Medicine Hat Joe

Week 38 Luke

It would have been front-page news: Governor Sanctions Murder of Galilean Pilgrims.
People in the crowd reported the story to the Lord.
The Lord could have gone on a Pilate-is-a-homicidal-tyrant rant but he just asked the crowd: do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than other people from Galilee?
It was a good question. It’s a pretty safe bet the Lord asked that exact question because that’s exactly what people did think – if some guy dies violently and prematurely he was likely a bad person.
But the Lord’s his own answer to his own question was: not at all!
That really gave people something to think about because thinking that bad-things-happen-to-bad-people was a pretty good and satisfying try-to-make-sense formula.
But the bigger surprise was that that wasn’t even the Lord’s point. Right away he said: you will also perish unless you turn from your evil ways and turn to God (he repeated this two verses later: I tell you again that unless you repent, you also will perish).
So the Lord seemed like he wanted to make a distinction between dying – which no one can avoid – and perishing – which people can avoid.
Conditional on if they repent and turn to God.
Which if it’s true seems like a key thing to keep in mind when it comes to personal post-mortem planning.

Note: quotes from Luke 13:2, 3 & 5 (NLT)

Week 38 Luke

A guy in the crowd asked the Lord about dividing up the family inheritance. Like any normal guy I guess he wanted to get his fair share.
The Lord didn’t give any legal advice. But he did say: Watch out! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; a man’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.
Earning money, winning money, getting money are all pretty regular things. We do what we can to get our hands on money, and most of us accept the general rule: the-more-the-better.
But the point the Lord was making was that monetary acquisitiveness isn’t a stand-alone economic activity. Our lifelong money-making adventure has a hand-in-glove connection to a non-economic driver that the Lord called greed.
I draw two circles side-by-side on a sheet of paper. I call one The-Money-Making-Circle. The Lord says don’t forget about the other circle. The-Greed-Circle. Keeping my Money-Making-Circle clean & clear is pretty tricky business because greed wants to intrude invade and overlap. Wanting-more wants in. The Lord says to be wary of it.
I can find out how many dollars I have in the bank. Calculating the number of personal units of greed I’ve invested is quite a bit bigger a problem.
Money is like a slip of litmus, green until it discolours in the presence of concentrated desire.

Note: Luke 12:15 (NIV)

Week 38 Luke

One day the Lord was speaking to a crowd.
He said that if anyone wanted to follow him there was an if and a then: if any of you wants to be my follower, you must put aside your selfish ambition, shoulder your cross daily, and follow me.
If I don’t want to follow the Lord then there aren’t any requirements. But if I do I have to:
a) set aside my selfish ambitions, and
b) pick up my cross each day.
It’s a short list. Innocent-looking. Kind of ambiguous. Not too complicated. I might think that I don’t really have major selfish ambitions. And I might figure that I do lift up one end of my cross from time to time. But the thing is the Lord’s saying that, unfortunately I’m definitely selfishly ambitious, and I’m clearly cross-reluctant. Both of which get in the way of following. So maybe if I’m a follower my first priority is mulling over what my joe-focused ambitions are, and also try to figure why the cross seems like such a drag on my daily schedule.
Many things about the Lord are pretty appealing. But there’s a no-kidding-around side to him too.

Note: quote from Luke 9:23 (NLT)

Week 37 Luke

A couple of things are going on when I’m reading through.
For one, I’m reading so I get to Revelation 22 by New Year’s Eve.
For two, I’m reading to try to make sense of what I read.
Reading through is a reading-and-sense-making project.
Anyway I was reading one of the Lord’s public sermons in Luke and he said something about God that was really pretty definite, pretty explicit, pretty precise, pretty clear. He said that God: is kind to the unthankful and to those who are wicked.
I’ve spent the last eight months reading through and haven’t always come away with the idea that God is kind to unthankful and wicked people. I’m pretty sure I could page back for an example where it looks like God isn’t all that kind to unthankful and wicked people. So Luke 6 is a good reminder that reading through – besides just reading through – also has a jigsaw-puzzling-my-way-through element to it. And God-is-kind is one of the pieces.
My profile of God can’t exclude it.

Note: quotes from Luke 6:35 (NLT).
This piece of the puzzle about God being kind isn’t even the Lord’s point. His main point is his rule-for-disciples: Love your enemies! Do good to them! Lend to them!
The Lord knows I’ll wonder why I can’t hate my enemies, and his reason – a kind of footnote – is that God doesn’t. He’s kind.

Week 37 Luke

The angel Gabriel told Mary she was going to have a baby.
Mary asked a good question: how can this be, since I am a virgin?
The angel gave her two not too detailed explanations about how the miracle would work, and then one outcome: the Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; and for that reason the holy offspring shall be called the Son of God.
In the natural world when a natural human man and a natural human women have natural sexual intercourse then they have a natural human child. But in the Lord’s case he had a natural human mother but he didn’t have a natural human father so he wasn’t a naturally conceived human child.
Unlike Mark, Luke seems to be pretty keen on going back to the very beginning and showing that before he took his first breath the Lord was prenatally unique. He was not just a guy from Nazareth who had an extraordinary bunch of innate talents, innovative ideas, oratorical skills, and personal charisma. In whatever ways he was regular there were ways he was quite a bit more than regular. And in the story of the virgin-conception Luke is clear that from the start the Lord was special. Jesus was human, and he was also divine. He was the one, and he was the other; both-and.

