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 9 (ESV)

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

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)

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

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)

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)

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)

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)

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

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 John 20 (ESV)

The True Gardener (20:11–18)

John is the only Evangelist who tells us that Jesus was arrested in a garden (John 18:1), and he is also the only one who tells us that Jesus was buried in a garden (John 19:41). This repetition is intentional. John is sharing the climax of a story that started in a garden a very long time ago.

In Genesis, Adam was placed in a garden to tend and keep it (Gen 2:15). He was given one command, and he broke it, resulting in the loss of the garden. The ground, once a place of life and fellowship with God, became the land where thorns and thistles grew, where labor was cursed, and where death entered the human story (Gen 3:17–19). What followed was the long, painful story of a world east of Eden, trying and failing to find its way back.

John depicts the arrest and burial of Jesus in gardens to show that the story of Eden is coming to an end. The last Adam enters a garden not to tend it but to be taken from it, handed over to sinful men, tried, and crucified. He is laid in a garden tomb, as the curse of Genesis 3 reaches its darkest and fullest expression. The first Adam lost the garden through disobedience. The last Adam surrenders his life in obedience, taking upon himself the consequences of what the first Adam set in motion. Where the first Adam grasped, the last Adam gave. Where the first Adam hid, the last Adam was handed over. The garden, once the site of humanity’s greatest failure, becomes the place of its only hope.

The Sabbath ended quietly. Then, on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary went to the tomb. She found it empty, wept, and then turned around and saw a man she did not recognize. Thinking he was the gardener, she asked him where the body had been taken (John 20:15). John does not rush to correct her assumption, because at a deeper level, it’s not really a mistake. She stands in the garden where Jesus was buried, on the first day of a new week, looking at the last Adam, and she is more right than she knows.

The risen Christ is the true gardener of God’s new creation, come to restore what the first Adam lost.

The First Day of the Week (20:1–10)

Jesus was crucified on Friday, the sixth day—the day humanity was created (Gen 1:26-31). He rested in a tomb in a garden on the Sabbath, echoing God’s rest on the seventh day of creation (Gen 2:2-3). Then, “on the first day of the week,” he rose from the dead (John 20:1).

These days may seem like just historical details, but they point to a bigger reality.

Twice in John 20, John tells us it was “the first day of the week” (vv. 1, 19). But in Greek, the phrase is striking: τῇ μιᾷ τῶν σαββάτων—literally, “the first of the sabbaths.” Greek has its own perfectly good word for “week” (ἑβδομάς), but John intentionally chooses the Hebrew-rooted word “sabbath” instead.

Why? Because John wants us to see that something monumental has happened. The first week of the old creation has come to its end. God created the world, humanity sinned, God became human, God died, and God rested on the Sabbath in a tomb. The whole arc of the first creation points to this moment.

But when Jesus rises, he rises on the first day. A new week begins—the first week of the new creation. And what did God do on the first day of the first week of creation? He spoke into the darkness and said, “Let there be light” (Gen 1:3).

On the first day of this new week, God spoke into the darkness of death itself and said, “Let there be light.” And the Light of the world rose from the dead (John 8:12).

The Sabbath was always meant to point forward to the day when God’s rest—his completed work of creation and redemption—would fill the earth. The resurrection is that future arriving in our present. Jesus’ rising on the first day doesn’t leave the Sabbath behind; it fulfills it. The true Sabbath rest isn’t about stopping work one day a week. It’s about entering the rest that comes from living in the life of the risen Christ (Heb 4:9-10).

The resurrection isn’t just an event that happened on a specific day in history. It occurred on the first day of the new creation—a creation in which God is remaking everything by the same power that raised Jesus from the dead (2 Cor 5:17; Rom 8:11). We are living in that first week now, moving toward the true Sabbath rest that God always intended and making his Sabbath rest known here and now.

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)

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 John 19

The Hyssop and the Lamb (19:28–30) – Good Friday

Every Passover, Israel rehearsed the same story. A lamb was slaughtered; its blood was applied to the doorposts with a branch of hyssop; the destroyer passed over; a people were freed (Exod 12:22). The hyssop was a simple, shrubby plant, but it carried the blood that meant life. On a Friday afternoon in Jerusalem, it appears again.

John carefully marks the moment. Jesus, knowing “that all was now finished” (John 19:28), speaks: “I thirst.” John adds that he said this “to fulfill the Scripture” — a signal to the reader that something specific is in view. The psalm behind the words is not hard to identify. The righteous sufferer of Ps 69 cries out: “for my thirst they gave me sour wine to drink” (Ps 69:21). Jesus does not improvis at the cross. He inhabits the script that Scripture prepared for him, right down to his final thirst.

A jar of sour wine sits nearby. Someone raises a sponge soaked in it on a branch of hyssop (ὑσσώπῳ) and holds it to his lips. The hyssop isn't just a small detail. John has been connecting the Passover symbols throughout his account of Jesus' passion: Jesus is crucified on the Day of Preparation, the afternoon when the temple lambs are slaughtered (John 19:14). Now, at the moment of death, the hyssop appears again. The evangelist shows us what is happening. Jesus dies as the true Passover lamb, and what Israel has been practicing for generations reaches its final point.

He drinks the sour wine and says:

“It is finished” (John 19:30).

