In this video, Clint Loveall and Michael Gewecke continue their exploration of the Gospel of Luke. They delve into the challenging parable found in Luke 19:11-27, discussing its interpretation and its contrast with the parable of the talents. The conversation touches on themes of worldly power, allegiances, and the Kingdom of God. They also connect the parable to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem and the significance of his humble arrival. Join Clint and Michael as they navigate this thought-provoking text and provide insights into its meaning.
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Transcript
00:00:00:41 – 00:00:39:52
Clint Loveall
All right, friends, thanks for joining us again as we continue through the gospel of Luke. You picked you picked an interesting day. We’re in the 19th chapter. We begin with the 11th verse, arguably, a case can be made the most difficult parable in the gospels, and it will not sound like it initially because it sounds like another parable that, you know, and that sort of colors our expectation of this parable.
00:00:39:57 – 00:01:06:12
Clint Loveall
But it takes a hard turn and it is a very difficult parable to understand. It’s not one that most people do much with. It would be wouldn’t be impossible to preach. But I suspect most people don’t don’t, don’t try it very often. So I’ll read it and I’ll try to read it quickly so that we have some time to try and make sense of it.
00:01:06:13 – 00:01:31:44
Clint Loveall
I can tell you we probably won’t get to the bottom of it. It leaves more questions than answers. Verse 11 As they were listening to this, he went on to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem and because they supposed that the Kingdom of God, it was to appear immediately. So he said, a nobleman went to a distant country to get royal power for himself and then returned.
00:01:31:44 – 00:01:55:06
Clint Loveall
He suddenly tenor was slaves and gave them £10 and said to them, Do business with these until they come back. But the citizens of the country hated him and sent a delegation after him saying, We do not want this man to rule over us. When he returned, having received royal power, he ordered the slaves to whom he’d given the money to be summoned that they might find.
00:01:55:06 – 00:02:19:39
Clint Loveall
He might find out what they had gained. But first came and said, Lord, your pound is made ten more pounds. He said, Well done, good slave. You have been trustworthy in small things. Take charge of ten cities. Then the second one came and said, Lord, your pound has made £5. He said, And you take five cities. Then the other came saying, Lord, here is your pound.
00:02:19:44 – 00:02:39:25
Clint Loveall
I wrapped it in a piece of cloth. I was afraid of you because you’re a harsh man and take what you did not deposit and reap what you did not. So he said to him, I will judge you by your own words. Week in Slave. So you knew that I was a harsh man and taking what I did not deposit and reaping what I didn’t.
00:02:39:25 – 00:03:05:46
Clint Loveall
So why then did you not put my money in the bank? Then when I returned, I could have at least collected interest. So I said to the bystanders, Take the pound from him, give it to the one who has ten. And they said to him, Lord, he has ten already. I tell you, all those who have been more, who have more will be given, but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken.
00:03:05:51 – 00:03:31:06
Clint Loveall
And as for those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them, bring them here and slaughter them before my eyes. So, again, as you read this parable, you think you’re in Matthew. You think this is the parable of the talents, a parable about being faithful with what you’ve been given. This is not that parable.
00:03:31:06 – 00:03:58:50
Clint Loveall
And I think the most difficult part of interpretation is to realize is that though they they travel some similar ground, they are very different in their intention and they’re very different ultimately in the message. And so the first thing we have to understand is this is less a parable about earthly faithfulness, as in the parable in Matthew. This is about worldly power.
00:03:58:55 – 00:04:40:59
Clint Loveall
This is a warning to disciples about how the world works and in Luke tries to help us on the front end by telling us he told them a parable because they suppose that the Kingdom of God was to appear immediately. So this idea of waiting, this idea of being punished, this idea of being afraid, we we see here, I think as opposed to Matthew again, where the third servant is the one in ere actually in this text, it may be that the third servant is the one to be praised because he refuses to participate in sort of the scheming of the master.
00:04:41:04 – 00:05:09:21
Clint Loveall
He refuses to take for the master at the expense of other people. I want to I also want to be clear that almost everything we say about this parable is speculation. At least I’ll speak for myself, Michael, because biblical scholars, people who have spent a lifetime studying the gospel, don’t know exactly what to do with this, that this is some of some very, very difficult material.
00:05:09:30 – 00:05:28:46
Michael Gewecke
Now, some of that boils down to its relation, as you’ve always said, to a text that we know and we’re comfortable with. It’s always easy to hear in a story that sounds very similar, similar themes. We would probably particularly like amassing seen better than we’re going to like this theme. And so that’s going to color our reading here.
