The Gospel of Luke – Luke 11:29-54 – Denunciation of the Pharisees

This week we will continue our journey through Luke with Luke 11:29-12:59. In these readings, Jesus once more condemns the lawyers.

Sign of Jonah: (11:29-36)

Jesus tells the crowds that “no sign shall be given this generation except the Sign of Jonah.” v.29. Matthew has this same saying of Jesus in Matthew 12:38-42. Matthew, however, adds an explanation where Jesus says, “For just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so for three days and three nights the Son of Man will be in the heart of the earth.”

Matt.12:40, Jonah 2. Luke, however, does not contain this explanation. Instead, Luke’s explanation is Jesus saying, “For just as Jonah became a sign to the people of Nineveh, so the Son of Man will be to this generation.” v.30, Jonah 3. In Luke, the Sign of Jonah is not about Jesus’s Resurrection but the Gentiles’s repentance.

Luke follows Jesus’s teaching on the Sign of Jonah with a teaching on light. (Matthew gives us these same teachings, but within the Sermon on the Mount and in a different context. Matt. 6:22-23.) Think back to the Song of Simeon and the underlying verses from Isaiah, which foretell that the Messiah is a light unto the Gentiles. Luke 2:32, Isa. 42:6, 49:6, 52:10, 60:3. In his “well-ordered account,” Luke places these teachings on the Sign of Jonah and Light together to remind his predominately Gentile audience that Jesus also came for them.

Woe to Lawyers: (vv. 37-53)

In these verses, Jesus engages in a hyperbolic denunciation of Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers. (Matthew has a similar teaching in Matthew 23 set during Holy Week. In Matthew, however, Jesus does not mention lawyers.) The Pharisees, et.al., during Jesus’s day, were the good guys. They wanted the Jewish people to understand God’s expectations of them as set forth in the Scriptures. The way to bring about God’s Kingdom was through obedience to God’s Word. This obedience was not simply religious but social, political, and familial, touching all aspects of a person’s life.

On their best days, the Pharisees uplifted the society around them, but on other days, they were the social scolds policing appropriate social boundaries. In today’s society, social media is full of people, like the Pharisees, who quickly condemn any real or perceived social transgression. Therefore, if we bring Jesus’s hyperbolic denunciations current, Jesus is not only speaking out against religious leaders but anyone who places themself as policing proper social conduct.   

Jesus’s denunciations should be seen in the light of his various teachings in Luke 9 during the training of his disciples and his specific instructions that the least is the greatest and each of us must take up our cross daily and follow him. In their policing of social boundaries and correct conduct, the Pharisees’s iniquity was not hypocrisy (their own personal conduct was actually in accordance with the Law’s requirements) but in placing themselves as overlords of others. Their iniquity was making themselves great and placing crosses on the backs of others.

The key to understanding this passage correctly is to see ourselves as the object of Jesus’s scorn. Because as soon as we see anyone else as a modern-day Pharisee, scribe, or lawyer, we immediately become one of them as well.

Dinner is at 6. The menu is chicken bog. Discussion about 6:45. Compline at 8. Hope to see you here!

Be hard on yourself and easy on others. Carry your own cross but never lay one on the back of another.”― A.W. Tozer, Man: The Dwelling Place of God