Luke 6: Jesus' Teaching

LUKE 6:12 – 49: JESUS’ TEACHING

The gospels mention different kinds of people who followed Jesus around:

There were, as we saw in the previous study, those who were very disturbed by his teaching and actions – the Pharisees and teachers of the law, who opposed him on the basis of their understanding of the Jewish religion and scripture.

There were the large crowds coming from all over Judea, from Jerusalem, and from the coast of Tyre and Sidon. These had come to hear him, and to be healed. They had some kind of faith in his healing power (Luke 6:17 – 19).

There were those who were called ‘disciples’ (Luke 6:12, 20). The word ‘disciple’ refers to the student of a teacher, who is being regularly/continually exposed to the teacher’s instruction. This does not mean that all of these students believe and accept what the teacher says, and we know from John’s gospel that there were significant numbers of these who did not accept his teaching, and that Jesus knew they didn’t (see John 2:23 – 25; 6:60 – 71; 8:30 – 59).

There were the twelve disciples whom Jesus, after a night of prayer, chose to be ‘apostles’ (Luke 6:12 – 16). The word ‘apostle’ literally means ‘one who is sent’.

After choosing these twelve to be apostles, Jesus gave extended teaching to his disciples in the hearing of crowds – Luke 6:20 – 49; 7:1. Much of this teaching parallels content of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5 – 7), but both have material that is not in the other. It is possible that Luke is reporting the same event; it is more likely that Jesus preached similar content on more than one occasion to different crowds and in different places.

A common theme in Jesus’ teaching in 6:17 – 49 is our response to Jesus and his words, and the difference that makes not only to our relationship with God but to the way we relate to our fellow human beings. Our response creates and expresses a great divide between those who truly acknowledge Jesus Christ and those who don’t.

A. BLESSINGS AND WOES

Jesus’ words of ‘blessing’ are directed towards his disciples – ‘Looking at his disciples, he said ...’ (verse 20). These ‘disciples’, these ‘students’, have the potential to become genuine followers, genuine believers. They were listening to his teaching, and his teaching had the power to separate true faith from superficial faith, to make people choose whether or not they wanted to align themselves with this radical teacher and his provocative and divisive teaching, that drew some people to him but repulsed others. His teaching actually made people think.

Here in these blessings and woes Jesus puts contrasting human conditions side by side:

Blessedness to the poor ... woe to the rich (verses 20 & 24).
Blessedness to the hungry ... woe to the well fed (verses 21 & 25).
Blessedness to the sad ... woe to those who laugh now (verses 21 & 25).
Blessedness to those hated and rejected because of Jesus ... woe to those spoken well of (verses 22 & 26).

It would be easy here to think that Jesus is speaking merely about physical human conditions, and a future reversal of those physical conditions for both of these opposite parties. But there is something here that goes far deeper than that. There is a spiritual dimension that connects back to the controversies with the Pharisees and teachers of the law that we encountered in the previous study.

Read 6:20 – 26. Remembering what Luke reported in 5:17 – 6:11, answer these questions:
How does Luke 5:31 & 32 help you to understand Jesus’ meaning in 6:20 &24?

Suggest who Jesus was referring to when he talked about those ‘who hunger now’ and ‘weep ?

Suggest which people in the blessings and woes represent the Pharisees and teachers of the law.

What very significant distinction does Jesus make in verses 23 and 26b?

It is quite clear that Jesus likens the people he says are ‘blessed’ to the Old Testament prophets – men who were persecuted, even martyred because of their allegiance to God and his word. It is similarly clear, that Jesus likens those against whom he announces ‘woes’ to the people who mistreated the Old Testament prophets (6:23, 26b). This helps us to see that Jesus is talking not primarily about an economic or social divide, but about a spiritual divide: those who align with God and those who do not. Following directly after Luke’s reports of the antagonism of the religious leaders, these blessings and woes appear to be both a serious warning to those men, and an encouragement to his disciples. For those whom he had just appointed ‘apostles’ his words would prove significant.

B. LOVE FOR ENEMIES

Having just spoken about the mistreatment of those who love God (6:22, 26b) Jesus teaches us our responsibility as his disciples to love those who mistreat us. And this is not a formal, legal ‘responsibility’; it is the heart response of a person who knows they are the recipient of the mercy of God.

Read Luke 6:27 – 30.
Make a list of all the commands that in one way or another require us to love our ‘enemies’.

For you, which of these commands is most difficult to understand and obey?

