On the Way to the Tower

Six years ago, I wrote a post reconsidering the meaning of the Tower of Siloam story in Luke 13. You’ll remember eighteen Jews were killed when it fell, and the Lord used this then-current event as a teaching moment, warning his audience, “Unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.”

What dawned on me at the time was that the standard “Get saved or you’ll suffer eternal judgment” message we generally hear preached from this passage in evangelical circles doesn’t do justice to the Lord’s original purpose in referencing that sad tale. It is at best a remote application rather than a faithful exposition of the Lord’s intended meaning.

Individual Eternal Salvation vs. National Earthly Judgment

As I pointed out after examining the larger context of which the Tower of Siloam lesson is a small part, Luke has carefully assembled a series of anecdotes all focused on the same theme. That theme is not individual salvation from eternal damnation but rather the danger the Lord’s unsuspecting audience faced of losing their lives in the looming judgment of Jerusalem. That judgment was not individual and eternal but national and earthly, not Christian but distinctly Jewish. You can read that argument here if you haven’t considered it before.

What I noticed on a recent pass through Luke’s gospel is this: I didn’t go back far enough. Last time out, I dealt strictly with Luke 13. In fact, the Lord’s cry for national repentance and acknowledgement of himself as Israel’s Messiah begins further back in verse 35 of chapter 12, where the Lord begins to speak about appropriate conduct in view of the coming of the Son of Man. An accurate understanding of the original message of the entire passage from that point through the end of chapter 13 requires us to put ourselves in the sandals of the Lord’s original Jewish audience. It is their national blindness and hardheartedness he was addressing.

Slipping on the Sandals

As always, even in a nation under judgment there were individual exceptions, his disciples among them. These had already identified their Messiah and divested themselves of their share in the national burden of guilt. The faithful remnant of Israel would ultimately proclaim Christ as Lord in Jerusalem after his resurrection, eventually provoking the Jewish leadership to such an extent that they drove the vast majority of new Jewish Christians out among the nations where they spread the gospel as Jesus had commanded just before his ascension. But persecution for their faith had side benefits for these Jewish believers: all those who heard and obeyed the Lord’s warning of coming judgment against the nation of Israel escaped the Roman destruction of Jerusalem and Judea in AD70.

So let’s slip on those sandals again and have a look at the subject matter of Luke 12:35-59. I think at least some of our readers will agree with me that each of the four subjects the Lord touches on in these verses has as its primary object the repentance of his immediate, first century Jewish audience. He is calling on them to dissociate themselves from corrupt Judaism and acknowledge the Messiah Israel was in the process of rejecting.

1/ A Pair of Parables (12:35-48)

The initial section consists of two intertwined parables. The first concerns servants waiting for their master, who has gone to a wedding feast. In verses 35-38, he urges Jews waiting for their Messiah to alertness, that they be careful he not find them sleeping when he arrives. Those who are faithful can expect great benefits: the master will serve them. Then, in answer to Peter’s question about how this applies, he continues with the word picture in greater detail until verse 48. There are faithful and wise servants in the house whom the master will reward when he comes (v42-44). There are disorderly, drunken servants whom the master will cast out (v45-46). Between those two extremes are servants with greater or lesser knowledge of the master’s will whom he will treat in accordance with their level of understanding and obedience (v47-48). The message? Be the right kind of servant.

Any effort to try to map this parable onto individual Christian service and resulting eternal reward or judgment in the Church Age, or, alternatively, onto a lost world ignorant of Christ, is bound to plunge the interpreter into utter confusion. However, if we look at the master’s household as the theocracy of Judaism, the Lord’s analogy was a perfect fit. Some servants had faith and looked for their master’s arrival (Simeon, Nathanael). Some were unscrupulous, wicked and destined for destruction (the Pharisees and chief priests). Many were confused and in between (the crowds). Nevertheless, the image of a servant is an appropriate description of everyone within Judaism’s sphere. Their own scriptures plainly taught it and Jews would readily accept it.

Right in the middle of the parable, I believe we have a swerve. The image changes. In verses 39 and 40, the Lord comments, “But know this, that if the master of the house had known at what hour the thief was coming, he would not have left his house to be broken into. You also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” Here, Messiah compares himself to a thief rather than the master of the house. The analogy to a thief is not with respect to his objective in breaking in, his personal character, or his criminality, but solely with respect to the unexpectedness of his arrival. I will leave you to speculate about the identity of the “master of the house” in this second image.