τετέλεσται is not a cry of defeat. The verb τελέω conveys the sense of a task completed and brought to its destination. Jesus has used this language before. “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work,” he says at the well (John 4:34). In the Upper Room, John notes that Jesus loved his own “to the end” (John 13:1). In his prayer the night before: “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do” (John 17:4). The cross is not an interruption of that mission. It is the mission, arrived and fulfilled.

The hyssop that once bore Passover blood now touches the lips of the Passover Lamb himself. The psalm that voiced the righteous sufferer finds its final speaker. What Israel rehearsed for centuries, Jesus completes once and for all.

“We have a law!” (19:1–11)

“We have a law!” I hear phrases like this often these days—usually to explain why Christians can't (or won't) challenge laws that cause human suffering. After all, we're supposed to “be subject to governing authorities” (Rom 13:1), right? But does that biblical command really mean “If it's the law, it's the law,” and therefore “all good Christians” must comply without question?

The appeal “We have a law!” was often used against Jesus. “We have a law about the Sabbath!” “We have a law about ritual purity!” “We have a law about associating with the wicked!”

Now, that same language is used to condemn Jesus to death.

The Jews answered him, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die because he has made himself the Son of God”(John 19:7).

What happens when our laws oppress the innocent and even condemn them to death?1 How are we “good Christians” to respond to such laws? Should we obey? Should we assert Caesar’s right to bear the sword and the Christian’s duty to submit to governing authorities, regardless of the impact on human dignity, flourishing, and life?

And he said to them, “The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27).

To insist “We have a law!” while humans suffer and die because of that law is to align with those who condemned Jesus to death. It is to align with Caesar, Pilate, and the empires from this world in opposition to the kingdom of God that Jesus was establishing through his death and resurrection. It is to loudly and clearly declare, when faced with the true King who sacrifices himself so that others might live, “We have no king but Caesar” (John 19:15). 

A Link to John 13 (ESV)

The Lord Who Kneels (13:1–20)

The night before Passover, Isaiah’s Servant and Lord takes a towel.

Israel had long anticipated the one who would bear the shame no one else would bear (Isa 52:13–53:12). He would humble himself to a place of disgrace and accomplish what earthly power never could. John begins his account of Jesus' death not with an arrest but with a basin. Jesus gets up from the table, sets aside his outer garment, and starts to wash his disciples’ feet (John 13:4–5).

That night, Jesus washed feet that he had created.

John’s language is intentional. The verb he uses for “laid aside” (τίθησιν τὰ ἱμάτια) reflects the language Jesus uses elsewhere about laying down his life: “I lay down my life that I may take it up again” (John 10:17). In the same way, when the washing is finished, Jesus picks up his garments again (John 13:12).

The footwashing is more than just a lesson in servanthood. It is the cross, enacted in miniature the night before it happens. Jesus’s life is one continuous downward movement: from the right hand of God, to a manger in Bethlehem, to a basin in the upper room, to a cross outside the city walls (Phil 2:6–8).

It is worth noting that John does not record the words of institution. He mentions no broken bread, no cup, no “This is my body” or “This is my blood.” For John, the footwashing already says it all. The Lord who stoops to wash his disciples’ feet is interpreting his own death before it happens.

Peter understands none of this. His protest, “You shall never wash my feet” (John 13:8), is not rudeness; it is instinct. But Jesus’s answer is firm:

“If I do not wash you, you have no share with me” (John 13:8).

Discipleship does not begin with what you do for Jesus. It begins with receiving what you cannot do for yourself. The one who refuses to be washed cannot belong to the one who washes.

The Passover setting deepens the scene. John places the footwashing explicitly “before the feast of the Passover” (John 13:1), and the “clean/not clean” exchange that follows already has Judas in view (John 13:10–11). Jesus is preparing a people for a New Exodus in which people are cleansed by him through the washing with water.

The ὑπόδειγμα he leaves them (John 13:15), usually rendered “example,” is more than an ethical pattern. It is the shape of the community he is forming: “As I have done to you, you also are to do” (John 13:15). The cross not only saves us. It reshapes us.

On this night, before the bread is broken and the cup is raised, the Lord of heaven and earth gets down on his knees as the servant of all. Go, and do likewise.

A New Commandment (13:31–35)

We want to reach the lost. We aim to evangelize all nations and peoples. We want (to quote our vision statement) “to see the world, especially the places in which we live, work, and worship, filled with disciples of Jesus Christ.”

But how will the world identify us as his disciples?

Surely, it will be through our exegetical skill and theological insight. Surely, it will be our ability to parse Greek verbs and quote the church fathers from memory. Right?

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (13:34–35).

When I typed the words “Christian hate” into Google just now, the top result was a Reddit post titled “Why is there so much hate in Christianity?” When I scrolled down a little further, I found this question on Quora: “If Jesus Christ preached love, why do Christians show so much hate?”

The phrase “so much” really stands out to me in both questions. It’s not just that Christians are so widely known for hatred that people are questioning online how it could be so, but rather that Christians are known for “so much” hatred.

But Jesus commands us to love: love God, love your neighbor, and love one another.

That is how all people will know that we are his disciples. If we want to reach the world and save the lost, it starts with love.

And if you want to see what love looks like, it looks like kneeling to wash the feet of someone who will deny you and someone else who will betray you fatally.

A Link to Luke 22 (ESV)

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)

When Jerusalem is Named (Luke 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)

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)

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)

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.