to these four men: “come and see.”

I Am Not (1:19–34)

When priests and Levites from Jerusalem asked John who he was, he answered plainly: “I am not the Christ.” Pressed further, he denies being Elijah, denies being the Prophet, and only then identifies himself, applying a citation rather than claiming a title:

“I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord,’ as the prophet Isaiah said” (1:19–23).

The priests and Levites arrive with a script already written. Israel had been told that Elijah would return before the day of the Lord (Mal 4:5), and Moses had promised a prophet like himself, whom the people were to heed (Deut 18:15, 18). Asking whether John is Elijah or the Prophet hands him a role Israel had waited centuries to see filled, and John refuses.

There is some tension here with the other Gospels. Mark describes John as wearing the same clothing that Elijah wore (Mark 1:6; 2 Kgs 1:8), and Matthew has Jesus name him outright as the Elijah who was to come (Matt 11:14; 17:12–13). This Gospel makes no such move. John appears to deny being the Elijah-figure prophecied by Malachi, although he could also be denying that he is Elijah redivivus, which softens the tension somewhat.

What John does claim for himself is important. Isaiah prophesied the end of the exile and the return of Yahweh to Zion. John claims this role and names his entire ministry as preparatory. He is the voice, not the one whose way is being prepared.

The next day, John sees Jesus and says, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29). John’s own Gospel supplies the fullest gloss on this title. At the crucifixion, Jesus dies as the Passover lambs are being slaughtered (19:14), and his legs are left unbroken in fulfillment of the law that no bone of the Passover lamb may be broken (Exod 12:46; 19:36). Chapter one announces what chapter nineteen completes.

But the Passover lamb protected Israel from the destroyer; it did not, on its own, take away sin. For that, the image reaches toward Isaiah's servant, “led like a lamb to the slaughter,” who would “bear the sin of many” (Isa 53:7, 12).

John adds one more piece of testimony: “I saw the Spirit descend from heaven like a dove, and it remained on him” (1:32). Israel’s judges had been filled with the Spirit for a task, then left to themselves. What John describes does not depart; a Spirit that rests and stays marks someone whose identity was for far more than a single task.

John says, “I have seen and have borne witness that this is the Son of God” (1:34). John’s task was to point not to himself but to Jesus. In this way, he is a model of all disciples of Christ. Our task is always to bear witness about him and not ourselves. We prepare his way. He is the one for whom the world is longing and waiting.

From Creation to Tabernacle (1:1–18)

Quick! Answer this question without looking up the answer: How does the book of Exodus end? Recent experience tells me that most people aren’t sure about the answer to this question, but the answer is actually pretty important for understanding the narrative arc from Genesis through Exodus.

Genesis starts with creation. God creates the world and his image bearers, then dwells with his people in the temple known as the Garden of Eden. Then Adam sins, and humankind is exiled from the garden and the presence of God. Tragically, God no longer dwells among his people.

Throughout the story that follows, God does appear at certain moments to be with his people, but these instances are just that: instances. God appears, and then he leaves.

But then, with an outstretched arm, God frees his people from Egypt and calls them to Mount Sinai, where he meets them on the mountain. And this time, God shows up, and he intends to stay. He gives Moses not just the Law, but also instructions for building the Tabernacle, the movable dwelling where God would live with his people as they traveled through the wilderness and into the Promised Land.

The book of Exodus concludes with God’s glory filling the Tabernacle.

³⁴ Then the cloud covered the tent of meeting, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle. ³⁵ And Moses was not able to enter the tent of meeting because the cloud settled on it, and the glory of the Lord filled the tabernacle (40:34–35).

In that moment, the narrative arc of Genesis–Exodus was complete. The God who had at first dwelt with his people was now dwelling with them once again. But what does this have to do with the Gospel of John?

John draws on this very narrative arc in the introduction to his Gospel:

¹ In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. ² He was in the beginning with God. ³ All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made (John 1:1–3).

The introduction begins with creation and then moves to presence and glory:

¹⁴ And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth (John 1:14).

The Greek word translated as “dwelt” is σκηνόω, from σκηνή, which means “tent.” This word is the one used for the Tabernacle in the LXX (the Greek translation of the Old Testament).1 John’s point is fairly obvious. The God who created the world and then dwelt with his people has come to dwell with his people once again in the person of Jesus. John wants his readers to see that Jesus is the tabernacling presence of the creator God back on earth once again, and that seeing him is to have seen the glory of God.

First Post (Jan 1, 2026)

Happy New Year! Thank you for signing up to Walk with Jesus in 2026! Each year, many people make resolutions for their health, finances, and habits—all good things. But what about our spiritual life? The Word became flesh. God has united himself to humanity forever, and that changes everything. As followers of Jesus, shouldn’t our resolutions be about following him more closely? About loving people more genuinely? We’re starting with John because there’s no better place to begin walking with Jesus than “In the beginning.” Happy reading!

A Link to Luke 24 (ESV)

What a Ghost Cannot Do (24:36–43)

The two on the way to Emmaus had just finished telling the Eleven how they had met Jesus on the road, and suddenly he was standing in the room. The reaction is not relief:

“They were startled and frightened and thought they saw a spirit” (24:37).

Jesus addresses their fear directly.

“Why are you troubled, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? See my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me, and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have” (24:38–39).

“Flesh and bones” is not an odd way to describe a body. It is the oldest way. When Adam first saw the woman, he said, “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Gen 2:23).

The disciples still do not move past wonder into ordinary belief.

“And while they still disbelieved for joy and were marveling, he said to them, ‘Have you anything here to eat?’” (24:41).

Luke describes their feelings in an incredibly revealing way. They are not doubting in the usual sense. They are experiencing joy that is too large to trust so easily. And Jesus does not argue with them to move them to certainty. Instead, he asks for dinner.

“They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate before them” (24:42–43).

This is the proof. A spirit cannot be touched, and a spirit does not eat. Jesus does both.

One of the major points of this scene, among others, is to make clear what the Apostles meant when they said that Jesus rose from the dead. They didn’t mean that this spirit was alive and among them. They didn’t mean that he was dwelling in their hearts. They didn’t even mean that he had ascended spiritually. They meant that he was raised from the dead bodily, with a body at least somewhat like ours, in that it can eat and drink. People can deny that Jesus rose from the dead. What should be indisputable is the precise claim the Apostles were making.

Years later, Peter will stand in a Roman household and explain exactly what qualified the apostles to say what they said. Peter tells Cornelius that God raised Jesus on the third day and made him to appear “not to all the people but to us who had been chosen by God as witnesses, who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead” (Acts 10:40–41). Peter is describing (at least in part) this scene, this fish, and this room. Peter claim is not that they saw a vision of Jesus or felt his presence. He says they ate and drank with him.

The Last Blessing (24:44–53)

Jesus tells the eleven that everything written about him in the Law of Moses, the Prophets, and the Psalms had to be fulfilled (24:44). Then he opens their minds to understand the Scriptures (24:45). Not a new revelation, but a new reading, the same books they had heard numerous times before, now read with Jesus himself as the key.

What was written, he says, is this:

Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem (24:46–47).

Israel’s story was never only for Israel. The servant who bears Israel’s guilt is also given as a light to the nations, and that purpose now becomes the shape of the church’s mission. The eleven are witnesses to this (24:48), and before Jesus sends them anywhere, he promises them power from on high (24:49). Wait first. Then go.

Luke narrates the ascension in a single sentence, and the detail he includes is deliberate:

And he led them out as far as Bethany, and lifting up his hands he blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven (24:50–51).

