Ancient Anglican

In Jesus’s apocalyptic contest between God’s Kingdom and the powers of evil, Jesus teaches that he needs total loyalty from his followers and that his followers must completely reorder their priorities. Although Jesus just told his disciples not to be anxious, here he tells them they do need to be watchful and ready.

In their policing of social boundaries and correct conduct, the Pharisees’s iniquity was not hypocrisy but in placing themselves as overlords of others. Their iniquity was making themselves great and placing crosses on the backs of others.

Jesus moved the lawyer’s inquiry, which sought to husband God’s grace in isolated security and purity, to one of extending God’s grace to the whole world. In other words, Jesus’ response to the lawyer’s testing shows just how far the mission that began with the Twelve and then the Seventy will extend.

As you receive the communion wafer, let it touch your lips, and at that moment, know that you are no longer a person of unclean lips. And as you allow the wafer to pass through your lips, experience the grace of God coming upon you – in all of its wonder and awe and its amazement and incomprehension.

In Luke 9, Jesus commissioned and trained the Twelve to carry on his work. Here, he expands his workforce by adding seventy additional apostles to proclaim the Kingdom of God.

In these readings we encounter Jesus’s disclosure to the Twelve as to the meaning of his identity as the Christ, and Jesus’s instructions to them as to what is required of his disciples.

Jesus is the founder of the Kingdom of Heaven, but for the business to succeed, he needs others to share in the planning and responsibility of the venture. These are the Twelve.

Jesus knows that metaphorical storms will come upon the apostles and the church, and he wants his disciples (including us) to have a faith that trusts God to achieve his purpose even through disorder and apparent destruction.

In the readings this week we meet the sinful woman who loved Jesus and the Three Woman who follow Jesus.

In healing the Centurion’s slave and raising the widow’s son, Jesus is fulfilling the stories of Elisha and Elijah that he quoted in Nazareth.

We must love our neighbors, even those who are our enemies, and we cannot judge others by pointing out their sins when we still have sins of own. Rather, to be a follower of Jesus, we must always have an attitude of spiritual impoverishment borne of humility and contrition.

We see Jesus’s increasing authority in his forgiving sins, his declaration that he is the Son of Man, and in his declaring himself Lord of the Sabbath.