Luke 6:12-16

Transcript

00:00:00:54 – 00:00:29:24
Clint Loveall
Hey, everybody. Thanks for joining us on this Monday. Sorry about the little mix up with our video. We’re not sure what’s going on. We are trying to get it figured out so that it quits happening, But we may go a little shorter today. As many of you are back with us a second time and we appreciate that. We are in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, the 12th verse, a kind of section that is in most of the gospels, and I’ll just read it and then we can talk.

00:00:29:24 – 00:01:05:13
Clint Loveall
There is quite a bit surprisingly to unpack here. Now, during those days he went out to the mountain to pray and he spent the night in prayer to God. And when the day came, he called his disciples and chose 12 of them, whom he also named apostles Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew. And James and John and Philip and Bartholomew and Matthew and Thomas and James, the Son of Alpheus and Simon, who was called the Zealot and Judas, the son of James and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.

00:01:07:10 – 00:01:28:31
Clint Loveall
I think anybody familiar with the Jesus story knows that Jesus had a group of men around him called the Disciples or the Apostles. What’s interesting here in Luke is that Luke gives us the impression that Jesus has selected that group from a larger group of potential. And you don’t you don’t want to read too much into this, Michael.

00:01:28:31 – 00:02:02:47
Clint Loveall
I want to be careful. But it’s interesting that Luke says that Jesus, the night before he made these choices, spent the evening in prayer. I I’m not saying that Luke wants us to see that connection there, but it seems relatively it it seems relatively possible, maybe even likely, that Luke is connecting Jesus’s night of prayer with his ultimate narrowing of this pool of men to 12 and the particular men that he’s chosen here.

00:02:03:36 – 00:02:12:03
Clint Loveall
Again, I wanted I don’t want to tell you straight out that that’s what Luke is saying, but it seems likely that Luke wants us to pick up on that.

00:02:12:19 – 00:02:39:57
Michael Gewecke
Yeah, and don’t miss either. The connection that this has towards the latter part of the story. And I know that we shouldn’t skip ahead, but the next time that Jesus is going to be praying all through the night and it’s going to involve his disciples, they’re going to be in the Garden of Death ceremony. So don’t miss the fact that Jesus is praying before he calls his disciples, and then he’s praying at that crucial evening before his trial and his crucifixion.

00:02:39:57 – 00:03:04:01
Michael Gewecke
And there he has his disciples with him. And in many ways, that bookend shows us Jesus’s faithfulness. Jesus is a man of prayer. He’s a man of conviction. Jesus is the one who follows in God’s way. Jesus is the one who holds the weight and bears the burden. These disciples, both in the beginning of their call and then even at the end of their call, they’re going to rely upon Jesus.

00:03:04:01 – 00:03:23:20
Michael Gewecke
They’re going to find Jesus to be the one who carries the weight for them. And I think that there’s a lot of sense as to that we shouldn’t spend too much time. Like you said, Clint, I think that some of this is simply that before a big decision or four, before a big moment, we find Jesus in prayer.

00:03:23:20 – 00:03:27:59
Michael Gewecke
And I think that that is very much part of the story that Luke is trying to tell us here. Yeah.

00:03:27:59 – 00:03:51:39
Clint Loveall
And you recently did a class on the 12 Disciples, you know, I think, and pushed back on this. If you disagree, I think the disciples are an interesting study in the New Testament because in the Gospels they are present, they’re not particularly important. And what I mean by that is that they don’t take a great deal of leadership.

00:03:52:21 – 00:04:13:51
Clint Loveall
They are often pictured getting things wrong as often as getting them right. They do have moments of courage. They have moments of insight. But but all the gospel writers in their own way make it pretty clear that the story is not really about them. You could maybe say that John, with the beloved Disciple stuff, highlights their role a little bit more.

00:04:14:07 – 00:04:51:07
Clint Loveall
But I think the gospel writers take steps to make sure and and protect against the story becoming about these men. Having said that, when you look in a book like Acts, these men become leaders. They they perform miracles, they preach, they do missionary stuff, they do healings. Their role becomes in some ways much more prominent and up front in the aftermath of Jesus death and resurrection.

00:04:51:46 – 00:05:23:22
Clint Loveall
But we do know throughout the rest of the story, these are the 12, these are the 12 men who are going to travel with Jesus. They’re going to see what happens. They’re going to relate the stories. They’re going to have ups and downs. They’re going to suffer many of many of them in cases, particularly after Jesus, but even to some extent through the story, particularly late in the story, and that we’ve always accorded them in the faith of special place, and I think rightly so.

