Luke 13:1-35

Notes of Christ's Sermons

Luke 13:0

Luke undertook to be very minute and exhaustive in his statement of Gospel facts. He was going to do better than many other writers had done. He said so with cool frankness: "Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eye-witnesses, and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also" that is a curious expression. We expected him to say: Forasmuch as many have done this work there is no need for me to do it. But he makes the very fact that there were other writers a reason why there should be one more. That was good reasoning; it should prevail in all the lines and departments of Christian life and action. The contrary policy often supersedes it, and brings ministers and churches into great discomfort and enfeeblement. Men will say, You have so many helpers, you have no need of me. They are always more or less dishonest men, not intentionally so; intentional dishonesty is perfectly vulgar and wholly detestable, and nobody lays claim to it; but when men say, "There are so many preachers I need not be one; so many deacons I need not be another; so many helpers there is no need of me," they are not conducting a Christian argument, they are, with all their graciousness, unconsciously jealous and spiteful, but not sufficiently so to prevent them conducting family prayer in the evening as if they were as good as their neighbours. Luke reasoned in the right way; he said, Many men are taking up this subject, I will do what I can in it; I think I can beat some of them: "It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order." Will the book be as good as the preface? I fancy not when the subject is Jesus Christ. The first sentence is often the best. Why? Because the subject grows. No man can ever prepare his imagination for the glory of that theme. The young preacher feels this; he buckles to with a brave heart, and says he will work honestly all day, and pray most of the night, and produce such discourses as will satisfy his best ambition. He empties his inkhorn, does all he can, and then puts his young hand upon his mouth and says, Unprofitable! I have failed! I had an ambition high as heaven, bright as the unclouded noon; but I have failed! He does not do justice to himself. The Lord does not pronounce that judgment upon him; he says, Thou hast not failed: industry never fails; conscience always succeeds; thou hast won a right bright crown. Cheer thee! It is not the man who has failed, it is the God who has exceeded all ever thought of in prayer, ever dreamed of in poetry.

Still we expected more from Luke than from the others, and we get more. He does not see some things as Mark saw them. It is fashionable shall we say, with due mental reservation, pedantic? to point out that Luke was the observing writer. Mark observed a great many things that Luke never saw, or at least never recorded. Matthew also had his own way of looking at things: and as for John, what was he looking at? Apparently at nothing, his inner eyes were fastened on the soul of Christ. If Luke had sharp eyes, what ears John had! he heard whisperings of the heart, throbbings and beatings and sighings. And what a gift of expression! he turned all that he heard into noble sweet music for the soul's comforting in all the cloudy days of the Church. But Luke says he will set down things "in order"; the others have been good historians, but a little wanting in the power of grouping and classifying; good historians, but poor editors. Luke will break things up into chapters, and verses, and paragraphs, and sections, and he will attend to chronological sequence. We need mechanical men in the Church, people that know when to begin a new paragraph, and to codify laws, and to do a good many useful little things. But when Luke comes to his thirteenth chapter he is obliged to condense. He cannot overtake Christ except by condensation, a note, a line, a catchword, a significant phrase, and he thinks he can find all the rest when he goes home to write it out. He cannot. Even Luke says he must put things together in a somewhat hurried and condensed fashion. Blessed be God! It would seem as if God himself must condense, because he cannot overtake himself; so he must put here a syllable, and there a sign, and otherwhere some hint of meaning, in burning bush, in. sacred wine, in bread blessed so blessed that it becomes flesh; he will condense, he will bring things to a sharp issue; he will put in a memorable word, and that word shall stand for a whole library.

