God our helper,
show us your holy ways and teach us your paths.
By your Holy Spirit open our minds that we may be led in your truth and taught your will.
Then may we praise you by listening to your Word and by obeying it.
Through Christ, our Lord. Amen.
The parable of the Good Samaritan is a powerful one. How would it shape our service if every time we saw someone in need, we began a little story in our heads – “One day as [Matt] was going down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho, he saw someone in need…” How would the story end?
A question came up regarding the Lord’s Prayer and why modern translations of Matthew and Luke don’t have the ending we have (“yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever, amen.”). The earliest Greek manuscripts of the New Testament don't have the ending we use, but some of the later ones do (in Matthew, that is. No manuscripts have the long ending in Luke). That is why it is in the King James Version in Matthew. There was a document in the early church called the Didache (di-duh-kay) that dates back to about the year 100 A.D. It contains a lot of liturgical details, such as how to celebrate communion and baptism. It also has the longer ending that we use on the Lord's Prayer. Even if the ending wasn't original, it apparently was used in the very early church.
In Luke 15:3 we read that Jesus tells the people a parable, but then there are three parables there. We need to read them as a unit. Notice that Jesus interprets “being found” in the parable as repentance. “I once was lost, but now am found” – how do you know? By responding in repentance.
Luke 16:16 is a very difficult passage. Another legitimate way to translate the last part is “everyone is urged to enter in.” That seems to fit the context better, but it is still a difficult passage.
Reading big sections of Luke is a challenge – there is so much going on here! One of the overall impressions I got today was that judgment is real. Jesus doesn’t water the Gospel message down by making lots of exceptions or by softening the hard edges. The Good News is not that God doesn’t care or turns a blind eye; the Good News is that God has accomplished what we could not do and welcomes us as his children!
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