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Luke 10:30-37, there is an Old Testament passage that many scholars believe Jesus is deliberately echoing and if they are right, it adds a layer that the Torah expert in his audience would have caught immediately. 2 Chronicles 28:5-15, during the reign of king Ahaz of Judah, one of the most...

Luke 10:30-37, in verse 33, the outsider, the heretic, the man from the wrong mountain, feels what Jesus feels, his compassion is not second-hand, it is the same gut-deep, body-moving force that drives every act of rescue in the Gospels. The priest saw the man and calculated. The Levite saw the...

Luke 10: 30-37, in verse 33, in the early 1st century, during Passover, Samaritans scattered human bones inside the Jerusalem Temple courts, an act of deliberate desecration that would have rendered the space ritually unclean. This was not a theological disagreement between denominations, this...

Luke 10:30-37, there is another layer in Luke 10:31, Leviticus 21:1-3, prohibited priests from making contact with a corpse except for immediate family members, the man on the road was half dead. From a distance, especially from the other side of the road, you might not be able to tell whether...

Luke 10:30-37, in Luke 10:29, the Hebrew word behind neighbor in Leviticus 19:18 is “rea,” in its immediate context, it appears in parallel with the phrase “the children of your people, in Hebrew bnei amekha,” that phrasing gave some interpreters room to read neighbor as referring primarily to...

Luke 10:30-37, the road winds through the Wadi Kelt, a dry, narrow canyon carved into pale limestone full of caves and blind turns and long stretches where nobody can see you. The Jewish historian Josephus recorded that this road was roughly 150 Roman stadia long, travelers knew it well...

Luke 16:1-13, the unjust steward had already made his choice long before the parable began, he was a slave to wealth and when wealth turned on him, he reached for the only savior a slave to wealth has, more leverage, more deals, that is the only kind of salvation money can buy, a few more years...

Luke 16:1-13, then verse 9, make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness, that when you fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations. The mammon of unrighteousness, in Greek “mamona,” mammon is an Aramaic loan word, wealth, the thing you trust in and notice, it is not...

Luke 16:1-13, commission, usury, honor, three interpretations and notice, not one of them turns the steward into a good man, every honest interpretation leaves him exactly what the text calls him, unjust, which means the praise was never about his character. So, what was the steward’s character...

Luke 16:1-13, what morally was actually happening in those two transactions? The second interpretation, the steward was stripping out illegal interest, the Torah forbade a Jewish lender to charge interest to a fellow Jew, Leviticus 25:35-38; Deuteronomy 23:19-20 are flat about it, but wealthy...

Luke 16:1-13, here is the detail that tells you this steward knew exactly what he was doing, those are not random numbers. 50% off the oil, 20% off the wheat, those figures track the going rates of merchant markup and interest in the first century commodity trade. Oil carried a high markup...

Luke 16:1-13, the oikonomon “steward” could enter binding contracts in his master’s name, he could collect debts, he could buy, sell, hire, fire, his signature carried the master’s legal weight. This is the hinge the whole parable turns on, when the steward sat down with the debtors and slashed...

Luke 16:1-13, a man robs his employer, gets caught and then on his way out the door, robs him a second time, bigger and nobody stops him. The master does not reverse it, the master does not punish him, the master does the one thing a robbed man should never do, he claps. And then Jesus, the one...

Mark 4:1-20, there is a tenderness waiting just a few verses later, because Jesus is not finished with the seed, in the same chapter, he tells another short parable, Mark 4:26-29. A man scatters seed, then sleeps and rises night after night and the seed sprouts and grows and he does not know...

Mark 4:1-20, four hearts, one word, the only variable is the ground, but Jesus does something between telling the parable and explaining it and it is one of the hardest moments in the gospels, the disciples come and ask why Jesus teaches in parables at all. And Jesus answers with words that have...

Mark 4:1-20, the fourth soil, after three failures, the fourth seed finally finds good ground, soil that is open, broken up, deep and clear, the seed goes in, the roots go down, the plant rises and bears grain. And Jesus gives a number that the modern ear flattens, but the ancient ear would have...

Mark 4:1-20, the third soil is the most dangerous of the three that fail, because it does not look like failure at all, the seed falls among thorns and here the seed actually grows, it takes root, it rises, there is a real plant, but the thorns were already in that ground and they grow, too and...

Mark 4:1-20, listen to how Jesus opens, the very first word out of his mouth, before the farmer, before the field, is a command. Listen and then at the end, after the four soils, he closes with it again, Mark 4:9, he who has ears to hear, let him hear. The whole parable is wrapped on both ends...

Mark 4:1-20, here is where the original setting matters, because the way they farm is not the way you farm and the difference changes how you hear the whole thing. In 1st century Galilee, the farmer often scattered his seed before he plowed the field, this is backwards from what you would...

Mark 4:1-20, watch what the sower actually does, he goes out to his field, he reaches into his bag of seed, he scatters, then he reaches in again and scatters again. Four handfuls in the parable and every single handful is the same, the same grain, thrown by the same hand, with the same motion...