Luke 18:28-30

3 d. Luke 18:28-30. The Conversation regarding the Disciples.

There had been a day in the life of the disciples when a similar alternative had been put before them; they had resolved it in a different way. What was to accrue to them from the course which they had taken? Peter asks the question innocently, in the name of all. The form of his inquiry in Matthew, What shall we have therefore? contains, more expressly than that of Luke and Mark, the idea of an expected recompense. In Matthew, the Lord enters at once into Peter's thought, and makes a special promise to the Twelve, one of the grandest which He addressed to them. Then, in the parable of the labourers, He warns them against indulging pride, on the ground that they have been the first to follow Him. It is difficult fully to harmonize this parable with the special promise which precedes it, without holding that the promise was conditional, and was not to be fulfilled, except in so far as they did not abandon themselves to the spirit of pride combated in the parable, which savours of refinement. As, therefore, Luke places this same promise in a wholly different setting, Luke 22:28-30, a context with which it perfectly agrees, it is probable that Matthew placed it here through an association of ideas which admits of easy explanation. According to Luke and Mark, the promise by which Jesus answered Peter is such as to apply to all believers; and it behoved to be so, if Jesus did not wish to favour the feeling of self-exaltation which breathed in the question of the apostle. There is even in the form, There is no man that...(Mark and Luke), the express intention to give to this promise the widest possible application.

All the relations of natural life find their analogies in the bonds formed by community of faith. Hence there arises for the believer a compensation for the painful rupture of fleshly ties, which Jesus knew so well by experience (Luke 8:19-21; comp. with Luke 8:1-3); and every true believer can, like Him, speak of fathers and mothers, brethren and children, who form his new spiritual family. Luke and Mark speak, besides, of houses; Matthew, of lands. The communion of Christian love in reality procures for each believer the enjoyment of every sort of good belonging to his brethren; yet, to prevent His disciples from supposing that it is an earthly paradise to which He is inviting them, He adds in Mark, with persecutions. Matthew and Luke had assuredly no dogmatic reason for omitting this important correction, if they had known it.

Luke likewise omits here the maxim, “ Many that are first shall be last, etc....,” with which this piece closes in Mark, and which in Matthew introduces the parable of the labourers.

The common source of the three Syn. cannot be the proto-Mark, as Holtzmann will have it, unless we hold it to be at their own hand that Luke ascribes to this rich man the title, ruler of the synagogue, and that Matthew calls him a young man. As to Luke's Ebionite tendency, criticism is bound to acknowledge, with this piece before it, that if salvation by voluntary poverty is really taught in our Gospel, it is not less decidedly so by the other two Syn.; that it is a heresy, consequently, not of Luke, but of Jesus, or rather, a sound exegesis can find no such thing in the doctrines which our three evangelists agree in putting in the Master's mouth.