Luke 13:10-21

11. The Progress of the Kingdom: Luke 13:10-21.

During this journey, as throughout His whole ministry, Jesus did not fail to frequent the synagogues on the Sabbath days. The present narrative introduces us to one of those scenes. Perhaps the feeling which led Luke to place it here, was that of the contrast between Israel, which was hasting to destruction, and the Church, which was already growing.

A glorious deed, which tells strongly on the multitude (Luke 13:10-17), leads Jesus to describe in two parables the power of the kingdom of God (Luke 13:18-21).

1 st. Luke 13:10-17. The Healing of the palsied Woman.

And first the miracle, Luke 13:10-13. This woman was completely bent, and her condition was connected with a psychical weakness, which in turn arose from a higher cause, by which the will of the sufferer was bound. This state of things is described by the phrase: a spirit of infirmity. Jesus first of all heals the psychical malady: Thou art loosed. Λέλυσθαι, the perfect: it is an accomplished fact. The will of the sufferer through faith draws from this declaration the strength which it lacked. At the same time, by the laying on of His hands, Jesus restores the bodily organism to the control of the emancipated will; and the cure is complete.

The conversation, Luke 13:14-17. It was the Sabbath. The ruler of the synagogue imagines that he should apply to Jesus the Rabbinical regulation for practising physicians. Only, not daring to attack Him, he addresses his discourse to the people (Luke 13:14). Θεραπεύεσθε, come to get yourselves healed.

Jesus takes up the challenge. The plural hypocrites is certainly the true reading (comp. the plural adversaries, Luke 13:17). Jesus puts on trial the whole party of whom this man is the representative. The severity of His apostrophe is justified by the comparison which follows (Luke 13:15-16) between the freedom which they take with the Sabbath law, when their own interests, even the most trivial, are involved, and the extreme rigour with which they apply it, when the question relates to their neighbour's interests, even the gravest, as well as to their estimate of the conduct of Jesus. The three contrasts between ox (or ass) and daughter of Abraham, between stall and Satan, and between the two bonds, material and spiritual, to be unloosed, are obvious at a glance. The last touch: eighteen years, in which the profoundest pity is expressed, admirably closes the answer.

Holtzmann thinks that what has led Luke to place this account here, is the connection between the eighteen years' infirmity (Luke 13:11) and the three years' sterility (Luke 13:7)! Not content with ascribing to Luke this first puerility, he imputes to him a second still greater: that which has led Luke to place at Luke 13:18 the parable of the grain of mustard seed, is that it is borrowed from the vegetable kingdom, like that of the fig-tree (Luke 13:7-9)!!

This so nervous reply brings the admiration of the people to a height, and shuts the mouth of His adversaries. Jesus then, rising to the general idea, of which this deed is only a particular application, to wit, the power of the kingdom of God, developes it in two parables fitted to present this truth in its two chief aspects; the two are, the mustard seed (Luke 13:18-19) and the leaven (Luke 13:20-21).

2 d. Luke 13:18-21. The Two Parables.

The kingdom of God has two kinds of power: the power of extension, by which it gradually embraces all nations; the power of transformation, by which it gradually regenerates the whole of human life. The natural symbol of the first is a seed which acquires in a short time an increase out of all proportion to its original smallness; that of the second, a fermenting element, materially very inconsiderable, but capable of exercising its assimilating virtue over a large mass. Those two parables form part of the collection, Matthew 13:31 et seq.; the first only is found Mark 4:30-31.

Vers. 18 and 19. Again the formula ἔλεγε δέ (or οὖν, as some Alex. read).

The two questions of Luke 13:18 express the activity of mind which seeks in nature the analogies which it needs. The first: “To what is like...,” affirms the existence of the emblem sought; the second: “To what shall I liken...,” has the discovery of it in view. Mark likewise introduces this parable with two questions; but they differ both in substance and form from those of Luke. Tradition had indeed preserved the memory of this style of speaking; only it had modified the tenor of the questions. We must certainly reject with the Alex., in the text both of Luke and Matthew, the epithet great applied to tree. Jesus does not mean to contrast a great tree with a small one, but a tree to vegetables in general. The mustard plant in the East does not rise beyond the height of one of our small fruit trees. But the exceptional thing is, that a plant like mustard, which belongs to the class of garden herbs, and the grain of which is exceedingly small, puts forth a woody stalk adorned with branches, and becomes a veritable tree. It is thus the striking type of the disproportion which prevails between the smallness of the kingdom of God at its commencement, when it is yet enclosed in the person of Jesus, and its final expansion, when it shall embrace all peoples. The form of the parable is shorter and simpler in Luke than in the other two.

Vers. 20 and 21. Jesus anew seeks an image (Luke 13:20) to portray the power of the kingdom of God as a principle of moral transformation. There is here, as in all the pairs of parables, a second aspect of the same truth; comp. Luke 5:36-38; Luke 15:3-10; Matthew 13:44-46; John 10:1-10. We even find in Luke 15 and John 10 a third parable completing the other two. Leaven is the emblem of every moral principle, good or bad, possessing in some degree a power of fermentation and assimilation; comp. Galatians 5:9.

The three measures should be explained, like the three years (Luke 13:7), by the figure taken as a whole. It was the quantity ordinarily employed for a batch. They have been understood as denoting the three branches of the human race, Shemites, Japhethites, and Hamites; or, indeed, Greeks, Jews, and Samaritans (Theod. of Mopsuestia); or, again, of the heart, soul, and spirit (Augustine). Such reveries are now unthought of. The idea is, that the spiritual life enclosed in the gospel must penetrate the whole of human life, the individual, thereby the family, and through the latter, society.

Those two parables form the most entire contrast to the picture which the Jewish imagination had formed of the establishment of the Messiah's kingdom. One wave of the magic wand was to accomplish everything in the twinkling of an eye. In opposition to this superficial notion, Jesus sets the idea of a moral development which works by spiritual means and takes account of human freedom, consequently slow and progressive. How can it be maintained, in view of such sayings, that He believed in the immediate nearness of His return?

The place which those two parables occupy in the great collection Matthew 13, is evidently the result of a systematic arrangement; there they have the effect of two flowers in a herbarium. Luke has restored them to their natural situation. His account is at once independent of and superior to that of Matthew; Mark accords with Matthew.