From:  (Nigel B. Mitchell)
Newsgroups: aus.religion.christian
Subject: Luke 6:11-12
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1998 11:05:15 GMT

Rowland Crowcher, who plays a very important part as honorary chaplain
and wise old(ish) man here on aus.religion.* is always encouraging us
to post devotional and sermon- type material, along with our diatribes
on theological minutea. My study group was looking at the following
passage this week (we are working our way through Luke's Gospel,
having started in February, and we are only up to chapter 6, so we
plan to start a new book about July 2000), and I thought I might share
a few thoughts.

This is not a polemic piece, and please don't try and see yourself or
anyone else in what I have written. I would prefer not to enter into
dialogue on this - if you find it helpful, thank God, and if you
don't, press <delete> and don't give it another thought.

(Luke 6:11-12 NRSV)  But they [the scribes and pharisees] were filled
with fury and discussed with one another what they might do to Jesus.
12 Now during those days he went out to the mountain to pray; and he
spent the night in prayer to God.

Printed versions of the NRSV and most other bibles make chapter 12 the
beginning of a new paragraph, and sometimes add one of those annoying
little headings like "Jesus chooses the 12 apostles". In verses 13ff,
Luke does record the election of the twelve, and then the chapter goes
on with the sermon on the plain. 

But of course, early texts of the New testament were written with
great economy, and breaks for paragraphs were a luxury seldom afforded
(indeed, breaks between words were often greatly abbreviated as well,
which creates a few problems for translators from time to time). It
occurs to me that maybe Luke 6:12 is meant to follow straight on from
Luke 6:11, and maybe Jesus' need for prayer on the mountain was not
(just) in preparation for his selection of the twelve, but also, at
least in part, arose out of a need to regroup after his vehement and
possibly violent rejection by the synagogue 'powers that be'. 

Often the religious language we lay on Jesus gets in the way of us
recognising that he was a human being. Few people consciously
subscribe to the heresy of denying the humanity of Christ, but at the
same time it is sometimes difficult for the devout Christian to
acknowledge that Jesus, because he was a human being, had physical,
emotional and spiritual needs not terribly different from our own. We
know that he wept at the grave of his friend Lazarus, and over the
city of Jerusalem. We know that he was enraged against the abuse of
the Jerusalem temple, and that he preferred to be with his friends
rather than his family. He also had spiritual needs. He needed to be
by himself from time to time, and he needed to pray. 

The Gospel authors have given voice to Jesus' prayer on two
significant occasions - in his struggle with evil in the wilderness,
and in his struggle with God in the garden of Gesthemane. But here in
Luke 6 we are given no words - unless they are the onese that emerged
the sermon that follows.

Jesus was rejected. He knew the pain of doing what he believed to be
God's will, bringing healing and wholeness to the lives of others, and
getting nothing but flack for his trouble. I reckon he would have been
pretty discouraged at times. The way Luke tells the story Jesus had
healed a man with a crippled hand - a miracle of healing which, to any
thinking person, should have both validated Jesus' ministry and
prompted an outpouring of joy and thankfulness to God, and yet all the
scribes and Pharisees did was plot to destroy Jesus.

Of course, we can qualify what happened in all sorts of ways - maybe
the scribes and pharisees did not see what really happened, maybe Luke
is indulging in a bit of anti- Jewish hyperbolae here, and it was only
a few disgruntled scribes and pharisees and not the whole lot- but if
we take the story at face value, their reaction is completely
illogical, even stupid, and it is no wonder Jesus had to get away.

To those of us who are Christians, it sometimes seems as though the
Gospel message (as we understand it) is so obvious, and so wonderful,
that anyone who rejects it or distorts it must be a complete dill, or
worse. Perhaps we can take confort from the fact that even Jesus, who
presumeably knew the Gospel better than any of us, sometimes failed to
convince those who heard him teach and saw him in action. He had bad
days, and failures, so it should not surprise us when we do as well.
He needed some time apart, to pray, to regroup, perhaps to develop a
new strategy. 

We all need to find a time and a place where we can do this. Whether
it is a park or garden, a golf course, a backyard, or a church
building that is open during the day. It is probably best to make a
regular time each day, or at least each week, but if our lives don't
work that way it is probably even more important that we have a
contingency plan for our safety valve of prayer. To sit with God. To
look at God. To let God look at us. To find peace, and to find
strength to carry on.

cheers

N+

Nigel B. Mitchell