00:05:23:42 – 00:05:52:01
Clint Loveall
I just think it’s interesting that in the Gospels the writers are so committed to focus on Jesus that they don’t really seem too interested in the stories about the disciples. In fact, having taught the class to be curious if you agree with this in the Scripture itself, we know very little about these men. There’s a lot of details we’d love to know about them, and it’s lost to us.

00:05:52:01 – 00:05:53:43
Clint Loveall
And I think that sort of speaks to the point.

00:05:53:43 – 00:06:15:07
Michael Gewecke
By the way, it’s also true there’s more information in the historical church tradition record. Yeah, but there’s less than what you think. Actually, I think it’s striking the number of disciples where it went something like, well, they might have gone here and they could have gone here, but we think that maybe they actually went here was.

00:06:15:07 – 00:06:18:55
Clint Loveall
A story about this, but we’re not. Yeah, that stuff is very common.

00:06:18:55 – 00:06:51:18
Michael Gewecke
And my takeaway on that, though, Clint, is that actually I think when you find the disciples in the scripture, there is a concerted effort by every gospel writer, I think. And I think that that would include John, though maybe there’s some caveats. And I think every gospel writer, though, at a very, very fundamental level, is trying to humanize the disciples in a way that I think serves to invite the reader to find themself in that discipleship role.

00:06:51:34 – 00:07:18:09
Michael Gewecke
I think that what we discover in the Gospels is that they’re fundamentally books about what it looks like to be a follower of Jesus. And they’re not history books. They’re not about what these very notable people did. They’re about this is the formation Final Life of Jesus as He lived it with his followers. So therefore you can be formed by it, so that you can be a follower.

00:07:18:09 – 00:07:38:36
Michael Gewecke
So I think there’s an odd way in which the gospel writers walk this this really interesting, strange kind of path where they want you to know about Peter, they want you to know about John, but they don’t want you to revere them. They don’t want you to put them on a pedestal. They want you to ask yourself, How am I called to be a disciple?

00:07:38:36 – 00:08:00:09
Michael Gewecke
How am I called to be in a possible how am I called even in my failure, even in my lack of faith, in the midst of our own living, of our own real human lives? The Gospels show real human disciples. And I just you know, that was one of my big takeaways from that class is that we we are tempted to make celebrities, but the Bible’s not.

00:08:00:34 – 00:08:27:37
Clint Loveall
Yeah, I think very true. And interestingly, having said that, we don’t know as much about these men as we’d like to. What is interesting is even in the little we know, we see some pretty interesting, some pretty fascinating realities. So as you read this list, you have fishermen. You have a man, Matthew, who was a tax collector, sort of in collusion.

00:08:27:37 – 00:08:50:49
Clint Loveall
Most would have said with Rome. And then right there alongside him, you have this man named Simon, who was a zealot, who was called the zealot, the zealots were a party that wanted to overthrow Rome violently. You have an amazing diversity in these 12 men as much as you would have in a group of 12 first century Jews.

00:08:50:49 – 00:09:21:14
Clint Loveall
I think you have in Luke. And this is one of the particulars of Luke’s list. You have two Judases. Most people, I think correct me if I’m wrong, Michael, think that this first Judas, the son of James, is more often called Thaddeus in the other gospels, probably called Thaddeus, As you can imagine, after the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, Judas becomes not a name that you really give to anybody or that you celebrate.

00:09:21:14 – 00:09:47:02
Clint Loveall
And so if there is a second Judas, we know him. We think as Thaddeus. And and that leaves Judas Iscariot the one. So there’s no confusion about who is the betrayer. But this is an interesting group of men we sort of know from their stories. James and John are impulsive. Peter often seems to be a know it all.

00:09:47:58 – 00:10:14:43
Clint Loveall
We don’t get the sense that any of these men or by themselves in and of themselves, anything special or important. They’re not chosen because of their status, because of their wealth from anything that we can tell. And yet, Jesus, having prayed all night, is led to this particular group of 12 people, each one serving a purpose, each one bringing something unique to this group.

00:10:15:30 – 00:10:28:57
Clint Loveall
It would be nice to know in more cases what that was and to have more stories about that. We get some glimpses of it and we’ll get some glimpses of it through the Book of Luke. But we we just don’t know as much as we wish we did.