Now make a list of all Jesus’ reasons why we should love our ‘enemies’.

For you, which of these reasons seems the most compelling motivation to love even the ‘enemy’?

At a deeper level, think about how Jesus was himself demonstrating this kind of love – in coming to earth as a human being, in offering saving truth even to those who opposed him, and, eventually, dying as our substitute under the judgement of God so that those who believe in him can be forgiven. Hint: read Romans 5:10; Ephesians 2:1 – 3; Colossians 1:21, 22.

[Read this study for further insight into the depth of God’s amazing grace that planned our salvation through the death of the Son even before the creation of the universe and us.]

C. ABOUT NOT JUDGING OTHERS

In the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 – 7, Jesus taught about range of other issues after he spoke about loving our enemies and before he taught about not judging. But in his teaching reported in Luke 6 Jesus spoke about not judging immediately after telling us to love our enemies – Luke 6:37 – 42. If we overlook the section headings inserted by the NIV and other versions, we will discover a powerful sequence in Luke’s report:

[1] Blessed are you when men hate you, when they exclude you and insult you and reject your name as evil because of the Son of Man.

[2] Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you... do to others as you would have them do to you.

[3] Do not judge ...do not condemn...forgive ...

Firstly, there is the fact of hatred and rejection directed towards people who belong to the kingdom of God. Secondly, the command to love the people who do this to us. Thirdly, the command not to judge – to not follow our natural inclination. While the command to love focused mostly on our external, visible actions towards our enemies, the command to not judge penetrates right into our hearts and minds – into our unseen thoughts and feelings towards the ‘enemy’. In this, Jesus internalizes the love that he has commanded: it is one thing to physically give our enemy our coat as well as our shirt. But it is quite another thing to forgive them – to not judge them, to not condemn them. Compared to forgiving, the coat and the shirt might seem easy. But that giving – that is, giving to the enemy (verse 30) – is an expression of forgiveness (of not judging, of not condemning).

C.1 The mini parable about the blind men – 6:39
Some commentators understand Luke6:17 - 49 as a series of disconnected sayings. But if we continue the progression of teaching noted above, then we see that this one-liner is also connected to what has gone before – that it is connected to being persecuted because of Jesus’ name, to loving those enemies, to not condemning them, but forgiving them: because the heart that cannot love and do good to the enemy, the heart that cannot forgive the enemy, is also blind, just as the enemy is blind – still blinded by a law- and performance-based mindset. We cannot communicate the gospel of grace to others if we ourselves do not have a heart that knows the grace of God. The attitude of retaliation is the attitude of legalism – a tit-for-tat, payback mindset that knows nothing of mercy, that does to others what they have done to us, rather than following Jesus’ command to ‘do to others as you would have them do to you’ – Luke 6:31. As blind as the Pharisees who persistently watched Jesus to find some point of accusation.

C.2 The student and his teacher – 6:40
Flowing on from what has gone before – Jesus, the teacher, was persecuted, but as we will see in 23:34, even as he was dying at their hands he asked the Father to forgive them. The ‘student’ (= ‘disciple’), when he is fully trained, ‘will be like his teacher’. Here Jesus challenges his disciples/students to take on board his attitudes, his heart, so that they will be able to respond to persecution, to the ‘enemy’, in the same way that he himself did.

What do these verses say about the non-retaliation practiced by Jesus?
Isaiah 50:5 – 9

Isaiah 53:7

Luke 4:28 – 30

Matthew 26:50 – 54

Matthew 27:27 – 31

1Peter 2:23

C.3 The speck of sawdust and the plank – 6:41 – 42
Jesus’ teaching about the speck of sawdust and the plank is included in the Sermon on the Mount, where it immediately follows his commands to not judge, and his teaching that parallels Luke 6:38 (Matthew 7:1 – 5). It is clearly connected to the practice of judging/condemning that Jesus is forbidding. In Luke, that includes a connection with the ‘blind man’ – the man who has a plank in his own eye that prevents him both from seeing his own problems/faults, and from helping the other person with their problem/fault – their ‘speck of sawdust’.

If by the ‘blind man’ Jesus is referring to people like the Pharisees and teachers of the law, then the plank in their eye is their perceived righteousness: these are people who try to remove a ‘speck of sawdust’ – like picking and eating grain on the Sabbath (Luke 6:1 – 5) or healing a man’s hand on the Sabbath (Luke 6:6 – 11), while all the time they have this huge plank in their own eye – the blinding plank of their own perceived ‘righteousness’. Jesus pointed out their blindness at length in Matthew 23.