Lifting the hands to bless was a priestly act before it was Jesus’ act. When Aaron finished the sacrifices on the day of his ordination, “he lifted up his hands toward the people and blessed them” (Lev 9:22). Centuries later, the high priest Simon would do the same after completing the temple service, coming out before the assembly to raise his hands and bless the people (Sir 50:20). The sacrifice is finished. The priest comes out. He lifts his hands. He blesses.

Jesus does not stop being a priest when he ceases to be bodily present. Aaron finished his service and stepped down from the altar. Jesus finishes his and is carried up, mid-blessing, into heaven. Luke never narrates the blessing’s ending. It simply continues, out of sight.

And they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy, and were in the temple continually, blessing God (24:52–53).

Luke’s Gospel opens with a priest struck silent in the temple, unable to speak the blessing the people outside were waiting for (1:21–22). It closes with the disciples in that same temple, freely blessing God, because they have just been blessed by a greater priest whose blessing never stopped.

We are not waiting for the blessing to resume. We are living inside it. Our task is not to stand and stare at the place he left, but to go, in the power he promised, and hand on what we have just received. Hands lifted, not lowered.

Why Do You Seek the Living Among the Dead? (24:1–12)

The question the angels asked at the empty tomb wasn’t just for the women who brought spices. It’s a question for every reader of this Gospel:

“Why do you seek the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen” (Luke 24:5–6).

Why are we still searching for life in people, places, and pleasures that we know are metaphorical graveyards? Why do we continue to live as if death is the final destination?

The declaration spoken by the angels is the thunderclap at the heart of human history, the sunrise breaking over the dark night of sin and death. If they are true—and they are—nothing can ever be the same again.

The women arrived early in the morning, expecting silence, stillness, and the chill of stone. They were doing what anyone would do: honoring the dead. What they found instead was the stone rolled away, the body gone, and a stunning message from heaven.

The question echoes all the way back to the first garden, where God walked among his people and called out to a man hiding in the shadows: “Where are you?” (Gen 3:9). Now, in another garden near a tomb (John 19:41), God calls again through his angels: why are you looking for the one who is life itself in the place where only death reigns?

The women were terrified, but the angels instructed them to remember what Jesus had said—that he must suffer, die, and rise on the third day (Luke 24:6–7). The grave is not the end. Death has lost its sting. The tomb has been left behind.

God did not abandon his Holy One to the grave. The sacrifice was accepted. The curse is lifted. Peter declared this without hesitation before a Roman household:

“They put him to death by hanging him on a tree, but God raised him on the third day. And he commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one appointed by God to be judge of the living and the dead. To him all the prophets bear witness that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.” (Acts 10:39–43)

The resurrection is not private news. It is not a feeling to be hidden away in the heart. It is public. It is political. It is cosmic. Jesus Christ is Lord, not Caesar, not death, not sin, not the devil. Everyone and everything else is not.

And because he is risen, those who belong to him share in that life now. Paul writes:

“If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God.” (Col 3:1–3)

Notice the tense. You have died. You have been raised. That is what happened in your baptism. The resurrection is not only what God did for Jesus. It is what God is already doing in everyone united to him. You are not who you once were. You are not bound by your past. You are not defined by your failures. You are not under the curse of death. So stop living like you’re still in the tomb.

Why do you seek the living among the dead? What grave are you still sitting in? What tomb have you sealed yourself into? What darkness are you hiding in when the light of the world is already shining? Come out. Come out into the light. Come out into the joy. Come out into the freedom of resurrection. Christ is risen, and in him, so are you. Live like it. Rejoice like it. Hope like it. Forgive like it. Love like it. Walk in that newness of life.

Because your Redeemer lives.

Alleluia. Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia.

Made Known in the Breaking of the Bread (24:13–35; Easter)

I’m tired. I need to go to bed. I have Easter services in the morning.1

My favorite post-resurrection scene is the Road to Emmaus. Two disciples are walking with Jesus, but they don’t recognize him. When Jesus asks what they are talking about, Cleopas quips that he must be the only person visiting Jerusalem for the Passover who doesn’t know about what happened there. When Jesus asks for more details, Cleopas says hopelessly that he had hoped Jesus was the one to redeem Israel, but apparently that hope came to an end when the Romans crucified him. He adds that there have been reports of angels saying he’s alive and that the tomb is empty, but it doesn’t sound like Cleopas puts much faith in them.

Jesus responds:

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory?” (24:25–26).

Jesus then gives the greatest sermon/Bible study ever. Luke says:

And beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (24:27).

The thing is, even after Jesus opens the Scriptures for them, they still don’t recognize him.

The two disciples continue to walk with Jesus. Eventually, they find their way to the table, where Jesus “he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them” (24:30). This is almost word-for-word what Jesus does at his last Passover with his disciples (cf. Luke 24:31). And in that moment:

“Their eyes were opened, and they recognized him” (24:31).

They didn’t recognize him when he opened up Scripture to them, but as they report later, “he was known to them in the breaking of the bread (24:35).

The Road to Emmaus followed the pattern of early Christian worship. There is the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Sacrament. Both are important (and I say this as someone who has spent basically his entire adult life studying Scripture and teaching people), but Christ is made known in the breaking of the bread.

And people try to tell me that it’s not a sacrament, just a meal of remembrance.

Jesus gave the greatest study in Scripture that anyone has ever given (better than I or anyone else reading this will ever give), but they still didn’t recognize him. It was only when he took, blessed, broke, and gave that their eyes were opened, and they recognized their risen Lord.

Happy Easter.

“Be present, be present,
Lord Jesus Christ,
our risen high priest;
make yourself known in the breaking of bread.”

A Link to Luke 23 (ESV)

In Paradise (23:39-43)

One of the criminals hanging beside Jesus joins the mockery already coming from the crowd and the rulers below:

“Are you not the Christ? Save yourself and us!” (23:39).

His demand names a savior he does not believe exists, since a real Christ, in his estimation, would never have been nailed to the cross in the first place. The other criminal answers him first, then turns to Jesus.

“Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward of our deeds; but this man has done nothing wrong” (23:40–41).

He states his own guilt plainly and Jesus’ innocence just as plainly, something none of the nearby rulers have managed to say. Then he makes a surprising request:

“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom” (23:42).

He asks to be included in a kingdom he cannot see, secured by a king who, by every visible measure, is dying beside him. Jesus answers with more than the man asked for.

“Truly, I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise” (23:43).

The word translated “paradise,” παράδεισος (paradeisos), is the same term the Greek Old Testament uses for the garden God planted in Eden (Gen 2:8; cf. Jos., Ant. 1.37; Iren. 5.5.1). Jesus’ promise echoes the Garden of Eden, the place humanity was driven from and barred from reentering by cherubim and a flaming sword (Gen 3:24).

“Today” belongs with “you will be with me,” not with “I say to you,” although it’s not impossible to read it the other way. Jesus means not merely that he is speaking to the man today, but that the man will be with him before the sun sets on either of their deaths.

The criminal asked for a future kingdom. Jesus offers him present rest. Paradise here denotes the blissful nearness to Christ that precedes the resurrection of the body, not the resurrection itself. It is the same interim state Paul has in view when he says that to depart and be with Christ is far better (Phil 1:23), even as his deepest hope remains the resurrection still to come. What the criminal receives today is real and immediate. The garden is where man was with God. What he still awaits, along with every believer who has died since, is the day when the whole world is remade and he receives back a body that will never die.

Weep for Yourselves (23:26–31)

As the soldiers led Jesus away, they seized Simon of Cyrene, coming in from the countryside, and put the cross on him to carry behind Jesus (23:26). Luke does not tell us what Simon thought, only where he walked: behind, in the position Jesus had already named for anyone who would follow him. “Whoever does not bear his own cross and come after me cannot be my disciple” (14:27). Simon is given no choice in the matter, but the posture is the same one Jesus required of every disciple willing to take it up.