This is the way with his book. As we have often said, all other good books are in the Bible. They are variations of it; they are never improvements upon it; they do nothing outside its lines, but they wisely turn to highest advantage what is to be found within its limits. The Bible is the condensed wisdom of God. There are commentators who find sequence in this chapter; there are men bold enough to say that the parable concerning the fig tree follows admirably after the short discourse about what occurred to the Galilæans and those eighteen upon whom the tower of Siloam fell. Without seeing the sequence literally we may feel it spiritually. Let us, then, regard this chapter as a series of notes of Christ's sermons. They were sermons that bore reporting. Sometimes the most humiliating thing you can do to a preacher is to try to quote something he has said. He never recognises it; he is perfectly sure he never said it, he has a latent conviction that you made it up: but as you get good from it he is content that you should assign it to his authorship, if you please. But Jesus Christ had a sermon in every sentence, so that if you could not quote in detail you could quote the whole in condensation and suggestion. His were little sentences, but the little sentences were focalised infinities of thought. Luke, therefore, gathers a good deal even in this condensed chapter, and gives us a many-sided view of Jesus Christ. What would we give for a handful of notes used by the Saviour? He never wrote a word. He never preached what is called with blasphemy a "finished sermon." We now have "finished" preachers. There is a sense in which that is true. This man so talked that little children opened their eyes in amazement, and women wondered at the gracious words which proceeded out of his lips, and old age said, "Never man spake like this man." He himself was the discourse; he was in very deed the Gospel "I am the truth"; he therefore never did anything but preach, because he preached as he breathed; it was a continual forthgiving of deity to humanity. He remarked upon the anecdotes and stories of the times most tersely and instructively. In nearly all ages men have loved startling anecdotes. There were men who told him of the Galilæans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices, and they thought they were giving him some information. He said, Pay next to no attention to the anecdotes of the day; do not ground upon the incidents of the time generalisations which cannot be sustained. You suppose that these Galilæans were the supreme sinners because they suffered such things: you are wrong. God is not fantastic in his action. You say that if they had not done so much that was wrong they never could have suffered as they did at the hands of Pilate: nothing of the kind: by so talking you despoil history of its genius and providence of its purpose. I tell you, except ye repent ye shall all perish: attend to yourselves: do not live upon the anecdotes which relate to other people, but enter into self-judgment. The "likewise" does not refer to a literal vengeance or method of punishment, but it refers to the inevitable, unchangeable gracious law, that whatsoever a man soweth that shall he also reap. Jesus Christ was not so much interested in the anecdotes as the people were. They had heard of eighteen people being killed by a tower that had fallen down, and Jesus said, "Suppose ye that these Galilæans were sinners above all the Galilæans, because they suffered such things?"

Here we have a doctrine capable of broad application. How foolishly we judge the Almighty! We say that certain men sought their own pleasure on the Lord's Day, and they were drowned. Nothing of the sort. Do not degrade the universe. We say that certain persons having done certain things were struck down dead, and this was a sign of the divine wrath. Such is not the God, the Father, in whom we believe. Are the people therefore wrong in their inferences? They are wrong because they are too narrow. They might avail themselves of the same great truth, and do it on the right lines, and thus save themselves from contempt and their doctrine from repudiation. From eternity, it is necessary that whoso does wrong should go to perdition. He cannot go anywhere else. That is the law. It was not made by the New Testament; it is not a dogma invented by Christian thinkers: it is the necessity of the universe. Creation casts out of her motherly heart those that will plague and destroy the purpose and intent of God. The son of perdition can only go to hell. Then we are so very apt to be liberal in awarding divine judgments, under some peculiar and inexplicable semi-consciousness that by so doing we are almost equal to the divine Being himself. There is a great comfort to some hearts in judging other people; in this, as in other respects, we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Jesus Christ will have no false interpretations of events; he will have no false morals drawn from accidents and anecdotes. We are bound every man to consider his own life, his own conscience, his own duty; let him learn from history to apply history to himself. How prone we are to look upon history as a riddle which we have to guess if we can! Now why did that tower fall upon those eighteen people? Then we have a series of conjectures, and these we call exposition. One minister asks with solemnity too awful to be sincere, "Why is not the name of Job's wife given?" Then he answers himself with a wit too profound to be genuine, "Why should it have been given?" And this we call exposition! Jesus Christ sweeps away all this rubbish; he will have none of it. He says, You are despoiling the meaning of God's providence: you do not comprehend what God is doing: he means all death to teach life; all punishment to teach caution; all judgment to indicate the solemnity, the grandeur, the all but divinity of his universe. Luke takes down enough of this to make it perfectly clear that it was useless to go to Jesus Christ to tell him the last anecdote. He was an awful man to talk to if you wished to fritter away his time or to turn trifles into events of importance.