Note: quote from Luke 1:34 & 35 (NASB)

Week 37 Luke

I’m flying across the Pacific Ocean when the plane goes down – luckily not hard enough to kill me – and I luckily wash up on a deserted island and look in my survival-backpack and find I packed one of the four gospels. It’s Luke. So I’m lucky again.
I don’t really think that Luke is any more reliable than the others, but the way he starts out gives me an I-can-trust-this-guy feeling.
He writes his gospel to someone named Theophilus, and he says five interesting things about his project:
Luke says that: many people have written accounts.
He says that these many people: used as their source material the reports circulating among us from the early disciples and other eyewitnesses.
He says that he: carefully investigated all of these accounts from the beginning.
Then he: decided to write a careful summary for you.
Theophilus was already familiar with the story but Luke told him he was writing: to reassure you of the truth of all you were taught.
Luke seems like a thorough reasonable studious logical thoughtful investigative biographer. He did his homework, did his research, then wrote a recap of the Lord’s life. A gospel written to reassure.
The onshore breeze is a relief in the heat as I sit checking through my other survival supplies. I’m apprehensive about whether I packed smart enough, but not concerned at all about my gospel choice. I like Luke.

Note: quotes from Luke 1:1-4 (NLT)

Week 37 Mark

The Lord was asked a lot of questions.
One of them was: of all the commandments, which is the most important?
Out of that jumbled mass of hundreds-&-hundreds of regulations that Moses gave, the questioner was asking, can you highlight one of them?
And the Lord’s answer was that yes there is a hierarchy of laws, some are more important than others, and the premier law is this: the Lord our God is the one and only Lord. And you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.
When you think about, this almost isn’t even a law. I’m not saying it isn’t a law since the Lord said it was. But it’s different from other doing-and-action-type-laws (like, for example mixing oil with a grain offering). This is a heavyweight law. It says that with all the constituent parts that make up me I have to love the Lord. It’s a kind of Total Personal Affection and Endorsement program. A Being Law. It means I’m on the Lord’s side. I’m devoted to him, trust him, revere him, defer to him, think he’s the greatest, back him up, agree with him, imitate him. I’m all in.
On a side-note, Law Number One also leaves me with the sense of its fearsome-awesomeness. Not panic. Not dread. But definite personal concern with being face-to-face with Law One.

Note: quotes from Mark 12:28 and 29-30 (quoted from Deuteronomy 6:4-5) (NLT)

Week 36 Mark

A group of legal specialists came to the Lord and asked about Moses’ divorce law – which basically ok-ed divorce.
The Lord told them that Moses’ law was a kind of Plan B law that was legislated because people have hard hearts. A Law-For-the-Hard-Hearted.
But there was an earlier law, a Plan A that was in place long before Moses was born: from the beginning of creation. It was the original soft-and-malleable-heart rule that said a man and woman come together and have sexual intercourse. At that point things have changed: they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.
So what I take from this is:
The OT divorce law was an inferior add-on necessitated by a lot of people having granite-hearts.
The original pre-Moses plan was: when I get married I stay married.
The original pre-Moses plan had in mind that sexual intercourse has a kind of transformative stickiness that changes two people into one – physically in the moment, permanently in some extra-physical way.
The original pre-Moses plan included two things: the obvious guy-inside-the-girl part, and the not-so-obvious part that involved a divine permanentizing.
I know the Lord didn’t actually say this part – I’m saying it – but one of my take-aways – since I think he’s implying it – is that if I think sexual intercourse is just sexual intercourse then I need to think again.

Note: quote from Mark 10:6, 8-9 (NASB). See also Deuteronomy 24:1-3.

Week 36 Mark

The story of the Lord walking on water is pretty spectacular and incredible.
The disciples are out on the stormy lake and the Lord comes to meet them, walking across the water.
Since the disciples were first-century guys they were a lot more ignorant than 21st-century Albertans. But one thing they did know was that it was impossible to walk on water. They didn’t have to know about surface tension and water molecules. You can’t walk on water.
When the Lord got right into the boat Mark says that the disciples were still really cranked up. No surprise, I guess. But Mark also says they shouldn’t have been. He says the reason they were flabbergasted was because: they still didn’t understand the significance of the miracle of the multiplied loaves, for their hearts were hard and they did not believe. Being jacked-up was being unbelieving.
Mark says they should have gotten some insight from when the Lord fed 5000 people earlier that day.
Before that there was Jairus’ daughter.
Before that the haemorrhaging woman.
Before that the exorcism.
There’s a kind of progressive curriculum being taught, and the disciples should have been putting together a composite picture of the Lord. But they weren’t. They didn’t believe.
When the disciples saw a miracle their response was something like an hysterical: wow, did you see that? Unbelievable!
It should have been something more like: hmmmmm…who exactly is this guy?

Note: quote from Mark 6:52 (NLT). The story is in Mark 6:45-52

Week 36 Mark

One of the things the Lord was doing in the gospels was teaching people.
One of his story-telling methods was parables.
I think a pretty simple way to start understanding parables is to admit they’re not that simple to understand. Take the parable of the planter. He plants seed. Some of it’s lost, but some is productive and grows a crop. I read that parable today and my reaction is the same reaction almost anyone would have: what does it mean? What do I do with it?
The Lord knew people would ask that, and so he ended by saying: anyone who is willing to hear should listen and understand.
When it comes to teaching and learning the basic idea is that the teacher teaches and the learner listens and learns. When the learner can’t dope out what the teacher is teaching then he can ask. And it looks like that’s what happened here because: later, when Jesus was alone with the twelve disciples and with the others who were gathered around, they asked him, “What do your stories mean?”
The Lord had started out with a large crowd in verse 1 but that big group is shaved down to a small group of learners asking the teacher: what do your stories mean?

Note: quotes from Mark 4:9 & 10 (NLT). The parable of the planter and its explanation is in Mark 4:1-20.