Taught By Pictures, Stories, and Questions
Again, Jesus teaches us by stories, questions, and pictures. He provokes our minds and hearts, our imaginations and senses and emotions. His imagery is arresting and memorable. It is designed to resonate within our imagination for a long time after he has initially spoken to us (or we have initially read his word). May the Spirit bless our hearing and contemplation and remembrance, that we might in time be empowered to obey the Lord Jesus from faith and love.
39-42
Answer the Questions, Think Through the Themes
Stop and consider, then answer, Jesus first two questions here. The answers are obviously ‘No’ and ‘Yes’ respectively, aren’t they?
What, then, is Jesus trying to get us to think about here? These questions bring up themes of sight, knowledge, wisdom, guidance, and leadership on the path of life and faith. (Again, consistent with O.T. wisdom, Jesus’ portrays life as a journey in need of a good pathway.)
Laughing At Ourselves to Prepare Our Hearts for Instruction
There is also black comedy here, isn’t there? This is slapstick. This is dark farce. Jesus clearly wants us to laugh at the absurdity of our own weaknesses, limitations, and sinfulness in a Fallen world, doesn’t he?
It’s only after we’ve thought through these questions and their implications (the needs we have that they highlight – e.g. for good, wise leadership) and had a good laugh at ourselves (which is refreshingly humbling) that we are ready to hear and benefit from the instructions he gives us.
Every Human Being Is a Disciple – The Only Question Is Who Your Master Is
As a disciple, how far can you advance? No farther than your master.
Jesus is partly getting us to realise that we are all disciples of someone or something. (Some may say ‘I am my own master and there is no other’, but if you could watch their life very closely you would see that the truth is rather different.) The question is not discipleship but mastery. Who is our Master? Think of who you expect to lead you in life, who you are really following in the footsteps of. How far have they gotten? That’s how far you will get. What pitfalls have they experienced? Those will be your pitfalls (in as much as they are truly your master that you follow wholeheartedly).
Authentic Church Leadership Points People to Jesus
Of course, Jesus is also turning up the heat in the storyline here as well. His words here implicitly critique the religious leaders who are opposing him, those who think they have the light and vision to lead Israel. His assessment of them is not flattering.
As we saw with the choosing of the Apostles in the last chapter, Jesus does give his church spiritually gifted leadership. But such church leaders are only as authentic as their teaching and example lead people to the loving and wise Lordship of Christ. When teachers and leaders help you walk more closely with the biblical Jesus, they are worth following. When they don’t, then they’re just another blind guide that will cause you to stumble into the ditch right after they do so themselves.
Two Kinds of Blind Leadership
Expounding the Bible without constantly and faithfully exalting Jesus as the centrepiece of the Bible, and a relationship of faith and love with God through him as the whole point of the Bible, is a blind guide.
Exalting ‘another Jesus’ (2 Cor. 11:4) that is not grounded in Scripture is also a blind guide.
You just can’t have the Bible without Jesus and you just can’t have Jesus without the Bible.
That’s the way God has graciously revealed himself to us and the way he designed it to work. In so doing he’s actually wisely given us a fairly simple and eloquent criterion by which to discern whether we’re following Spirit-inspired leadership (for the Holy Spirit always magnifies and testifies to Jesus: e.g. 1 Cor. 12:3; 1 John 4:3-4, 13-15; 5:6-12; cf. John 14:26, 15:26, 16:13-14).
These are two subtle dangers we face in following those who profess to be our leaders. We need not throw stones at them, but we also need not follow them if they are not truly leading us to the true Jesus.
Answering Two More Revealing Questions
Jesus asks two more questions. Let’s answer those too. Why do we notice other people’s little sins and not notice the glaring sins and faults in our own lives that are so plain to see? Sinful human nature would rather accuse others and excuse ourselves (rather than, say, excuse others and accuse ourselves). When we’re so eager and ready to see sin in other people and to want to ‘help’ them, we often only reflect our own lack of self-awareness and our own unrealistic self-assessment (or lack thereof).
The Bible does not urge a morbid self-introspection, but simply a healthy sense of one’s sinfulness and sins before a holy and loving God, with a desire to repent and grow.
How can we help other people with their small sins when we’re so entangled in our big sins? We can’t.