Why can we not get the Church to be serious, real, fundamental, to get at the philosophy of things? Ministers have no encouragement to search into these matters, because there is hardly a congregation in the world that would endure a prolonged and exhaustive study of the Scriptures. Now Jesus Christ, according to some commentators, speaks a parable upon this very subject. The anecdote of the newsmongers suggested a parable to the divine genius. Some people mistake an anecdote for a parable, and a parable for an anecdote. A parable has infinite colour, throb, suggestion, wisdom. Jesus now began to tell what happened. Did it happen literally? Perhaps not. But literal happening is nothing. What we want is the truth, the necessity of life. Truth is larger than fact. Fiction is the largest truth, when rightly managed, when properly interpreted. So Jesus Christ relates a parable: "A certain man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard." He lays down the doctrine in this parable that he will have nothing to do with uselessness. He makes nothing of ornament; he will not listen to the plea that the fig tree looks well, is an ornament in the place which it occupies, and although there is no fruit, there is an abundance of leafage, and an artist would be very pleased to take a sketch of the tree. The meaning of the whole universe is utility. Utility is a word which has been abused by being narrowed, depleted of its force and meaning. Utility is a wide word. He is useful who grasps a hand in silence; but it is a masonic grip and a masonic sign. He is useful who gives a little child a red and blue and yellow picture oh, so crude in colour that the trained eye could not look upon it: but the child's eyes round into bigness and delight when they see such vividness. He is useful who gives a shoot of ivy to some poor man to plant in his inch of garden that it may climb round his windows and talk spring and summer to him. He is useful who suggests ideas, excites noblest thought; he most useful who having the gift of prayer lifts men right up to heaven's gate. It is in this sense that Jesus Christ will have nothing but that which is useful, fruitful, real: "Herein is my Father glorified, that you bear much fruit."

But is there not something higher than usefulness in this wondrous parable? Yes. When did Jesus Christ speak without telling all he knew, in suggestion? Every sentence of his contains every other sentence. We have to search for it, to grow its meaning, and for that we want summers warmer than any that have shone upon earth and time. The first verse of the Bible is the whole Bible. There is nothing more in the Bible than there is in the first chapter cf Genesis, and there is nothing more in the first chapter of Genesis than is in the first verse. How it grows! How it reveals itself! How it looks at us, and withdraws; broadens upon us and contracts! How it tantalises, and yet gratifies! How it fills the imagination, how it thrills the heart! So in this very parable we have the great doctrine of intercession. We cannot explain it; but it having been revealed to us as a doctrine we acknowledge it. We have been told that there is one who prays our prayers over again, and makes them by his spirit and addition his own prayers "He ever liveth to make intercession for us," to translate our meaning, to keep back our ignorance and selfishness, and as it were to offer the wine of our realest love and need to God. This is our comfort in prayer. When the prayer has fled away from us like a liberated bird the Lord Jesus undertakes the next office, a sacred, self-imposed duty; and when we hear of our prayers again we hear of them through the same medium, in answers of quietness, rich peace, contentment, ineffable restful-ness. This is how the Lord's intercession is granted to us in gracious answers. We cannot tell how, but we know it. We make mistakes in our ignorance. We are mocked because we pray for a fine day that the children may enjoy their summer excursion. There be long-headed philosophers, too courteous to laugh outright, but too human not to smile, who tell us that we want to rearrange the solar system. These unbaptised brethren are always anxious about the solar system. It is a wonderful thing to them, because they have never seen anything else. If they had once seen God, they never would have mentioned the solar system any more. But when man's great idea of space, and weight, magnitude, force, and velocity, is all concentrated in the solar system, it is exceedingly desirable that Sunday school teachers should not disturb the comfort and the peacefulness of that sublime mechanism. They may be right; but whether they are or not, their view has nothing to do with the energy and the success of prayer. I can pray for a fine day for the excursion, for fine weather that the harvest may be got in; I can pray God to send the haymakers a whole heavenful of sunshine because we want food in for the beasts that perish; and having said my prayer I shall have an answer. I have prayed for that dear little wasting child, now almost skin and bone, and he will live even the doctors cannot kill him. He will live. But the word "live" may have to be enlarged; I may have to pass from one lexicon to another to get broader, deeper, truer definition; and when the little child, in the language of earth, dies, I shall see him in every glittering star and every blooming flower, and hear his little chatter in every babbling brook, and he will seem to fill all nature with his little blessed presence.

We must not narrow terms and rob them of their meaning because every word we have does not end in itself, if it be a vital and important and necessary word. Bread does not end at the baker's shop. It is not in the power of any baker to limit the meaning of the word bread. Water is not limited by channels and torrents and pouring clouds: water there is for the soul's drinking cool, refreshing, pure water. "Live" does not mean some action of the body, some attitude of the anatomy: live means something, we cannot yet tell altogether what, in reference to love, thought, development, service, pureness, worship. Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord: for they do but enlarge their sphere of service and get nearer to their Maker. The intercession of the text was answered. The intercession of Christ is answered. The answers which are received to our prayers are greater than the prayers themselves; otherwise man would be equal to God; man would say, I prayed for so much and got it. But the Lord gives exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.

What do you suppose the people did after all this? A parable like this ought to have saved a man from all criticism, and given him the very highest place in his time. Any man who spoke that parable ought to have had, according to material measure, the very finest house in the land, the noblest position in the whole country. The creator of a parable like that might have created all the stars, and the doing of it would not have been equal to the creation of the parable. What became of him?

