Luke 19
When I look at the Gospels chronologically, I see the ebbs and flows of Jesus’s ministry. John doesn’t necessarily take a chronological view, but the Synoptic Gospels tend to, and today’s reading in Luke 19 brings us to the beginning of Jesus’s final earthly week.
The Arc of His Ministry
His ministry began with a baptism that few understood, and He was immediately thrust into the wilderness. There was suffering and difficulty there, 40 days without food. I know how hangry I can get by lunchtime, and He went 40 days.
From there He launched into His ministry, and it gathered momentum. It is a beautiful thing to see. But before long the questions and pushback from the Pharisees began. The more Jesus exposed their wrongheadedness, their misplaced priorities, and their lack of true submission to God, the more the pressure grew, until the religious leaders were plotting to kill Him.
Many who encountered Jesus were convinced He was special. A few were convinced He was the Messiah, and that number kept growing. But others resisted or turned away, for different reasons:
- The fearful, who had something to lose.
- The disappointed, who “supposed that the kingdom of God was to appear immediately” (Luke 19:11, ESV) and wanted a different kind of king.
- The deceived, who figured the religious leaders knew more than they did, so surely they knew what they were talking about.
- The devious, who could not abide Jesus’s teaching and would not sit still long enough to weigh what was true.
Could we be wrong? The risk to their positions of power should never have been what motivated them. The search for truth, and for living and speaking it, should have been. That is not what happened.
The Curious Tax Collector
Zacchaeus was a chief tax collector. Tax collectors were notorious for betraying the Jewish people and for extorting more than they should. Yet this man was intensely curious about Jesus.
Jesus went right to him, called him by name, and went to his house. He rewarded Zacchaeus’s curiosity in a way that brought him to the realization of his sin. “Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold” (Luke 19:8). That is genuine repentance, a real recognition of his need and a real response.
What We Do With What We’re Given
Then Jesus tells a parable. A nobleman gives each of ten servants one mina and says, “Engage in business until I come” (Luke 19:13). When he returns, one has turned his mina into ten, and another has made five. Both are rewarded.
The third hid his mina in a handkerchief. “I was afraid of you,” he said (Luke 19:21). There is almost a tendency to want to feel sorry for him, yet he was given money to steward, and he didn’t. Was he fearful? Was he lazy? What he wasn’t doing was trusting that his master had given him this to take care of and to grow. Boy, that one hits close to home.
The master takes his mina and gives it to the servant who has ten. With an election tomorrow, I can’t help noticing how that runs against so much of the rhetoric and promises we’ve been hearing. Being rich or poor is not what causes us to be viewed one way or the other in God’s eyes. It’s what we do with what we’re given. We can’t be fearful, and we can’t be deceived. We need to be faithful, trust Him, and use what God has given us for kingdom purposes.
Down the Mount of Olives
Jesus now comes down the Mount of Olives. I’ve come down that hill. I’ve seen the graves with rocks on top of them, thousands and thousands covering the hillside.
It is a triumphal procession, but not everyone is praising Him. The crowd shouts, “Blessed is the King who comes in the name of the Lord!” (Luke 19:38), the words of Psalm 118. Jesus wasn’t scripting what the people said. And He came riding a colt, just as Zechariah had prophesied: “humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey” (Zechariah 9:9). It was happening right before their eyes.
You would think the Pharisees would begin putting two and two together. Instead they say, “Teacher, rebuke your disciples” (Luke 19:39). Jesus refuses: “I tell you, if these were silent, the very stones would cry out” (Luke 19:40). Having stood on that hillside, I can almost picture it. One way or another, He was going to be praised.
The Lamb of God
Then He enters the temple. Jesus has grown more and more open over the last several readings, even raising Lazarus from the dead just two miles from Jerusalem. Now He drives out those who are selling and declares, “you have made it a den of robbers” (Luke 19:46). He is poking the proverbial bear, because He knows God’s plan has Him on a cross by the end of the week.
The timing is no accident. At the first Passover, a spotless lamb was sacrificed so the death angel would pass over the Israelites in Egypt. Jesus arrives the week of Passover to become the true Lamb of God, “a lamb without blemish or spot,” foreknown “before the foundation of the world” (1 Peter 1:19–20), for the sins of the people.
This is where fearful, disappointed, and deceived move to devious, and Jesus had already told us it was coming. Tucked into the parable of the minas is a detail I skipped past above. The nobleman’s own citizens hated him and sent a delegation after him, saying, “We do not want this man to reign over us” (Luke 19:14).
By the end of the chapter, that line has walked off the page. “The chief priests and the scribes and the principal men of the people were seeking to destroy him” (Luke 19:47). The King has come, riding into Jerusalem exactly as promised, and their answer is the same as the citizens’: we will not have this man reign over us. They will plot, they will trump up charges, and they will do away with this troublemaker. In their eyes that’s all He was, but He was the Son of God, the Lamb of God, the Savior of the world, who was and is Lord.
A question to consider: What has God placed in my hands that I’ve hidden away out of fear?
Be blessed and be a blessing.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible, © 2001 by Crossway.