Jesus, Master of the Giantesque
Jesus obviously wants us to laugh again here at this absurdly comical and rather monstrously slapstick picture he paints.
The ‘giantesque’—‘preposterous exaggeration, often used in the service of satire’—is a stylistic technique scholars have cited that Jesus often uses in his ‘humorous vignettes based on overstatement’. Other examples include the camel through the eye of a needle and straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel whole.1 (The philosopher, Elton Trueblood [The Humor of Christ, 1964], noted that Jesus’ sayings like this are not unlike the American ‘tall tale’.)
Note: the ‘log’ here is ‘the main beam of a building’ (Bock, 128)!
Jesus’ Comedic Timing and Delivery
I love Jesus’ comedic timing and delivery here as well. Not only does he give us this hilariously ridiculous picture, he then drives the humour home by rehearsing this little dramatic scenario where he’s acting out the log-eyed person saying to the other: ‘here, let me get that out for you!’ You can just picture the protruding log obstructing the vision of the ridiculously self-important and self-deceiving first person so that mayhem ensues.
Jesus Gives Us a Gracious Tongue-Lashing
Once we’ve thought through the questions Jesus asks us and had a good, uproarious laugh at our sinful selves, what is Jesus’ instruction for us?
Well, first he calls us a nasty name! He confronts us head on with our sin and names it nakedly in the cruel, cold light of its ugliness. In all the context of his gracious, compassionate life and even the context of this segment of teaching (which clearly has the aim of helping people be his successful disciples, inheriting everlasting life) we know that Jesus excoriates us with a tongue-lashing only as the kind physician who has our best interest in mind, who knows our only hope is a stringent, stinging medicine, a sharp shot in the arm. We must wake up. We must face facts. Only his gracious realism will save us from our disastrous self-destruction and destruction of others. Only his biting diagnosis will convince us to take our medicine and be part of his restoring of shalom to his creation.
Jesus tells us plainly: when we behave this way toward each other we are simple hypocrites. We are ‘putting on a mask’ and ‘play-acting’ a part, a role. We are being insincere and hiding our true selves from one another and pretending to be in a position to pronounce judgment on one another.
In the harshness of his assessment of our behaviour we of course mustn’t lose sight of the overall comedy. It burns, yes, but we can still hear a faint chuckle and see a slight shaking of the head, with a hint of a grin at the corners of his mouth, when we hear Jesus say to us, ‘You hypocrite’.
He’s kind of saying ‘you pretentious idiot!’, ‘you silly faker!’ – then, he kindly and firmly sets us straight. First you’ve got to sort your own big sin in your heart between you and God before you can help your brother out with his little sin! Get your priorities straight, you beloved dummy! You’re no good to anyone else if you don’t.
The Refreshing Bite of Jesus’ Satiric Wit
It’s so refreshing to just hear our Lord graciously lay into us a bit, get us laughing at ourselves and then repenting of our deeply ingrained sinfulness. It’s so liberating to let his words pierce to our hearts and get to the root of the matter and show things clearly.
The beauty of it is that when people see us as honest and self-aware and dealing realistically with the sin in our lives, they will often positively desire our help with their own sinful struggles. We don’t feel threatened by honest, fellow sinners who share in our struggles for practical holiness. If we see them have any measure of success with repentance and spiritual growth, then we love to have their help!
As we saw in the last passage, Jesus is re-envisioning the whole world for us as one that is utterly soaked in the unmerited mercy and grace and generosity of a compassionate, loving almighty Creator and Redeemer God. When that cosmic vision has shaken us to our core, we can live on a whole different level than the conventional ‘tit for tat’ human ethics and begin to reflect our heavenly Father’s mercy and generosity even to our enemies. It is this kind of worldview that allows for dealing with the log in our own eye before we help our brother or sister with the speck in his or her eye.
43-45
Humans Pictured as Fruitful Trees (Not Machines)
Fruit and trees are deeply creational images used right throughout the Bible from the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis 2 and 3 to the fruit trees (whose leaves are ‘for the healing of the nations’) lining the streets of the New Jerusalem in Revelation 22.