00:10:29:43 – 00:10:56:49
Michael Gewecke
There’s a beautiful diversity in these characters, like you say, Clint, and there’s actually a rich Christian history in understanding their lives and their importance. And I think that maybe as Protestants, we worked so hard to extract ourselves from some of the systems and some of the orders that that came about over the thousands of years of church development that maybe we did miss some of the humanity of these people.

00:10:57:10 – 00:11:25:40
Michael Gewecke
And I think it’s worth at least spending time. If you haven’t before, take a little time, pick up a book and read a little bit about these men, because the the fact that they were included so little really in the content of the story quantitatively is in many ways overshadowed later when we find out that these are the men who died for their faith, who went to all corners of the world.

00:11:25:40 – 00:11:50:07
Michael Gewecke
In fact, they by the end of their lives, the faith had spread throughout the entire known world. There’s good reason to think the faith had made it to India and certainly to the farthest western part of Europe, if not potentially into Great Britain already. And that was just in their lifetimes. And that is a testament to their courage and to their their true belief in this man Jesus.

00:11:50:07 – 00:12:19:08
Michael Gewecke
And what you changes. The only thing I’ll add last word, Judas, as you said, has a really bad reputation and and history has not been kind on the word Judas. One thing I learned, I’m just put in the back of your trivia hat knowledge. There’s a thing called the Judas Goat. The Judas goat is a goat that is trained in, uh, in cattle yards, in, in meat processing facilities.

00:12:19:28 – 00:12:37:35
Michael Gewecke
The goat is trained to go and assimilate with the other goats and then lead them to the location where the animals are killed and all of the other animals will be processed. And then that animal is spared and allowed to do it to the next group. And it’s called the Judas Goat. And I learned that and thought. Wolf, that.

00:12:37:35 – 00:13:22:03
Clint Loveall
STARK Yeah, Judas is certain. There have been some modern ideas that maybe Judas was trying to do something good. The early church and the history of Christianity has largely chalked up what Jesus did to the worst or what Judas did to the worst of motives. The one last thing I’d add, Michael, and I think to your point, and maybe this is particularly true in Luke, and I say that because of Luke’s next work with the Book of Acts, there is a if you read those two works, there’s a very distinct difference between the gospel or the gospel account of the disciples before the resurrection who desert Jesus and who don’t think he’s been resurrected and

00:13:22:03 – 00:13:47:04
Clint Loveall
who think the women are telling them stories and don’t understand what’s happening. And then the men they become in the aftermath, led by the Holy Spirit as they guide the church and as they spread the good news of the Gospel. And I think because Luke gives us both both ends of the story, we see in some sense the the fullest development of their own stories.

00:13:47:04 – 00:14:08:54
Clint Loveall
And I think, you know, to some extent they are downplayed in the front end of the story. But in the post resurrection part of the story, in the church, part of the story, they become, yeah, in many ways, the thrust of the story, particularly if you include Paul among their number, which we can talk about some other.

00:14:08:54 – 00:14:51:05
Michael Gewecke
Point, but Paul’s included in this. The thing that they share consistently, even post resurrection, is the unlikeliness of their success, the unlikeliness of their leadership, the unlikeliness that you are one of the Thomases. Aren’t these men just Galilean? The idea being where did you learn to speak in public? And I think that that’s part of the reputation that the gospel writers actually carefully wrote within their stories was to make sure that we understood that, that wherever they did something great that should reflect upon God’s greatness and not their education or their training or their charisma, that this is God working through them.

00:14:51:07 – 00:15:13:17
Clint Loveall
Yeah, and that’s a beautiful takeaway because I think all of us at some point, as we’ve led our own path of discipleship, have thought, well, if I could, if I could write, if I could sing, if I could do you know, and we have felt ordinary and maybe not up to the task of sharing faith because of our ordinary ness.

00:15:13:48 – 00:15:43:22
Clint Loveall
And it is a helpful and humbling reminder that Jesus really sought ordinary kind of from the outset. I mean, that Jesus wasn’t looking for extraordinary and or those of us who feel like we fit the bill of ordinary still have wonderful opportunities to be disciples because it’s not ultimately about who we are, but about who Jesus is. And I think we see that right at the beginning here.

00:15:43:43 – 00:15:48:50
Michael Gewecke
It’s a good summary. I’m glad that you’re with us today. Look forward to seeing you tomorrow. I until then, be blessed.

00:15:49:08 – 00:15:49:33
Clint Loveall
Thanks.