A great crowd follows, with women among them, mourning and wailing for him (23:27). Jesus turns and speaks, redirecting their grief rather than receiving it.

“Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me, but weep for yourselves and for your children” (23:28).

What comes next is warning, not comfort: a coming reversal so severe that barrenness, the ancient curse, will be called blessed, and breasts that never nursed will be envied.

For behold, the days are coming when they will say, ‘Blessed are the barren and the wombs that never bore and the breasts that never nursed!’ Then they will begin to say to the mountains, ‘Fall on us,’ and to the hills, ‘Cover us’ (23:29–30).

This line comes from Hosea, where Israel, under judgment for her idolatry, cries out to the mountains, “Cover us,” and to the hills, “Fall on us” (Hos 10:8). Jesus alludes to the prophet’s words but reverses which cry goes where: mountains fall, hills cover, exactly backward from Hosea’s order. Hosea’s scene will soon replay itself in Jerusalem.

Jesus closes with a proverb:

“If they do these things when the wood is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (23:31).

The proverb implies that the time is not yet right for the Roman destruction of the city, but what will happen when Jerusalem has become dry kindling? The word for wood, ξύλον, is also the same word Luke later uses for the cross in Acts, where the apostles preach that Jesus was killed by hanging him on a tree (Acts 5:30; cf. 10:39; 13:29).

Jesus’ words are unmistakable. Judgment is coming soon upon the city and its people. In some ways, Jerusalem and Jesus will share the same fate: they are both killed/destroyed by the Romans only four decades apart. One of the pair would be resurrected on the third day, and the other would not.

Into Your Hands (Luke 23:44–49)

The psalms of lament provided ancient Israel with a language for moments of crisis — words to express when the body weakens, enemies close in, and God feels far away. Israel’s faithful sufferers kept turning to these prayers, confident that God listened even to the darkest cries. Jesus dies within this tradition, using its language at his final breath.

Which Psalm he draws on, however, depends on which Gospel you read. Mark and Matthew both record a cry of dereliction as Jesus’ last spoken words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Ps 22:1 quoted in Mark 15:34 and Matt 27:46). The weight of abandonment falls hard in those accounts.1 Luke’s account is strikingly different. Luke omits the cry of dereliction entirely. In its place, Jesus speaks three times from the cross (23:34, 43, 46), and every word is either a prayer or an act of grace. His final word is a quotation of Ps 31:5:

“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

Not a cry of dereliction; a prayer of trust. The wider context of Ps 31 shows a righteous sufferer surrounded by enemies, mocked and forgotten, yet holding onto God as his refuge. The psalmist does not doubt God’s listening; he trusts in it. Luke’s Jesus dies exactly this way: not in apparent abandonment but in deliberate, filial trust.

The word “spirit” (πνεῦμα) points to the full scope of biblical anthropology. When God formed man in Gen 2:7, he breathed life into dust, and the creature became alive as a combined body and spirit. Neither alone constitutes a complete human being. When Qohelet describes death, he states that the dust returns to the earth and “the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Eccl 12:7). In biblical terms, death signifies the unmaking of that union. Jesus on the cross intentionally and willingly fulfills Eccl 12:7: he entrusts the animating spirit, God’s own breath, given at creation, back into the Father’s hands.

The picture Luke paints is not the Greek view of an immortal soul escaping a disposable body. The spirit Jesus commits to the Father is not destined for eternal disembodied existence. God holds it until the resurrection, when it returns to the body, and Jesus becomes fully alive again in the biblical sense: body and spirit united. The resurrection is not a separate miracle added to the cross. It is the completion of what Jesus began with his final prayer.

Luke’s dying Jesus is the righteous sufferer of Ps 31, trusting, praying, entrusting himself to the Father’s care. And the Father, who holds the spirit of his Son, proves trustworthy when the tomb opens on the third day.

A Link to Luke 22 (ESV)

Failure and Forgiveness (22:31–34)

Jesus doubles Simon’s name, and across Luke’s two volumes this happens only three times: to Martha, when she is anxious about too many things (10:41), to Simon here, and later to Saul, when the risen Christ finally corners him on the Damascus road (Acts 9:4). The repetition emphasizes the significance of this moment.

Jesus tells Simon that Satan “demanded to have you” (22:31). The pronoun “you” is plural in Greek and refers to everyone reclining at the table. The verb suggests a formal claim brought before a court rather than a casual request. The same dynamic stands behind Job’s suffering, where the accuser first has to secure permission before he can touch anything that belongs to God (Job 1:12; 2:6). Satan asks for the whole company the way he once asked for Job, and gets what he asks for: permission to “sift you like wheat,” the violent shaking that separates true grain from everything blown away with it.

Then Jesus turns to Peter alone, and the pronoun narrows from plural to singular, a shift the Greek marks four separate times in one sentence. Satan’s demand reached everyone at the table. Jesus’s prayer is for one man specifically, that his faith would not fail because this man has a job waiting for him after his own failure: “strengthen your brothers” (22:32).

Peter hears none of this as a warning; he hears it as an insult to his loyalty. He answers that he is ready to follow Jesus to prison and to death (22:33). Jesus does not argue with the sentiment. He tells him plainly what will actually happen: before the rooster crows, Peter will deny three times that he knows him (22:34). Peter genuinely loves Jesus; he is only wrong about what that love can currently survive under pressure.

There is something encouraging about Jesus’ awareness of Peter’s impending failure. Judas will betray Jesus. Peter will deny him. One of them will be consumed with guilt. The other “will [turn] again.” Jesus is keenly aware of our shortcomings and failures. But he doesn’t dismiss us or cast us aside. Instead, he warns us, like he warns Peter, and then he offers us the chance to turn back to him again. When we do, we find not only forgiveness, but vocation. Even in the pattern of failure and forgiveness, we find a purpose in Christ.

Jesus and Swords (22:35–38, 47–53)

Isaiah’s servant song ends with a strange line about the servant’s company. He “poured out his soul to death and was numbered with the transgressors” (Isa 53:12). The servant does not merely suffer near criminals. He is counted as one, reckoned into their number by the very people condemning him. The verdict is a miscarriage of justice, but it is also, in a way that Isaiah does not yet explain, the point. The servant’s identification with the guilty is how he bears what belongs to the guilty.

Jesus applies this line directly to himself:

“For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’ For what is written about me has its fulfillment” (Luke 22:37).

When Jesus first sent the disciples out earlier in the Gospel, they carried no moneybag, no knapsack, no sandals, and lacked nothing (22:35; cf. 10:4). Now he reverses the instruction. Take a moneybag. Take a knapsack. Sell your cloak if you must, but get a sword (22:36). They find two:

And they said, “Look, Lord, here are two swords.” And he said to them, “It is enough” (22:38).

Jesus is not equipping an armed resistance, nor is he advocating for his disciples to arm themselves. He is manufacturing the evidence for his own arrest. The Roman Empire would barely notice a band of unarmed Galileans, but the same people brandishing swords would certainly get their attention. Isaiah’s line will not fulfill itself; it needs a sword in someone’s hand when the crowd arrives.

One of the two swords shows up exactly when it is needed. In the garden, one of the disciples strikes the high priest’s servant and cuts off his ear (22:49-50). Jesus stops what’s happening (“No more of this!” )and heals the wound. The weapons were for theater, not actual use (22:51). Only Luke records this healing. Jesus wants the sword seen, not swung. Then he turns to the chief priests, the temple officers, and the elders who have come for him and names what he has arranged.

“Have you come out as against a robber, with swords and clubs?” (22:52).

The question is confirmation. Jesus is standing before the charge he built, and he has made certain it costs no one anything real but him.

Jesus does not tell his disciples to arm themselves in case their enemies come to harm them. In fact, when they try to do that, he tells them to stop. Instead, he tells them to bring swords so that he would be “numbered with the transgressors.”

