Put your
trust in the LORD and do good. He will make your righteousness as clear as the
light and your just dealing as the noonday. Be still before the LORD and wait
patiently for Him. Psalm 37:3-7
Now it
happened that one day while he was teaching the people in the Temple and
proclaiming the good news, the chief priests and the scribes came up, together
with the elders, and spoke to him. ‘Tell us,’ they said, ‘what authority have
you for acting like this? Luke 20:1-2
Because I am sort of an odd person, I have to
admit that I am totally clueless about the latest binge show watching and
certainly have no idea about the latest actors and media trends. It cuts a lot
of conversations short with my eighth grade kiddos. Really, I should do something
about my severe lack of cultural literacy. However, really last night I was
rereading Jesus Through Middle Eastern
Eyes just before curling off to bed. And this chapter was pretty
complicated, addressing the inauguration of Jesus’ ministry, mostly because so
many things can be translated several different ways. And taken in the context
of the sort of theological training Jesus had, at the local haberim, a lay movement that had sprung
up in the villages of the Holy Land around this time. The word means “the
friends” and they joined nightly in discussion of the Torah and applying its
laws to their day.
And Jesus knew exactly what he was doing, as he
edited Isaiah 61, reading it aloud to the congregation, leaving out all the
bits of vengeance on the Gentiles. Jeremias points out that the words can be
translated, “And all witnessed against him, and were amazed at the words of
mercy that came out of his mouth, and they said, ‘Is not this Joseph’s son?’”
And this is the good news that He preached, and continues
to preach each day, until His return: to
proclaim to the prisoners–freedom, and to the blind, recovery of sight, to send
forth the oppressed–in freedom, and to proclaim year of the LORD’s favor.
Bailey sums up this gospel of Jesus as being
radical in every sense from the expectations of the crowd. It is not about
material blessing, but rather it is a call to action, as exemplified by the
faith of a Gentile woman and man, the hungry Sidonese widow and Naaman, the
Syrian commander-in-chief. The faith
exhibited here involves intellectual assent, trust and obedience.
And it’s all about the simple little chorus I
learned as a child: Trust and obey, for
there is no other way, to be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey.
Then in fellowship sweet we will sit at His
feet,
Or we’ll walk by His side in the way;
What He says we will do, where He sends we will go;
Never fear, only trust and obey.
Or we’ll walk by His side in the way;
What He says we will do, where He sends we will go;
Never fear, only trust and obey.
