Thoughts for the Day

Luke 7:29-30 (All the people, even the tax collectors, when they heard Jesus’ words, acknowledged that God’s way was right because they had been baptised by John.  But the Pharisees and experts of the law rejected God’s purpose for themselves, because they had not been baptised by John.)

Luke adds this verse in parentheses, but it really does clarify for us the connection between John’s ministry and that of Jesus.  Gabriel had said John would “make ready a people prepared for the Lord”, and here we have it.  Broadly speaking (there will have been exceptions, no doubt) “all the people”, even tax collectors (illustrative of the most outcast in Jewish society), acknowledged the rightness of Jesus’s words because they had been prepared by John, through their response to his call to undergo a baptism of repentance.  The religious leaders, meanwhile, had rejected John’s ministry and were not among those prepared to respond to Jesus.  It isn’t hard to understand why the leaders rejected John.  He wasn’t part of the religious establishment, the elite, the intelligentsia.  He didn’t fit with the normal pattern of society, he was radical in his lifestyle and his message, and, when he got Herod’s attention, he was so uncompromising in what he said that he ended up in prison.  How would we have reacted to such a man?  I’m reminded of Paul’s comment about the way God works, “But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong” (1 Cor 1:27). ).  It isn’t bad to be wise or strong, but alongside stalks a dangerous temptation to disregard or even despise the foolish and the weak whom God often chooses to use first!