Not My Will (Luke 22:39–46)

When the devil finished tempting Jesus in the wilderness, Luke adds a detail that the other Synoptics omit. He writes that the devil departed from Jesus “until an opportune time” (Luke 4:13). The reader is meant to sense that phrase hanging over the rest of the Gospel. By Luke 22, the opportune time seems to have arrived. Satan enters Judas (22:3), and as Jesus is arrested, he names what is closing in: “this is your hour, and the power of darkness” (22:53). Gethsemane sits between the devil and darkness.

Jesus goes to the Mount of Olives, as was his habit, and instructs his disciples before withdrawing: “Pray that you may not enter into temptation” (22:40). The word is πειρασμός, the same term used for the location of the wilderness trial by the devil in 4:2. Luke further links the two scenes in case the bracket wasn’t clear already. Then Jesus kneels and prays.

Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done (Luke 22:42).

The cup is not a vague metaphor. In Jeremiah, the Lord commands the prophet to take “this cup of the wine of wrath” and make the nations drink it (Jer 25:15–17). Isaiah reaches for the same image, referring to “the bowl of staggering” that Jerusalem has drunk to the dregs (Isa 51:17). The cup in Gethsemane is that cup, the cup of divine judgment. Jesus understands that it is the Father’s will for him to drink that cup in the place of others.

What follows is unique to Luke. An angel appears to strengthen him, and his sweat falls like drops of blood (22:43–44). The detail is not meant merely to describe physical distress. Something is genuinely being contested, and the contest is costly enough to require heavenly help.

The disciples, meanwhile, are found sleeping. Luke alone specifies the reason: it is from sorrow (22:45). The note reflects Luke’s sympathy toward them, but it does not change the fact that Jesus had asked them to pray and they had not.

He wakes them with the same instruction he gave at the start: “Rise and pray that you may not enter into temptation” (22:46). The framing is intentional. The disciples are about to face their own trial, and the answer to that trial, as it is with Jesus, is prayerful submission to the Father.

The wilderness temptation concluded with Jesus trusting the Father above every alternative the devil presented. Gethsemane ends the same way. The opportune moment came, but Jesus responded with prayer and submission.

A Link to Luke 21 (ESV)

Not a Hair Will Perish (21:7–19)

The disciples have just heard that not one stone of the temple will be left upon another, and they want to know what to watch for (21:7). Jesus begins with a warning about deception: many will come claiming his name and announcing that the moment has arrived. The disciples are not to follow them (21:8). Wars and unrest will come, and none of it should be mistaken for the coming judgment. These things must happen first, and Jerusalem’s and the temple’s end will not come at once (21:9). There would be a process.

What follows sounds like a catalog of ordinary catastrophe: nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom (21:10). Earthquakes, famines, pestilences, terrors and great signs from heaven (21:11). None of it, on its own, tells the disciples anything they could not already have guessed about a violent century.

Jesus then addresses what actually concerns him: before any of this, his disciples will be handed over to synagogues and prisons, brought before kings and governors for his name’s sake (21:12). Family will do the handing over. Parents, brothers, relatives, friends. Some will be put to death (21:16). Everyone will hate them for his name (21:17).

What comes next is the sentence that seems to contradict everything just said. Not a hair of your head will perish (21:18). The imagery is a common metaphor is the Old Testament. When Jonathan had unknowingly broken Saul’s oath and stood condemned to die, the army that intervened for him swore, “As the LORD lives, there shall not one hair of his head fall to the ground” (1 Sam 14:45). Solomon extends the same formula to Adonijah, conditioned on his staying out of trouble: not one of his hairs shall fall to the earth (1 Kgs 1:52). In each case the formula means exactly what it says. The person keeps their life. No one touches them.

Jesus has just said that some of the disciples will be put to death. How then can he say that not one hair on their head will perish? Notice that Jesus changes the verb. The Old Testament metaphor referred to a hair falling. Jesus promises a hair will not perish. The disciple of Jesus may lose their life, but that does not mean that they have perished. Their life may be taken from them, but God can and will give it back to them. So Jesus adds:

“By your endurance you will gain your lives” (21:19).

There is something freeing about believing in a God who raises the dead. It disarms the empire's greatest weapon and relieves us of our deepest fear. Yes, barring the return of Christ in our lifetime, we will all one day die, but we will not perish. Death is not the end for the disciple of Jesus. Disasters, both natural and manmade, may claim our lives. And even if we somehow manage to avoid such things, these mortal bodies will one day take their last breath. But that is not the end. One day God will give life again to our bodies, and we will see that not even a single hair on our head will have perished.

Snared by That Day (21:34–38)

Isaiah’s “little apocalypse” closes with a warning that names no nation in particular:

“Terror and the pit and the snare are upon you, O inhabitant of the earth!” (Isa 24:17).

The three judgments interlock. Whoever flees the terror falls into the pit; whoever escapes the pit is caught in the snare (24:18). Isaiah’s day of the LORD does not discriminate between covenant people and pagan nations; it comes upon “the inhabitant of the earth” as such.

The Greek text of Isaiah renders “snare” as παγίς (pagis). That word is used at the end of Jesus’ discourse on the Mount of Olives. Nineteen verses earlier, Jesus had described the specific, datable fall of Jerusalem: armies surrounding the city, desolation, flight to the mountains (21:20–24). Now the frame widens. “Watch yourselves,” he says, “lest your hearts be weighed down with dissipation and drunkenness and cares of this life, and that day come upon you suddenly like a trap. For it will come upon all who dwell on the face of the whole earth” (21:34–35). Isaiah’s inhabitants of the earth have become, in Jesus’ mouth, all who dwell on the face of the whole earth. Both the vocabulary and the universal scope echo Isaiah’s oracle.

The shift matters. AD 70 was coming for one city within a single generation (21:32). The day described here comes for everyone, indiscriminately, the way Isaiah’s day came for the inhabitants of the earth without exception. That universalizing move is also why the warning turns inward, from watching for armies to watching one’s own heart. The cares of this life (μέριμναι βιωτικαί) are the same cares Jesus already named as thorns choking the seed sown among them (8:14). Jerusalem’s fall would expose a nation’s misplaced trust. This wider day exposes everyone’s.

The remedy Jesus gives is sustained vigilance rather than more information: “stay awake at all times, praying that you may have strength to escape all these things that are going to take place, and to stand before the Son of Man” (21:36). Daniel’s throne room, where the court is seated and the books are opened before the Son of Man receives his kingdom (Dan 7:9–10), stands behind that image. The scene that earlier in the discourse vindicated Jesus becomes the same one in which every person must be ready to stand and face judgment.

When Jerusalem is Named (21:5–6, 20–24)

March 31, 2026

Luke 21 begins with Jesus observing the crowd depositing offerings into the Temple treasury. He notices a widow drop in two small copper coins. Then he tells his disciples that she has given more than all the others because she has donated everything she had to live on (21:4). What’s surprising is that right after, Jesus’ disciples admire the Temple’s beauty, and Jesus then predicts its destruction. In effect, the widow has just given her last coin to an institution that Jesus is about to condemn.

What follows in Luke’s Gospel is the most historically transparent of the three Synoptic versions of this discourse. Where Mark 13:14 speaks cryptically of “the abomination of desolation” and instructs the reader to decode the reference, Luke strips the apocalyptic cipher entirely:

“But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near. Then let those who are in Judea flee to the mountains, and let those who are inside the city depart” (Luke 21:20–21).

No riddle. No symbol requiring interpretation. Luke names the city and describes a siege. The desolation Jesus predicts is the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in AD 70, an event his first readers had either witnessed or heard described in living memory.