00:05:28:48 – 00:05:59:16
Michael Gewecke
I also think, though, Clint, that part of what makes this reading so difficult is because it does connect to larger Luke themes that also make us uncomfortable. I think Luke addresses the idea of worldly power in a way that the other gospel writers are not so inclined to address head on. And here this idea that there’s an interim period and the question given to everyone while you wait, what are you doing in the midst of the world around you?
00:05:59:16 – 00:06:23:52
Michael Gewecke
And not so much as in are you investing in this world, but what impact does the does our hope and faith, as well as our disbelief and our lack of faith affect the outcome of those things happening in the world around us? And Clint? You know, what’s really interesting here is the harsh, harsh turn that comes at the end of the story, Right?
00:06:24:07 – 00:06:58:13
Michael Gewecke
If we look at this really closely, the idea here, that verse 27, as for these enemies of mine who did not want to me to be king over them, bring them here and slaughter them in my presence. That’s really harsh, combative language. But when you put that in context of the eternal Kingdom and the idea of those who set themself against Christ’s kingdom, this would mirror images that we do have in, say, Matthew, even the sorting of the the goats from the sheep and the, you know, winnowing of the wheat and the tear.
00:06:58:15 – 00:07:13:55
Michael Gewecke
So we have other parables that end in very similar distance sorting endings, but because maybe of our connection to this parable and another telling that that’s more positive, maybe we might say, you know, this does come as a surprise at the end.
00:07:14:00 – 00:07:41:40
Clint Loveall
Yeah. And the other thing about that is that that connects to a piece of history that likely Jesus hearers knew. There was a Jewish delegation and that traveled when Herod was going to be made the ruler over the Jewish area. There was a delegation that traveled to protest, and after he rose to power, Herod literally had them put to death in front of them.
00:07:41:42 – 00:08:15:22
Clint Loveall
He he had them executed while he oversaw their slaughter. And so, again, that’s one of the things that makes this parable so difficult. Often we see in a parable when we see a king figure, we know that that’s the God figure. When we see a father figure. Luke gives us some exceptions to that. I don’t think it is wise to read this parable and think, this is telling us that God is a a harsh, vindictive king who’s going to slaughter people.
00:08:15:27 – 00:08:46:18
Clint Loveall
I don’t think that’s the idea. I think with the backdrop of that story about Herod, Luke is saying something very different. Luke is saying that as people of faith, the power and danger of the world has to be navigated. Now. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, Michael, but tomorrow we’ll look at the next story, which is Jesus entry into Jerusalem, the idea that of Jesus anointing as king.
00:08:46:22 – 00:09:09:22
Clint Loveall
And part of the reason I think that Luke puts these stories together is so that we are struck by the contrast of a man who goes to the distant country and we’ve seen the distant country and Luke, nothing good happens in the distant country. Remember, that’s where the prodigal son wants to eat the slop of the pigs and wastes all his money.
00:09:09:27 – 00:09:39:12
Clint Loveall
He goes to the distant country and confers power upon himself, gains power for himself, comes back and uses that power to punish those who have stood against him, thereby proving by the way, their reservations about him. And you contrast that with Jesus, who rides humbly into Jerusalem on a donkey and is proclaimed Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.
00:09:39:23 – 00:09:52:50
Clint Loveall
I think Luke is trying to help us understand something about the two kingdoms or what what are often called the two kingdoms of the gospel, the earthly worldly kingdom versus the heavenly or spiritual kingdom.
00:09:52:55 – 00:10:16:59
Michael Gewecke
Yet make no mistake, the beginning here of this passage ties in to the passage that is going to come. This is an interim text, it’s a middling text, and I think we see that here all the way in verse 11, where he goes on to tell a parable because we quote, He’s near Jerusalem, and then also he pairs it immediately with this idea of the kingdom of God, to your point.
00:10:17:04 – 00:10:40:09
Michael Gewecke
But when when you see Jesus enter into Jerusalem, that’s a text we’re far more familiar with because coming into Holy week, if you’re part of the church’s celebration of that, you celebrated this this activity. Every time we’ve come the week before Easter. And so here what we have happening in a really powerful sense is the question of allegiances.
00:10:40:10 – 00:11:08:28
Michael Gewecke
I mean, that’s what happens at the end, is those who are not only in allegiance against this king, they’re the ones who experience the destruction, but it’s the ones who have invested in the worldly power that are given that worldly power at the same measure that they’ve been received. And I think that that’s a fascinating thing when you remember that the early church clan didn’t have any political power.