"And he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, Woman, thou art loosed from thine infirmity. And he laid his hands on her: and immediately she was made straight, and glorified God. And the ruler of the synagogue answered with indignation, because that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath day, and said unto the people, There are six days in which men ought to work: in them therefore come and be healed, and not on the Sabbath day" ( Luk 13:10-14 ).

The Jews had their own way of doing things. It it was a case of life and death the doctor might prescribe on the Sabbath day, but the doctor was not to pay the slightest attention to chronic cases of any kind; they were there on Saturday and they would be there on Monday, and they would be there the next week, and they would be there the next month, and therefore no particular heed was to be paid to them. Here again we find the narrowing spirit. All ailment is the same to Jesus Christ. Transient as men call transient, or chronic as men call chronic, the great fact is that the man wanted healing, and he was there to heal; if he had done anything else he would have thwarted his own election, and stultified his own sovereignty. This was the necessity of his very make, build, constitution, he came not to destroy men's lives, but to save them. Having spoken as he only could speak, "all his adversaries were ashamed." He made them hold down their heads that the redness of their blush might not be seen. Whoever encountered him and stood upright after an interview, when the purpose was a purpose of hostility? We have seen how many men came up to him in fine attitude, in studied posture, thinking they had a case that would constrain his attention and secure his approbation. How often we have seen them coming up young men, going away about a hundred years old, so blanched and withered and humiliated, and so ashamed that they dare not speak to one another, or if they did speak they wanted to say, "It was you that would go I did not want to go, but you made me I will never go again." "And all the people" Bless God tor the people. What would the kings do without the people? They would die of loneliness. "And all the people " Yes, it is true oftentimes that the voice of the people is the voice of God. There may be mysterious variations of this, and yet there is a central truth in it. "And all the people rejoiced for all the glorious things that were done by him." Yes, let judgment be upon the "things," and we have no fear. We must not be word-mongers, logic-choppers; we must take our stand upon the facts, the conversions, the changes of heart and disposition and character and tone and temper, and Christ asks no other standard of judgment See what Christianity has done for the world, and by the glorious things it has done let the whole Christian argument stand or fall. We are not all called upon to argue. Many are called upon to suffer, and suffering may be borne with such gracious heroism as to constitute itself into an argument. The great talker proceeded. He gave philosophic symbols of the invisible and infinite kingdom; he said, The kingdom of God is like a grain of mustard seed: like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened; and thus he started imagination on a wondrous course of inquiry, and to this day the poets are finding new symbols. When a man arises who can construct a new parable, true to the purpose of the kingdom of heaven, the people acknowledge him to be a true servant of Christ.

But did the matter end there? No. There was an application to this sermon as there ought to be to every sermon. He said unto them, "Strive to enter in at the strait gate." What is the meaning of this "strive"? Literally, wrestle; throw your arms around the adversary, and throw him; struggle; say you will begin. He is a giant with whom you have to grapple, but it is God who tells you to enter into the encounter. "Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able." They shall only seek: but that is not the whole meaning. We must dislodge the narrow-minded theologian from this passage. Have not some good men said, Many will seek to enter in and shall not be able because of the decree of God? Who says so tell lies. When will they seek to enter in and not be able? The Lord gives the time: "When once the master of the house is risen up, and hath shut to the door, and ye begin to stand without, and to knock at the door, saying, Lord, Lord, open unto us; and he shall answer and say unto you, I know you not whence ye are" ( Luk 13:25 ). The time is when the Lord himself has risen, has closed the dispensation, has terminated the economy of grace, has gone to some other department, so to say, of his universal empire. But, blessed be his name, he has not risen yet; he has not shut to the door yet Now men may come. In this holy moment those who are outside may strive to enter in; may wrestle, struggle, determine in God's strength to enter in. If you fail to do this you fail altogether, no matter what admiration you may have of Christianity as a theological system; no matter what knowledge you may have of Christianity as a theological argument; no matter how liberal you may be in the support of Christian institutions. If you do not strive to enter in, determine to enter in, if you do not struggle and agonise; if you do not make it the supreme object of your life to get in, all else is failure. "Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters!" Sweet word! How sweet to those whose throats are burning with thirst! "Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts: and let him return unto the Lord, and he will have mercy upon him; and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon." What I "abundantly"? Yes. What does that mean? Wave upon wave, billow upon billow of love; he will multiply pardons; give them a thousand thick; so give them that conscience and memory and imagination shall have no more record of sin.