The Attitude Of The Religious Leaders
THE ATTITUDE OF THE RELIGIOUS LEADERS
LUKE 7:31-40
How do you deal with doubts?
Verses 31-35. The record of the Gospels is darkened by the lengthening shadow of the attitude of the religious leaders. They rejected John because the great movement of the Spirit which God brought to pass through him took no thought of the existing framework of established religion. The Baptist, indeed, had only fierce scorn for them (Matthew 3:7,12). Jesus mingled with the society he came to influence, meeting the sinner where the sinner was to be found, but, like John, paying no reverence to the leaders of religion. With like savagery they turned on him and reviled him for his association with the outcasts of society. Whimsically, he referred to a children’s game with its accompanying ditty. It is not clear what it was, but wedding and funeral seem to have been similarly rejected.
Time tells, the Lord concluded, for foolishness and wisdom find expression in action and history, and men ultimately see plainly who is wise and who is foolish. Christ and John stand vindicated.
7:36-40. The Lord was no rigid proletarian. He was without class-consciousness as every follower of the Lord should be. He had dined with the tax-gatherers at Capernaum. He now dines with a Pharisee, who treated his guest rudely, with an eye, no doubt, to the comment of his critical fellows. People from the street could freely penetrate the public rooms of large houses, and so it came about that the woman came in and ministered to Christ.
The incident is not that recorded in Matthew 26:7-13, Mark 14:3-9 and John 12:1-8. Simon the cleansed leper is not Simon the Pharisee. Similarity of names is always possible. If the records were largely destroyed, historians of a distant future might find it difficult to believe that Admiral Cunningham, General Cunningham and Air Vice-Marshal Conyngham commanded simultaneously in the eastern Mediterranean in the 1940s. In Luke, the incident apparently takes place in Galilee, and the woman is not known—in the others it is Mary of Bethany. Incidents can be repeated, as words also can, without the narrative being suspect, or the narrator careless or mendacious.