This clear identification of the discourse’s subject determines how the rest of the discourse is read. Jesus is not, in this passage, mapping the end of time (as we would understand it). He is speaking as a prophet in the tradition of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, announcing judgment on the city and its temple. His startling claim, the one that contributes to his death, is that Jerusalem will not be spared when God acts to establish his kingdom “on earth, as in heaven.”

Every empire will be knocked down by the stone cut from the mountain without human hands (Dan 2:34–35). That expectation would have been normative to any first-century Judean. What shocks his hearers to learn is that Jerusalem and its temple will fall along with the empires.

Jesus closes with a word his audience could verify: “This generation will not pass away until all has taken place” (21:32). The generation standing before him would live to see it. They did. “This generation” here isn’t “the church age” or some other shoe-horned definition that makes Jesus mean what he obviously does not say. If anything, “this generation” is probably an allusion intended to identify Israel in Jesus’s day with the generation that fell dead in the wilderness (cf Ps. 95:7–11).

The widow’s coins are still there at the beginning, a quiet, devastating detail. Like so many others, she gave everything to a house that would eventually crumble. Jesus offers us more than a building. He offers us a kingdom that shall never be shaken. Jerusalem and its temple shared the same fate as Jesus. They were all destroyed/killed by the Romans. But only one would rise from the dead.

A Link to Luke 20 (ESV)

What Jesus Never Said (20:20–26)

The scribes and chief priests realize that the parable of the wicked tenants was told against them (20:19), but they cannot seize Jesus while the people are listening. So they watch him and send spies “who pretended to be sincere” (20:20). The spies have one task: to catch him in something he said, so that he can be handed over “to the authority and jurisdiction of the governor.”

The spies begin with flattery. They say that Jesus teaches rightly, shows no partiality, and teaches the way of God truly (20:21). Every word of the compliment is accurate, and none of it is meant sincerely. They are buttering him up.

The spies then set the trap. They ask whether it is lawful for them “to give tribute to Caesar, or not” (20:22). A yes would cost Jesus the crowd that protects him; a no would hand the spies a charge of sedition to carry to Pilate.

Jesus sees their craftiness and asks for a denarius. The coin carries Caesar’s likeness and inscription, and Jesus draws his conclusion from the coin itself: render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s (20:25). The answer gives the spies nothing to report. Luke writes that they were not able “in the presence of the people” to catch him, and they fall silent (20:26).

The silence does not last. When the council brings Jesus before Pilate, the accusations include his “forbidding us to give tribute to Caesar” (23:2). The charge repeats the spies’ own phrase from the temple courts. Luke’s readers remember what Jesus said in chapter 20, and so do the men who sent the spies. They failed to catch Jesus in his words, so they reported words he never spoke.

Not only did Jesus’ answer avoid their trap, but it reminded them of a truth they had forgotten and would rather not have rubbed in their face. The rule of a foreign people over the children of Israel was a sign of their sin and need for repentance. However, instead of reckonizing what was wrong and turning to God, they were colluding with the empire against God. “The things that are God’s” are, in short, everything. But Israel was God’s in a unique way. They were God’s people, God’s chosen family among all the nations and families of the world. But they had failed to give to God what was his. They had failed to be faithful tenants of what God had intrusted to them. But faced with this truth, rather than turning from their sinful ways, they double down on their wickedness and seek to kill the Son of God by reporting to the empire what Jesus never said.

The Rejected Stone (20:9–19)

Jesus wasn’t the first to speak to Israel about a vineyard. The prophet Isaiah had sung about one:

Let me sing for my beloved my love song concerning his vineyard: My beloved had a vineyard on a very fertile hill (Isa 5:1).

In that song, Yahweh does everything for the vineyard. He clears the ground, plants the choicest vines, builds a watchtower, hews out a winepress, and waits for grapes. What comes up is worthless. So the owner announces judgment: he will tear down the wall, withhold the rain, and let the vineyard be trampled. Then the prophet names the vineyard plainly: “the vineyard of the LORD of hosts is the house of Israel” (5:7). He looked for justice and found bloodshed, looked for righteousness and heard an outcry.

Jesus takes that song and applies it to his own time. The owner plants the vineyard and leaves it with tenants. At the harvest, he sends servants for his share of the fruit, and the tenants beat them and send them away empty. The servants are the prophets, sent again and again and abused again and again. Finally, the owner reasons that they will respect his son. They do not. They throw him out of the vineyard and kill him, hoping to seize the inheritance for themselves.

The logic of the parable is the logic of the song. A vineyard exists to bear fruit for its owner. God did not plant Israel for Israel’s own sake; he blessed his people so that the blessing would return to him and run out to others. The tenants’ sin is the refusal to give back what was always his. When the owner asks what he will do, the answer is the same verdict Isaiah pronounced: he will destroy those tenants and give the vineyard to others (20:16).

Then the parable turns on a single word. Jesus looks at them and quotes the psalm the pilgrims sang at the great feasts, the last of the Hallel:

The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone (Ps 118:22).

In Hebrew, the stone is אֶבֶן (ʾeben) and the son is בֵּן (ben), one consonant apart. The rejected son of the parable and the rejected stone of the psalm are the same figure. The builders, the very ones charged with raising the house of God, throw away the stone on which the whole structure depends, and God makes it the head of the corner. What the tenants discard, the owner vindicates.

The last line refuses to let the image stay decorative. Whoever falls on the stone is broken; on whomever it falls, it crushes him (20:18). The words gather up the stone of stumbling in Isaiah (Isa 8:14–15) and the stone in Daniel that grinds the kingdoms to powder (Dan 2:34–35). The scribes and chief priests understood. They knew he had told the parable against them, and they wanted to lay hands on him that very hour.

We are the others to whom the vineyard has been given, which is no ground for ease. The same stone stands in the same place. We can receive everything from God and still treat the harvest as ours without remembering that it all belongs to him. The owner will come again to settle accounts, and the son he sent is the stone on which we are either built or broken.

The God of the Living (20:27-40)

The Sadducees arrive at the temple with a trap disguised as a theological question. Levirate marriage law states that a man must marry his brother’s widow (Deut 25:5–10). So: seven brothers, one woman, all dead. Whose wife will she be at the resurrection?

The scenario is not invented from scratch. Second Maccabees 7 describes seven brothers who are martyred sequentially under Antiochus IV, each refusing to renounce their faith, and several explicitly affirm bodily resurrection as they die (2 Macc 7:9, 11, 14, 23, 29).1 That tradition almost certainly influences this exchange. If so, the Sadducees aren’t just asking an abstract philosophical question; they are challenging a type of resurrection hope that is already deeply rooted in Jewish history and imagination.

Jesus dismantles their trap in two moves.

The first is conceptual. The Sadducees construct their reductio ad absurdum scenario on an unstated assumption: that if resurrection were real, it would simply be a resumption of our present earthly life with our present social structures and all. The absurdity that follows is supposed to prove the point that resurrection isn’t real. Jesus pulls the assumption apart. Those who attain the resurrection are ἰσάγγελοι, “like angels,” a word that appears nowhere else in the New Testament. The levirate institution exists because people die; where death no longer holds, the institution is beside the point. The trap collapses before the scriptural argument even begins.

Luke offers another distinctive phrase here: those who reach the resurrection are υἱοὶ τῆς ἀναστάσεως, “sons of the resurrection” (Luke 20:36), a phrase also not found elsewhere in the New Testament. The language of sonship in Luke is important: it symbolizes identity and inheritance. The heirs of the resurrection are not merely its beneficiaries; they are defined by it.

The second move is scriptural and even more surprising than the first. Jesus does not cite a resurrection proof-text but instead quotes Exod 3:6, God’s self-identification at the burning bush: “I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” The verb is in the present tense. God does not say he was their God; he is their God. The argument is based on God’s character: the one who enters into covenant does not abandon his covenant partners to non-existence. Jesus presents his case using the terms of the Torah that they accept.