00:11:08:33 – 00:11:50:56
Michael Gewecke
They had no real power to move the lever in terms of the social state. They were they were asked in their daily life, do you celebrate Lord Jesus or Lord Caesar and Rome and how they lived their life was a constant reflection of that value structure, that they were really put in position to address because of Jesus’s claim over their life and each and every day that the culture that surrounded them and the the people who had power and financial interest over them had the ability of making those earliest Christians lives really, really difficult and really, really painful.
00:11:50:56 – 00:12:12:56
Michael Gewecke
And they were constant asking those questions. Make no mistake about it, either the city that Jesus is about to enter into is also the city that in not so long 70 A.D., it would become destroyed. I mean, it would it would be leveled by the Roman army. And this appears at multiple times in Jesus’s teaching across the Gospels.
00:12:13:01 – 00:12:35:08
Michael Gewecke
And the commentators that I have here make know the fact that though it may not be a direct reference here, there may be some of that insinuated as well that even the Jerusalem Jesus is about to enter is going to be the place that’s going to succumb to the power of the world, the kingdom of the world power, even though the Kingdom of Jesus Christ is going to enter it in just a moment.
00:12:35:13 – 00:12:58:44
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and I do I do think and we’ll bring this up tomorrow. I do think it’s helpful to keep these stories. I think they are bookends. I think you need a particularly the second one to help unpack the first. But as an example, notice that in the early part of this parable he goes to the distinct county to county country to get power for himself.
00:12:58:44 – 00:13:39:50
Clint Loveall
So the power of this king is conferred upon him, which I think in Luke is another example why this shouldn’t be read to be the God figure in the parable was God’s power is not conferred. God’s power is not given by anyone. Contrast that with Jesus who has a power of his own. He has the very power of God and yet will refuse to use it in lashing out against his enemies, will submit himself to his enemies in order to save those, even those who have ridiculed him, even those who would have crucified him.
00:13:39:50 – 00:14:22:25
Clint Loveall
And so I it’s really tough. It’s really tough story. Nobody knows exactly what to do with it. But I think it helps us frame what Luke wants us to know about the stories that are coming up and that may not be its full purpose. It may be that we’ve lost something that at one point Christians understood that we no longer do, but certainly it functions as a good counterbalance to what we’re going to see in Jesus, to have a story of a man who is power hungry, who is bent on vengeance, who is vindictive, who takes what doesn’t belong to him.
00:14:22:30 – 00:14:30:41
Clint Loveall
These are all the antithesis of what Luke is about, to spend multiple chapters telling us about the way Jesus rules in his.
00:14:30:41 – 00:15:00:28
Michael Gewecke
Kingdom, regardless of the exact stories that this called to mind when it was delivered to the first audience. I think it’s very clear that this was something that they shared in their world, that they understood that these characters existed, that they knew that faith is never just a practice of supernatural or spiritual disciplines. It’s not just us praying and reading our Bible and getting to live out our faith in peace and security.
00:15:00:28 – 00:15:22:42
Michael Gewecke
They understood from the very start that faith is lived out in the real world, and the real world is filled with power and abuses of power. The real world is filled with people who utilize that to their own ends, sometimes at the destruction of others. And so the earliest Christians also understood Jesus’s kingdom to be a radical undoing of that kingdom.
00:15:22:42 – 00:15:46:51
Michael Gewecke
His arrival in Jerusalem, not in the parable, but in the story that we’re going to have tomorrow, does give us a revelation. It literally helps us to see differently what this coming kingdom is going to look like, where God’s ends can be achieved without slaughter, where God’s will can be done for the benefit and blessing of others, as opposed to the harsh criticism.
00:15:46:51 – 00:16:17:04
Michael Gewecke
And that’s the amazing gift of the of Luke’s vision of the gospel, I think, is that he’s able to to make it clear to the readers, yes, this is the world that you actually live in. It’s actually full of brokenness and and people usually utilizing power and authority against others. But that isn’t the one who you worship. And to keep the glasses on the revelation eyes to see how the son of God is different from that worldly power.
00:16:17:09 – 00:16:24:34
Clint Loveall
Yeah, probably nobody’s favorite text. Maybe some Bible scholar who loves obscure.
00:16:24:34 – 00:16:26:47
Michael Gewecke
But wrote a dissertation on that. Yeah, sure.
00:16:26:47 – 00:16:47:18
Clint Loveall
Works for the rest of us. It’s a head scratcher. It’s uncomfortable. Don’t be. If. If it’s disturbing to you, don’t be too upset. Try to join us again if you can. As we move into the texts that I think provide the counterpoint and the balance, because I. I suspect maybe that’s part of Luke’s intention.
00:16:47:31 – 00:16:53:15
Michael Gewecke
Maybe subscribe. See, don’t miss that video. The moral you want part two and we look forward to seeing you that five guys.