Urgent care
Luke 12:49 – Chapter 14
In his recent sermon Carlton spoke of the urgency of inviting people to live life in and through Jesus Christ, a theme that comes up in today’s reading.
First, though, Jesus speaks of God’s patience. In the parable of the fig tree in 13:6-9, a man wants to cut down a fig tree that has failed to bear fruit. The worker who tends to the trees, though, urges him to give the tree another year to produce fruit before cutting it down.
We are the fig tree in the parable. We have not borne fruit, and God would be justified in cutting us down. Yet, he continues to have patience in the hope we will yet do so.
The parable implies, though, that the reprieve is not unlimited. There will come a time when those who have not borne fruit will be cut down and tossed aside.
The urgency intensifies in Verses 22-30, when Jesus speaks of people who will be saved as going through a “narrow door” not all will pass through.
There will be a time when the door closes and no one else will pass through it. Those left on the outside will ask to be admitted, but will not be, though they will remember the time when they still had opportunity.
This isn’t a pleasant teaching, and it’s one that I think we often want to just ignore. The benefit, and price, of reading all of scripture, though, is having to face up to the parts we don’t particularly like.
We recoil from some of the presentations we have heard that move beyond simple truth-telling into the realm of manipulation: the high-pressure “turn or burn” presentation of the good news that makes it feel more like bad news. Our challenge is to take the urgency seriously without turning to fear or manipulation.
One of the ways to avoid those temptations is to take the attitude that Jesus himself shows a few verses later in 34-35.
You can feel Jesus’s pain in the words, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often have I longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing.”
Do we feel that much pain and compassion for those who have not accepted Christ? Do we feel that their failure to accept diminishes us and our own joy? If not, are we truly sharing the mind of Christ?