Read Luke 6:20-49
In 1949, one of the leading scholars of Christian liturgy, Gregory Dix, quipped to a colleague, “Our understanding of our forms of worship underwent a radical transformation when it finally occurred to someone that Jesus was a Jew.” Until the middle of the twentieth century, the Jewish context for early Christianity’s faith and practice went largely understudied and underemphasized.
Luke uses his Gospel to situate the biographical details of Jesus’ life and ministry in their Jewish context. In this record of Jesus’ famous sermon, Luke intentionally recalls the Jewish Exodus from Egypt and Moses’ famous final sermon in the book of Deuteronomy. After forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Moses stood before the ancient Israelites and renewed the covenant. He announced blessings and curses, assuring them that if God’s people obeyed His laws they would inherit and live long in the Promised Land. If they did not, God would exile them from the land and scatter them among the nations (Deuteronomy 6–8).
Like Moses, Jesus also stood before a large crowd, pronouncing blessings and woes. This time the promised inheritance isn’t a land flowing with milk and honey: it’s the promise of the “kingdom of God” (v. 20) and reward from God in heaven. There are still covenant responsibilities, of course. Jesus’ words are authoritative and must be obeyed. Nevertheless, in this new kingdom of God, obedience is summed up as acts that imitate the good and gracious Father, who shows kindness to the ungrateful and wicked.
Throughout their history, the people of Israel had been the ungrateful and wicked people whom Jesus referenced. Imagine their relief that Jesus had come to announce the Father’s mercy (v. 36). What good news!
APPLY THE WORD
We often think our greatest faith responsibility is belief: belief in the Bible and God’s revealed plan of salvation. And of course we should believe those things! But Jesus’ sermon makes clear that a truly Christian life is one of obedience. We are blessed when we hear God’s words and put them into practice.
DAILY DEVOTIONS, NEWS AND INFORMATION 