What do these verses say about our perceived human righteousness?
Isaiah 64:6

Romans 3:9 – 20

What does the gospel teach us about God’s gift of righteousness?
Isaiah 61:10

Romans 1:16, 17

Romans 3:21 – 26

Romans 4:4 – 8

Later in his gospel Luke includes stories that highlight this huge, blinding plank of perceived human righteousness.

C.4 The tree and its fruit
Here Jesus uses another image to press home what he is teaching: the picture of trees producing ‘fruit’. The concept of ‘fruit’ occurs here and there throughout the New Testament:

John the Baptist urged his hearers to ‘produce fruit in keeping with repentance’ and warned his hearers that ‘every tree that does not produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire’ – Matthew3:8, 10; Luke 3:8, 9.

Jesus spoke of the ‘fruit’ seen in those represented by the good soil in the parable of the sower – Matthew 13, Mark 4 and Luke 8.

Jesus expressed his disappointment in the lack of fruit in a fig tree – a parabolic pointer to the lack of appropriate ‘fruit’ in the Jewish religious leaders – (Matthew 21:19).

Jesus taught that abiding/living in him is the prerequisite for ‘fruit’, and that this ‘fruit’ is the visible evidence that a person is his disciple – John 15:1 – 8.

Paul wrote of the ‘fruit’ of the Spirit – Galatians 5:22, 23 and Ephesians 5:9.

If we understand Jesus’ teaching about the good and bad trees in the context of what he has been saying and what he is about to say, then the ‘good’ tree is the disciple who has heard his word, believed it in the depth of his heart, and because of that heart knowledge/commitment, puts it into practice; and the ‘bad’ tree is the temporary disciple who has physically heard his word and may have been attracted to it in some way, but has not let it change his heart, and remains unchanged by the word of Christ. Although he may on the outside appear for a time to be a ‘disciple’ nothing changed on the inside.

C.5 The wise and foolish builders
Similarly, Jesus likens those who hear his word and puts them into practice to a wise builder who built his house on a solid foundation, and those who hear his words, but do not put them into practice to a foolish builder who built his house on the sand. The first endures. The second is completely destroyed.

D. CRITICAL QUESTIONS ARISING FROM JESUS’ TEACHING

At the beginning of this study we looked at four different groups of people who interacted with Jesus and his teaching. His teaching in Luke 6:17 – 49 challenges us to look at our own hearts, and to see clearly where we actually stand, and who we are following. It raises several questions which are important for us to answer:

[1] In the way we relate to others, are we copying the Pharisees and teachers of the law in the way they related to Jesus? They demonstrated the kind of attitude that Jesus exposes as wrong and commands against in 6:27 – 49.

[2] Or, have we understood and embraced God’s mercy in not condemning us, in forgiving us, and are we copying Jesus’ example in showing that same mercy to others?

[3] Do our attitudes to others display the likeness of our heavenly Father?

[4] Bottom line question: have we really believed in, and believed the words of, Jesus Christ? Are we those who ‘hear’, but do not really hear? Or, are we those who really hear, that is, who respond with that true faith in Christ that includes acknowledgement, trust and obedience? The words of Jesus that we have looked at in this study create a divide – setting apart as God’s children, as members of his kingdom, those who really hear the words of Jesus and put them into practice.

We are not saved by works, but the faith that saves is always evident in works.

Read these verses that speak of this essential evidence:
Matthew 7:21 – 23

John 8:30 – 32

James 2:14 – 26

CONCLUSION
Had God treated us as the ‘enemy’, we would not have survived after Genesis 3. Had God treated us as the enemy, he would not have planned our salvation through his Son. Had God treated us as the enemy, he would not have over-ruled in human history to bring it to the point where Jesus Christ, the offspring of the woman, the one descendant of Abraham, the son of David was born and lived among us as one of us. But God so loved the world, the world that was opposed to him and rejected him, that he offers us in Christ his incomparable grace and mercy – by which we are not judged, by which we are not condemned, by which we are forgiven. And here, in the teaching of his Son, he says to those of us who believe in him:

I want you to be just like that – merciful, even to the ungrateful, even to the wicked, even to the enemy.

I want you to be just like me, your Father, because you are my sons and daughters.

I want you to reflect me, to display my glory. Because that is what I created you for.