Luke then adds what Matthew and Mark omit: “for all live to him” (Luke 20:38b). Heard against the Maccabean background, the claim is a vindication of the martyrs. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and those seven brothers all live to God, held in the presence of the one who made promises and kept them, and they will live again bodily on the last day.

Luke closes the scene with one more detail his Gospel sources do not include: some of the scribes respond, “Teacher, you have spoken well” (Luke 20:39). In a chapter of unrelenting hostility, the approval is small, but Luke notices it. Opposition is not the whole story.

A Link to Luke 19 (ESV)

Who Was Seeking Whom (19:1–10)

Jesus is passing through Jericho, and a man named Zacchaeus wants to see him. Luke gives us two facts about this man before anything else: he is a chief tax collector, and he is rich. A chief tax collector in Roman Jericho did not stand at a booth collecting his own tolls. He contracted the work to subordinates and took a cut of what they extracted from the toll roads running through the region’s balsam trade, which meant his wealth rested on other men’s extortion as well as his own. Everyone in Jericho had a reason to despise him, and his height gave the crowd an easy way to keep him from Jesus without laying a hand on him. He is too short to see over them, so he runs ahead and climbs a sycamore tree.

Luke says that Zacchaeus “was seeking [ἐζήτει, ezētei] to see who Jesus was” (Luke 19:3). Hold onto that verb.

Jesus reaches the tree, looks up, and tells Zacchaeus to come down, because he intends to stay at his house that day. Zacchaeus comes down joyfully, and the crowd grumbles that Jesus has made himself the guest of a sinner ( 19:5–7). The grumble is not unfair. Zacchaeus is a sinner, and by trade a serial one.

Zacchaeus says:

“Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (19:8).

His restitution goes well beyond what Israel’s law required of a convicted thief. He offers it as a description of who he now is, not as a plea bargain for what he has done.

But it is Jesus’ answer that matters most because it is where Luke’s verb comes back. Jesus tells Zacchaeus that salvation has come to his house, “for the Son of Man came to seek [ζητῆσαι, zētēsai] and to save the lost [τὸ ἀπολωλός, to apolōlos]” (19:9–10).

That phrase is lifted nearly whole from the LORD’s own promise in Ezekiel’s oracle against Israel’s failed shepherds: “I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed” (Ezek 34:16). Ezekiel’s God takes up the shepherd’s task the appointed shepherds of Israel had abandoned.

Zacchaeus thought he was the one doing the seeking, climbing a tree for a glimpse of a passing teacher. He was the object the whole time. The seeking he assumed he had initiated already belonged to someone else.

God is seeking the lost even before they are seeking him, and he calls his people so seek the lost as well.

The King Comes to Reckon (Luke 19:11–27)

When Herod the Great died in 4 BC, his son Archelaus traveled to Rome to have his kingship confirmed by Caesar. A delegation of Jewish leaders made the same journey to oppose him, pleading that this man not be allowed to reign over them. Caesar confirmed him anyway, and when Archelaus returned, he settled accounts with those who had resisted him. He had built a palace at Jericho, the very city where Jesus now tells a story about a nobleman who goes to a far country to receive a kingdom and then return.

Luke tells us why Jesus speaks this parable:

As they heard these things, he proceeded to tell a parable, because he was near to Jerusalem, and because they supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately (Luke 19:11).

It is tempting to hear that last line as a mistake Jesus is about to correct, as though the crowd expected the kingdom now and the parable answered that it would be a long time off. The crowd is not wrong. The kingdom of God is about to appear, and the parable does not push it into some distant future. As Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, the kingdom of God is about to appear. What the crowd has wrong is not the timing but the shape. They expect the king’s arrival to mean liberation. The parable tells them it means a reckoning.

A nobleman went into a far country to receive for himself a kingdom and then return. Calling ten of his servants, he gave them ten minas, and said to them, “Engage in business until I come.” But his citizens hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, “We do not want this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:12–14).

While clearly drawing on the Archelaus frame, alongside that story lies a much older one. Israel’s God had departed from Jerusalem and the temple at the exile, and he had promised to return to his city as king. Now he is returning, in the person of the one walking up the road to Jerusalem, and not everyone is happy about it. For everyone, from the servants to those who oppose his reign, there will be a reckoning.

The reckoning has two edges. The servants are accountable for what they have done with what was entrusted to them. The one who hid his mina and called his master harsh is condemned out of his own mouth, having known the master and done nothing. The citizens who sent the delegation are another matter, and their judgment is the one Jesus will pronounce over Jerusalem within a few verses, when he weeps over the city and foretells that not one stone will be left upon another.

The crowd wanted the kingdom to appear, and it was appearing. They simply assumed its arrival could only mean vindication for them and ruin for their enemies. We make the same assumption when we long for God to set the world right, never imagining that setting it right begins with us. The king’s coming is good news, but it is good news that audits the household before it deals with the rebels, and the most exposed servant is the one who held what he was given, did nothing with it, and assumed the master’s return was no concern of his.

Weeping over the City (Luke 19:28–44)

The prophet Ezekiel observed the glory of God leaving Jerusalem before the exile and carefully recorded its course: It moved east, stopping at “the mountain that is on the east side of the city” (Ezek 11:23, referring to the Mount of Olives), and then departed from view.

Centuries later, Zechariah announced the day of the Lord’s return via the same route:

“On that day his feet shall stand on the Mount of Olives that lies before Jerusalem on the east” (Zech 14:4).

The God who departed to the east would come back from the east. That return would mark the long-awaited return of Yahweh to Zion.

Luke seems to assume his readers are already familiar with this theme. When he casually mentions that Jesus was “already on the way down the Mount of Olives” (Luke 19:37), he’s not just giving a geographic detail. He’s making a theological statement. The Lord is finally returning to his city. The day of visitation has arrived. The time has come for God to be king over all the earth (Zech 14:9).

So Jesus makes his way to the city. As he approaches, the crowd quotes Psalm 118:26, but something is off, like a familiar melody that sounds wrong when a single note is out of place.

Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven and glory in the highest!” (Luke 19:38).

Two things stand out here. First, they add the word “king” even though the Psalm makes no mention of a king. Second, they unintentionally invert the language of an earlier scene in Luke’s Gospel.

When the angels announced Jesus’ birth, they sang of “peace on earth” (Luke 2:14). The Jerusalem crowd redirects that peace upward, to heaven, away from the world below. Both issues here point to the same conclusion. The people don’t really want “peace on earth.” What they want is a conquering king who will bring peace the way Rome does—by force and at the point of a sword—and they are trying to force Jesus into that role.

Jesus refuses to be that kind of king. He is a king, and he has come to conquer, but not the enemies they think. The people’s true enemies are not the Romans or any human made in God’s image. Their real enemies are sin, death, and the devil, and Jesus will defeat them not by embracing Rome’s way of peace, but by succumbing to it.

And so, when the city comes into view, Jesus weeps.

And when he drew near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you. And they will not leave one stone upon another in you, because you did not know the time of your visitation” (Luke 19:41–44).

Found only in Luke, this lament stands at the convergence of centuries of prophetic promise, Israel’s story, and Jesus’ vocation. Israel had been waiting for its God to return, and now Yahweh is at last coming to his city and his temple to reckon with his people and make things right.

The day has come for the return of Yahweh to Zion, but the city to which he comes does not recognize him. The people see only who they want him to be, not who he truly is.

And so, the one who is the Prince of Peace declares the judgment that comes when God’s people reject his ways. Jerusalem will be torn down until there is not one stone upon another.