The fruit tree in particular is often used metaphorically of human beings as we have already seen in the preaching of John the Baptist, where we noted that the Bible has an organic view of human beings, not (say) a mechanistic one (Luke 3:8-9; see also, e.g. Psalm 1:3).
This biblically organic view of human beings means that the Bible will never recommend ‘how-to’ techniques and programs to improve the human condition through environmental or behavioural conditioning as if change could be worked from the outside-in. We are not ‘manufactured’ on an ‘assembly line’ but are grown through a process of cultivation. Time and influence (‘planting’ and ‘watering’ and ‘pruning’ are all spoken of in the Bible in regard to human spiritual development) will be major factors.
(Remember Tim Keller’s summary characterisation the Kingdom of God as being ‘upside-down’, ‘inside-out’, and ‘forward-back’.)
The Bible consistently takes the human person seriously as a genuinely spiritual being, as fundamentally an embodied ‘spirit’ or ‘heart’ or ‘soul’. Biblically, there is always ‘more than meets the eye’ to a human person. We have an ‘inside’ that interacts with our ‘outside’, that is divinely designed to direct and control the ‘outside’. (The ‘outside’ is more than just the physical body, but also the attitude and personality and their bodily manifestations – e.g. the ‘tongue’ in James 3.)
What Kind of Fruit Can Be Plucked from You?
Here Jesus wants us to think about what kind of tree we are. He talks about us being known. We are known by ‘good’ or ‘bad’ fruit. (Which means we can’t hide even if we think we can – our fruit will show!)
He again brings in the comedic with the picture of gathering a ripe and juicy fruit from a dry and thorny source – a farcical physical impossibility!
What Do You Treasure In Your Heart?
By a strange and wonderful mixing of metaphors here, Jesus gets us to think of that cultivation in our hearts as what we treasure inside us. What do we value and hoard in our hearts?
As with being called a ‘hypocrite’, this saying gets past mere outward appearances. There’s something so intrusive to our sinful hearts about the Bible’s message, isn’t there? It gets right into our hearts, into the physically unseen core of us.
Jesus tells us that what’s treasured up in our hearts overflows out of our mouths.
What’s inside shows outside. That is biblical spirituality in a nutshell.
(And there is always good or evil spirituality – our spirits are always being formed in one direction or another. The ‘unspiritual man’ [1 Cor. 2] is just the human who is wilfully insensitive to the Holy Spirit, not a human with an ‘inactive’ or ‘dormant’ spirit—it is only ‘inoperative’ toward right relationship with God, but it is otherwise very active indeed.)
Not One Particular Moment of Fruit, But a Period of Production
‘To judge a tree’s fruit, we don’t look at one particular moment but a period of production. The product of the life reflects the heart. The product of our discipleship reflects our inner character, what Jesus calls the treasure of the heart. The value of our speech and actions is determined by the quality of the soul that produces them. In other words, works are a snapshot of the heart.’ (Bock, 129)
It’s probably important to note that in the context I would say Jesus at this point primarily wants us to ‘judge’ the fruit of our own lives, not others (or mainly only others in terms of deciding what leadership we’ll follow).
And if you don’t like the life production in light of Jesus’ kingdom vision, then the way to start changing is not a ‘how-to’ program of outward arrangement, but cultivation of the heart. Start improving the quality of your soul-life (supremely by looking to, worshiping, loving, being loved by, and obeying Jesus Christ as Lord) to eventually see a better production in the rest of your life.
(I would also want to add here that I think Jesus in pointing to kinds of trees invariably producing kinds of fruit is hinting toward our need for a whole new heart in order to enter God’s kingdom and know and love him.)
46-49
A Last and Devastating Question to Be Answered
It’s interesting how Jesus assumes disobedience here! As always, he operates on a refreshing and rather shocking level of realism.
Why do we do this? How well does this apply to us?
What are the implications here? What is entailed in calling Jesus Lord?
To say to Jesus ‘you are my Lord’ means absolute and total obedience to his commands, trusting and loving faithfulness to his words, action and not merely verbalisation.
Pay Attention: Jesus Has Something Hugely Important to Show Us
Jesus paints a final picture for us in this long sermon. Here he self-consciously directs us to his art of imagery and allegory: he tells us he will ‘show’ us the consequences of our listening habits one way or the other. He wants us to really sit up and pay attention at this point. The image is momentous and yet, again, blackly comic.
