Day 300 (Luke 14-15) - Year 6
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Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. It's day 300 for some of you. And for the rest of you, tomorrow will mark four whole weeks of being with us in this plan. Congrats to both of you.

Today, I had to look up dropsy to see what it is. Apparently, it's swelling, like edema. Today, Jesus meets a man who is afflicted with this. And wouldn't you know it, it's the Sabbath. Not only that, but Jesus meets this man when he's invited to a Pharisee's house for dinner. Do you smell a trap? Or is the fist just burning? The Pharisees likely wouldn't have allowed this man in their home otherwise because of how they associated sickness with sin.

Jesus is the one who brings it up. He asks if it's legal to heal on the Sabbath, as if he doesn't know A, the truth, and B, that they don't believe the truth. He regularly asks questions he knows the answers to. They don't respond because now they feel trapped, so Jesus just heals the guy and sends him home.

Then Jesus takes the opportunity to give some insight into kingdom values. He tells them to humble themselves or they will be humbled. Humility is coming one way or another. Then he turns to the host and says, when you have dinner parties like this, try inviting the poor and the sick, the people you consider to be sinners. You might not get any sort of repayment for it on earth, but that's not the point. In the long run, that is the path to blessing.

Jesus' statement probably makes things pretty awkward, so someone else at the dinner party pipes up, either to smooth things over or as a rebuttal, and says, Everyone will be blessed who eats and drinks in the kingdom of God. But Jesus tells a parable about what the kingdom of God is like.

He illustrates how the discarded and poor know they need God's provision, but the wealthy and important have other priorities, other things that take up their time. The list is familiar to all of us, even if we're not wealthy, because the reality is the fact that you own a Bible and are somehow listening to this podcast means you're privileged more than most people who have ever walked the earth.

The list of excuses the privileged people give includes possessions, work, and relationships. Those things kept them from the feast at the master's table. The poor and homeless don't have those distractions. Often, the things that creep in and push out God are things we primarily count as blessings. Blessings aren't inherently bad. The problem comes when they sideline the blesser.

Jesus drives this point home again later when he says that following him will mean self-denial. It means putting an end to our self-determination. And obviously, he's not really calling people to hate others. He's saying that by comparison, everything else comes in at a distant second. It means I renounce the right to everything, that nothing is mine but my Savior.

Jesus seems to really hammer this point home, probably because he knows that lots of the people who get excited about his teaching and his miracles are probably just caught up in the moment. He wants them to consider, really consider, if they're interested in a life of following him. It's not going to be easy, he says. In chapter 15, Jesus tells three parables about recovering things that have been lost, the sheep, the coin, and the son. Since we've already covered the lost sheep in Matthew 18 on day 295, we'll jump right to the coin.

This lost coin was only worth about a day's wages. It wasn't like she lost the Hope Diamond. But despite how little it seemed to be worth, the picture Jesus paints is one of complete joy at finding it.

This parable isn't about cash, obviously. Jesus is illustrating that God rejoices at recovering the lost, even when they might not seem to be valuable to anyone else. He says the inhabitants of heaven celebrate when a sinner repents. Jesus is telling this story in front of the Pharisees, by the way, so I'm guessing he put the emphasis on the fact that it was a sinner.

So he starts with sheep, moves on to money, then he really brings it home, pun definitely intended, with the parable of the prodigal son. One of the things we should probably do up front is define the word prodigal. We often think of it as meaning rebellious or wandering off, but really it means wasteful. So this is the parable of the wasteful son.

A man has two sons, and the younger son wants his inheritance now. Some scholars say this means he was basically telling his father he didn't love him, that he wanted him dead, since that's typically when inheritances are handed out. But others say there's more room here for this to be just a son who wants to do his own thing. What that thing turns out to be, though, does seem to indicate that he probably doesn't have a great relationship with his dad. Or maybe he's just foolish. Who knows?

He gets his third of the inheritance, because the oldest son typically gets a double portion, and he sets out to burn through it all. Then the best thing that could have happened happens.

A famine. He comes to the end of his money and he has to get a job. He's hungry. He has to feed pigs for a living. Jesus probably throws that detail in there to add some shock value for the Pharisees in the audience because pigs are considered unclean. And by the way, the thing he's feeding the pigs and longing to eat are the carob pods, aka locusts, that are possibly what JTB ate, like we talked about on day 277. His circumstances wake him up and soften his heart.

His entitlement has been starved out of him. He becomes repentant and decides he wants to go home and work as a servant in his dad's house. But as soon as his dad sees him in the distance, he basically has a plane fly overhead with a welcome home banner behind it. It seems like he's had his servants working on a Pinterest party board since the day the younger son skipped town. He doesn't punish him for running off. He doesn't shame him. He celebrates.

Meanwhile, the older son is out working hard and as he's heading in for the night, he hears the band kick up. He's fuming. He's definitely not going to that party. He'll order delivery and eat it in his room while wearing his noise-canceling headphones. But his dad comes over and begs him to come.

Older son is not having it. He says, I've done everything right all this time and you've never given me these things. His dad doesn't rebuke him for being self-centered. Instead, he says, all I have is yours. It always has been. That hasn't changed and that has nothing to do with this. I'm celebrating the fact that someone has basically been raised from the dead.

We never find out how the older son responds to this. But of course, it's just a parable. There isn't actually an older son. Parables often have one primary point. So why did Jesus tell this parable? What was he trying to communicate?

As Christians, we resonate with the story of the Father welcoming a sinner and celebrating that what was lost is found, what was dead is alive. That's beautiful. But given the audience Jesus is speaking to, a mixed bag of his Jewish followers who are described as tax collectors and sinners in verse 1, plus some Pharisees who are always trying to trap him, it seems that he might have a different angle.

It seems like maybe he's portraying the tax collectors and sinners as the younger son, the ones given to licentiousness, and the Pharisees as the older son, given to legalism and moral superiority. If we look at it that way, who do you think the real prodigal son is, the real wasteful one in this story?

Just to be clear, the word prodigal doesn't actually appear anywhere in scripture. It's a title we've added. But if I'm thinking about who really missed out, the one who really wasted what was given to him, it's the older son, not the younger one. I think Jesus is trying to show the Pharisees that they're missing out on the Father's heart because they're too busy hating the sinners.

What was your God shot today? Mine was in the parable of the prodigal son, whichever son that happens to be. It was the way Jesus painted God celebrating our nearness to him. It showed up three times, in verses 23, 24, and 32. God celebrates. It's easy to feel the weight of our sin and forget that he calls us clean. One of the great things about serving a God who is outside of time is that he sees our future as a present reality.

He sees us as holy because Jesus has already taken our debt and traded it for his righteousness. The fact that God would celebrate us feels a little odd, I won't lie. But the fact that in verse 32, he describes that as fitting blows my mind. He says, the absolute right thing to do is celebrate that the lost person has been found. There was never a question, strike up the band and start the fireworks. He is so merciful and so gracious and he is where the joy is.

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