Luke does not preserve this lament so that Christians can condemn Jerusalem from a safe distance. The point here is not to stare and wonder how the people of Jesus’ day could have gotten it so wrong. Instead, Luke preserves this lament to make God’s people reckon with an all-important question as we prepare to celebrate Palm Sunday:

I don’t mean personal inner peace.

I mean peace at the societal, national, and global levels.

If we truly do, then why do the heroes of many Christians today seem so fundamentally different from Jesus? And why do the values they promote seem so unlike the values of the kingdom of God?

And worst of all, why do Christians continue to endorse these unchristlike heroes and anti-kingdom values in Jesus’ name?

Jesus is the Prince of Peace. His self-sacrificial love for others, his embodiment of a love that considers others more important than himself, and his obedient taking up of his cross on the way to Good Friday represent the only true way of peace in this world.

Just outside the city that rejected the Lord’s peace, Jesus would be tortured, murdered, and give his life as a ransom for many, but in doing so, he would accomplish what no earthly king ever could.

We have no right to wonder why there is so little peace in this world when the church continues to advocate for peace the way that Rome brought peace and not the way that Jesus did. Rome brought peace at the end of a sword. Jesus brought peace by being nailed to a Roman cross for the sins of the whole world.

The God who departed Jerusalem by the east and promised to return the same way kept his word. He came back down the Mount of Olives, was rejected by the city he came to save, and won the only victory that could finally bring peace on earth.

And so, as we prepare to celebrate Palm Sunday, I am left wondering whether the Prince of Peace, sitting today on his throne at the right hand of God, looks down upon his church, called to embody his values, his life, and his self-emptying for the good of others, and says:

“Would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace!” (Luke 19:42).

May God have mercy on us all when our day of visitation comes.

A Link to Luke 18 (ESV)

Recover Your Sight (18:35-43)

Luke ends the third passion prediction with a threefold statement of failure. The Twelve “understood none of these things. This saying was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said” (18:34). The very next verse places a blind man by the road outside Jericho, begging (18:35). Luke sets the two scenes side by side with nothing between them. The men who can see have just failed to see, and the man who cannot see is about to regain his sight.

The beggar hears the crowd and asks what is happening. They tell him, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by” (18:37). The name recalls the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry, when he stood in the Nazareth synagogue and read from Isaiah:

“He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind” (4:18).

The beggar calls Jesus “Son of David” and asks for mercy. When those at the front of the procession rebuke him, he cries out all the more (18:38–39). Jesus stops, has him brought near, and asks what he wants. Luke then uses the same verb three times in three verses: “Lord, let me recover my sight.” “Recover your sight; your faith has made you well.” “And immediately he recovered his sight” (18:41–43). Luke’s summaries report that Jesus gave sight to many who were blind (7:21–22), but the man outside Jericho is the only blind person whose healing Luke narrates.

Luke closes with two responses. The man “followed him, glorifying God,” and “all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God” (18:43). Nazareth rejected the promise when it was spoken; Jericho praises God when it is kept. Within a few verses, Jesus will weep over Jerusalem because the things that make for peace “are hidden from your eyes” (19:42), the same language Luke used for the Twelve in 18:34. Proximity to Jesus did not give the Twelve sight, and the temple and its crowds will not give it to Jerusalem.

The Twelve had walked with Jesus from Galilee, heard his teaching, and still could not take in what he said about his death. We face the same danger. We can recite the creed and hear the passion narrative read every Holy Week and still assume that following Jesus leads to honor rather than a cross. Then we are caught off guard when obedience costs us a promotion, a friendship, or the good opinion of people we want to impress. The blind man had no such illusions to protect. He knew what he lacked, asked for it by name, and when he received it, he did what the rich ruler could not bring himself to do earlier in the chapter (18:22–23). He followed Jesus up the road to Jerusalem.

The Widow Who Would Not Stop (18:1–8)

Luke doesn’t leave us guessing about the meaning of this parable. He tells us at the outset that Jesus spoke this parable “to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart” (18:1). The difficulty is not the meaning but the characters in the story: a judge “who neither feared God nor respected man” grants a persistent widow her request. We are evidently meant to learn something about God from him.

The trap is to read the parable as allegory, with the judge standing in for God. The rabbis had a better category for this kind of argument: qal va-homer, “light to heavy.” If even the lesser case holds, the greater holds all the more. If an unjust judge will finally give a widow justice to be rid of her, how much more will the God who loves his people answer those who cry to him? The point turns on the contrast, not the comparison.

The widow is not chosen at random. Throughout Torah and the Prophets, she stands for the one with no standing, the person whose case God himself takes up.

"He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow" (Deut 10:18).

Israel is warned not to mistreat widows (Exod 22:22), and Isaiah measures the nation’s righteousness by whether it will “plead the widow’s cause” (Isa 1:17). When this widow cries out for vindication, she cries with the whole weight of that tradition behind her. The word Luke uses is not the language of acquittal but of vindication: ἐκδίκησις, the setting right of one who has been wronged.

That is why the parable closes where it does.

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (18:8).

The question reaches back to the end of chapter 17 and to Daniel 7, where the Son of Man is vindicated and given the kingdom. The widow’s small cry for justice and the cosmic vindication of the Son of Man are the same hope at different scales. To pray “give me justice” is to pray for the world to be set right, for the kingdom to come.

This is where Jacob meets us. At the Jabbok, he seized hold of God and would not let go until he was blessed, and he came away with a new name and a limp (Gen 32:24–31). The name Israel means “wrestles with God.” To be God’s people has always meant to contend with him and refuse to let him go. Prayer that will not stop is not nagging a reluctant God. It is the posture of one who knows how the story ends and who also longs for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven.

We lose heart because the verdict seems delayed. We look at the world and see the case still open. So we come to God again and again in prayer, and that repetitive coming is itself the faith the Son of Man is looking for.

He Went Home Justified (18:9–14)

Throughout Israel’s history, the way sinners approach a holy God has remained consistent. God provides the way; the worshiper only brings their need. The extensive sacrificial system, from the tabernacle to Solomon’s Temple to the Second Temple, was based on this principle. On the Day of Atonement, the high priest entered the inner sanctuary not because of his own worth but bearing the blood of the sacrifice. No one approached the mercy seat on their own terms.

Jesus shares a parable that assumes this entire structure. He addresses it, Luke says, “to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt” (Luke 18:9). Two men go to the temple to pray. One brings his record with him; the other comes empty-handed.

The Pharisee’s prayer warrants careful consideration:

“God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get” (Luke 18:11–12).

His words are not shallow pretense. The Pharisee is almost certainly being honest. He fasts more than what Torah requires and tithes part of everything he gets. By every outward standard, he is exactly what Israel should be. But his prayer is directed just as much at himself as at God.

The tax collector adopts a different posture. He stands far away, refuses to lift his eyes to heaven, and beats his chest. His prayer is only six words in Greek: ὁ θεός, ἱλάσθητί μοι τῷ ἁμαρτωλῷ, “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13). The word ἱλάσθητί relates to the concepts of propitiation and atonement, the same group of words connected to the mercy seat and the entire Levitical system (cf. Lev 16:2, 13–15). Standing in the temple courts, this man offers the only prayer the temple was ever meant to receive.

The verdict comes in a single sentence:

“I tell you, this man went home justified rather than the other” (Luke 18:14).

The word is δεδικαιωμένος — declared righteous before the judge of heaven and earth. The tax collector received the verdict that the Pharisee assumed was already his.

The sacrificial system existed to say one thing: God provides the mercy; we bring only our need. The tax collector understood what every altar and offering had communicated for centuries. The Pharisee, despite his precision, completely missed it. He approached God with a full résumé and left empty-handed. The tax collector came with nothing and returned home justified.