Just as with the picture of the trees, his stark structure is to show the Good, then the Bad:
good tree, bad tree
good person-good treasure-good product, bad person-evil treasure-evil product
one who puts his words into practice, one who does not put his words into practice
Come, Hear, Do – The Rhythm of Discipleship
It almost looks like three successive phases, a pattern, in knowing and following Christ: We come to Jesus. We hear his words. We put his words into practice. We should feel that rhythm and recognise our spiritual journey with Christ. Are we coming to Jesus, hearing his words, and putting them into practice? That is the rhythm of discipleship.
His Lordship over us means we kneel, we hear, we obey. We seek, we listen, we do. We sit, we contemplate, we act.
Building Discipleship
This is how to build a life on a solid foundation that outlasts the storms of a Fallen world. This is the life well built. This is the life unshaken.
Notice the continuity between the image of cultivation and ‘building’: both are a process over time, that require attention and hard work and patience and wisdom.
‘A secure foundation takes work. The hard work is worth it, because in the storm this house stands strong and secure. Nothing shakes it. Obeying Jesus will mean being able to stand up in the trials of life.’ (Bock, 130)
Jesus warns us severely that there just are no shortcuts in following him.
Jesus’ Sermon Is Book-Ended with Paired Encouragement and Warning
Just as Jesus at the beginning of his sermon complemented his Blessings with corresponding Woes, so here Jesus leaves us with an encouragement and a warning.
He wants us to desire the picture of a life well built on the foundation of doing his teachings and to fear and loathe the picture of the terrible fall and ruin of a life not built on that foundation.
Like the dark ‘horror house’ pictures in Proverbs, he gets all Poe on us. (Indeed, like the 'Fall of the House of Usher'!) We are meant to experience both a comedic chuckle as well as a horrific chill at this picture of tragicomedy.
‘The use of multiple terms to describe the house’s collapse accentuates the note of tragedy in the image… Everything the man had is lost. Jesus offers no editorial comment, but lets his sermon end with the echo of the collapsing house.’ (Bock, 130)
We are meant to look upon these two pictures and think, respectively: how wise and happy is the doer/builder with a foundation, how foolish and tragic is the non-doer/builder without a foundation.
Again, it is a warning. It is a wake up call to avoid this fate at all costs by enacting the Lordship of Christ over your life, not merely verbalising it.
How Will We Respond?
His words may seem so counterintuitive and counter-cultural to a fallen, sinful humanity, but he urges us with utmost seriousness that his vision of life is the only sane and beautiful and right and lasting view of the world there is.
Therein lies the challenge. How will we respond?
How do you define blessing and woe?
Who do you love and how do you love?
Who are you following?
What are you treasuring in your heart?
Are you or aren’t you putting into to practice the words of Jesus?
It is only by loving faith and trust in the goodness and grace of Jesus (who he is and what he does for us in his cross and resurrection) that we can hope to follow him as his disciples.
‘He is not formulating some ethic that we could follow independent of relationship to him. Having a relationship with him is at the base of faithfulness… Jesus says, If you wish to be wise, you will love as I have taught, follow me as Teacher and Lord, and walk in my way with faithfulness.’ (Bock, 129)
This long sermon calls us to terms of discipleship. Fundamental to those terms is our relationship of trusting obedience to the Lordship of Jesus. Thus his sermon heightens Luke’s unfolding drama. We have asked, who is this Jesus who goes around healing and forgiving the sins of sinners and doing what he pleases on the Sabbath? Now we ask, who could teach a teaching like this? Who in the world could say, ‘you must base your entire life on the foundation of doing what I tell you’?!?! That is a HUGE claim indeed! And so the story continues…
1 Ryken, Leland ; Wilhoit, Jim ; Longman, Tremper ; Duriez, Colin ; Penney, Douglas ; Reid, Daniel G.: Dictionary of Biblical Imagery. electronic ed. Downers Grove, IL : InterVarsity Press, 2000, c1998, S. 329
Works Cited:
Darrell Bock, Luke
Joel Green, The Gospel of Luke
Tom Wright, Luke for Everyone
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