A Link to Luke 17 (ESV)

I Want To Be Left Behind (17:26-33)

The Pharisees ask when the kingdom of God is coming. Jesus tells them that it will not arrive with the kinds of signs that can be observed (17:20). Then he tells them that “the kingdom of God is in the midst of you” (17:21). The last words there translate the phrase ἐντὸς ὑμῶν, which could mean “within you” (KJV, NKJV), as if Jesus were saying that the kingdom is entirely spiritual, but the ESV’s “in the midst of you” is more accurate. Jesus is saying, “You don’t need to go looking for the kingdom of God because it is already present with you” (cf. Isa 45:16).

He then turns to his disciples and says that a day is coming when they will want to see him (“see one of the days of the Son of Man”, Luke 17:26), but they will not be able to. People might tell them to go looking for him, but they won’t have to guess. When the Son of Man is vindicated, it will be like lightning that lights up the sky. They won’t have to guess what happened or look for signs. It will be plain as day. But before then he must first suffer many things and be rejected by “this generation” (17:25). Jesus is again talking about something happening in his present. This generation, the one in his own day, will reject him and ultimately crucify him.

Jesus explains what those days will be like by assuming his disciples already know two stories. “Just as it was in the days of Noah, so will it be in the days of the Son of Man” (17:26). People “were eating and drinking and marrying and being given in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and the flood came and destroyed them all” (17:27). He repeats the pattern for Lot: people were “eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building,” until the day Lot went out from Sodom and “fire and sulfur rained from heaven and destroyed them all” (17:28–29).

What most people miss, because they want to read texts like these as future predictions of the Second Coming, is the staggering claim Jesus is making. Jesus is predicting judgment on “this generation,” the Jerusalem of his own day, and he is directly comparing it to the judgment that fell on Sodom and Gomorrah. The judgment to fall on Jerusalem will be just like the judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah “when the Son of Man is revealed” (17:30). What Jesus is doing is tying his own vindication (the coming of the Son of Man) to the destruction of Jerusalem. That Jesus truly was who he said he was, that he was the Son of Man rejected by “this generation,” will be revealed with unquestionable certainty when judgment falls on the city.

That Jesus isn’t thinking of future cosmological destruction is made certain by what Jesus says next:

“On that day, let the one who is on the housetop, with his goods in the house, not come down to take them away, and likewise let the one who is in the field not turn back” (17:31)

You can’t run from cosmological destruction by fleeing directly from your rooftop without gathering your belongings or by running away without returning home if you’re working in the field.

Both stories share a second feature as deliberate as the disaster itself. Nobody in Noah’s or Lot’s generation was caught doing anything unusually wicked. They were eating, marrying, buying, building, ordinary activities that fill an ordinary day. Judgment did not interrupt sin in the act. It interrupted life lived as though the day carried no weight at all.

Then Jesus says: “Remember Lot’s wife” (17:32). Genesis says only that she looked back at the city behind her and became a pillar of salt (Gen 19:26). Jesus is telling his disciples, “When the destruction on the city comes, don’t be like Lot’s wife. Don’t look back. Just run.” This leads directly to the “left behind” verses:

^“I tell you, in that night there will be two in one bed. One will be taken and the other left. There will be two women grinding together. One will be taken and the other left” (17:34-35).

You probably know the song. “Two men walking up a hill. One disappears, and one’s left standing still. I wish we’d all be ready.” With due apologies to the songwriter, no one here is “disappearing” unless by “disappearing” you mean killed or taken prisoner. In these verses, you want to be left behind because the ones who are taken are taken in judgment. Notice that the disciples want to know “where” they’ll be taken. Jesus essentially says, “You’ll know where they’ve taken their corpses by where the vultures are gathering.”

Among many things, this section of Luke’s Gospel should remind us how important it is to read the New Testament in its historical context first and foremost. There are certainly other appropriate ways to read the Scriptures, and they can be immensely helpful. But they should always be built upon what these words would have meant in their original context. To start otherwise so often leads to confusion and bad theology.

We Have Only Done Our Duty (17:7–10)

The figure in this parable is not a hired laborer who has put in his hours and earned his wage. He is a δοῦλος (doulos), a slave, very likely the only one a small farmer owned, who works the field by day and the kitchen by night. The whole picture turns on a question with an obvious answer. When the servant comes in from plowing, does the master tell him to come and recline at the table (17:7)? No. He tells him to put on an apron and serve supper, and to eat only afterward (17:8). The servant has done what he was bound to do, and by doing his tasks, he puts the master under no obligation.

Jesus presses the comparison onto his disciples. The slave’s labor establishes no claim on the master, and neither does ours on God.

“Does he thank the servant because he did what was commanded?” (17:9).

The expected answer is no. This lands hardest on the assumption that it is built to expose, the assumption that obedience accrues to our account, that the hours we have logged in prayer, service, and study place God in our debt. The parable answers that the account does not exist. We are servants in a household we did not build, doing work we were commanded to do, and the doing earns us nothing.

The word translated “unworthy” sharpens the point. The Greek is ἀχρεῖος (achreios), which carries the sense of useless or worthless, even unprofitable. But, in fact, the servant is not useless; the field was plowed, and supper was made. He is useless in the sense that he has added nothing to his standing. He has produced no surplus, no merit beyond what was owed. He has only done his duty.

We say as much every time we come to the table. Before we receive the body and blood of Christ, we confess that we do not presume to come trusting in our own righteousness, but in God’s manifold and great mercies, that we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs. We say it because it is true at our best and not only at our worst. The church is not a community of sinners alongside the righteous, because there are no righteous persons to stand alongside. There are only servants who, having done all that was commanded, say, “We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty” (17:10), and whose one only hope in life and death is that it is God’s nature always to have mercy.

The One Who Returned (17:11–19)

When Jesus healed ten lepers on his way to Jerusalem, he was, as he does elsewhere, doing what other prophets had done before him, but on a larger scale. In 2 Kings 5, the Syrian commander Naaman came to the prophet Elisha covered in leprosy and was healed. Jesus himself referenced that story at the beginning of his ministry, noting specifically that out of all the lepers in Israel, only this foreigner was healed (Luke 4:27). Luke’s reader, prepared by that earlier story, cannot miss what is happening here. A Samaritan leper is healed while the nine Jewish ones walk on. Naaman has returned.

All ten cry out for mercy, and all ten receive it. As they go to show themselves to the priests, Luke writes that “they were cleansed” (17:14). The word is καθαρίζω, the language of ritual purification, the category the priests dealt with. Ten men enter the story as unclean. Ten leave it cleansed. And yet, the story does not end there.

One leper turns back. The Samaritan. Luke’s description of what follows is deliberately blurred:

Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus’ feet, giving him thanks (17:15–16).

He praises God and falls at Jesus’ feet. Luke does not separate these two actions. The worship given to Israel’s God is shown by prostrating oneself before Jesus of Nazareth. This is Luke’s subtle Christological argument, conveyed not through words but through posture.

Then Jesus says something unexpected. The man has already been healed. Every medical fact about him has changed. Yet Jesus says, “Your faith has made you well” (17:19). The word is no longer καθαρίζω. It is σῴζω, the verb for salvation. Jesus is talking about more than just skin being restored.

Ten received cleansing. One received salvation. The difference wasn’t in what Jesus offered but in who came back.

This is why gratitude isn’t just a virtue to develop; it’s a sign of understanding. How easily we praise and give thanks shows how well we recognize what we’ve been given and how truly unwell we once were. The nine went their way, probably happy. They had been physically cleansed. Only the one who knew his deep need understood the significance of the gift. He went home saved.

He was a foreigner. Like Naaman, he was, by every social and religious standard, the last person anyone would expect to be healed. He was also the only one who returned to worship and give thanks, and therefore the only one who was saved.