Both word pictures stress the need for alertness, obedience and faithful service. Christians can rightly assume the Lord expects the same sort of watchfulness and faithfulness from us in this present age as he expected from his Jewish servants, because he will return for his own one day soon, and his judgment of our works will shortly follow. But the original message is not directed at us. When we try to read ourselves into it, we will find ourselves in theological contortions, at odds with doctrines in the NT epistles.

2/ Not Peace But Division (12:49-53)

The second section also contains non-literal imagery (fire, baptism), but it’s not really a parable. The emphasis is on the Lord’s role as divider of households (three against two, two against three) as a result of his physical manifestation in the world. While it is certainly true that the spread of the gospel throughout the Church Age has cause a similar division within households, this is surely not the Lord’s primary meaning. The arrival of Messiah in his first advent forced the sort of acute divisions rarely experienced today. The choice to receive or reject him polarized everything in a first century Jew’s life, and made necessary the book of Hebrews. Matthew 10 vividly describes the extreme cost to Jews of embracing Christ in the post-Pentecost era: “Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death, and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.” The context there, as here, is clearly Jewish. It’s full of references to synagogues and the divided families involved are not Gentiles but contrasted with them.

Apart from in the Muslim world, Christians experience in-family persecution and division in a relatively mild form. Far more often, our concern about our relatives is not that they might betray us to authorities who want us dead (though yes, that time may come). For most of us, our unsaved family and friends regard our faith with indifference and occasional pity. But for the Jew of the first century, abandoning the tropes of Judaism was often life and death. For the Jew of the great tribulation, it will be very much the same.

3/ Interpreting the Time (12:54-56)

Applying the third section to Christians takes some creativity. It reads as follows:

“He also said to the crowds, ‘When you see a cloud rising in the west, you say at once, “A shower is coming.” And so it happens. And when you see the south wind blowing, you say, “There will be scorching heat,” and it happens. You hypocrites! You know how to interpret the appearance of earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?’ ”

This is a very pithy indictment of the character of a particular agrarian, Middle Eastern generation, not a generalization we can freely apply across human history. I say particular because he condemns them for their failure to interpret “the present time” (which is to say the first century) and agrarian because not even our weathermen in the urban West have the slightest idea when a shower is coming. And of course the generation in question is Middle Eastern because a south wind brings scorching heat. I can assure you that is not true over most of the planet.

The generation under indictment had seen healings on a scale unparalleled in history, had seen demons driven out, water turned into wine and the dead raised. No other generation has, and no other generation has had such knowledge of the prophetic scriptures without correctly applying it. These Jews were looking right through the king of Israel, ignoring dozens of proofs right in front of their faces. Of course they were guilty!

Making these three verses into a rebuke to his fellow Christians for seeing only what they want to, as this fellow does here (“Why do we insist on pretending to ignore the injustices around us?”) turns into a trip to interpretive fantasyland. These words are manifestly national, historical and distinctly Jewish in scope. They are not a critique of laissez-faire twenty-first century evangelicals. We have our own problems.

4/ Settle with Your Accuser (12:57-59)

Finally, what do you think the Lord meant by this parable? “As you go with your accuser before the magistrate, make an effort to settle with him on the way.” Yes, I believe this is a parable, not just a bit of random good advice for disciples with financial problems.

Personally, I’ve never heard these verses exposited as anything other than reinforcement from Christ for Paul’s teaching that Christians should not go to court against one another. That, or perhaps a reminder that we cannot predict the outcome of our choices, so we ought to err on the side of caution when involved in a dispute. But disagreements between believers are manifestly not what the Lord is describing. There is no question of a debt owed here (“you will never get out until you have paid the last penny”), merely a sentence waiting to be passed.

Try this interpretation on for size. The magistrate is God. The guilty party is the nation of Israel. The accuser is Moses (meaning the Law), as the Lord teaches elsewhere. Jesus is saying to a generation of first century Jews under the judgment of God for centuries of disobedience, “Make a deal with the One to whom you owe this debt. I’m offering one right now. Don’t wait for the day of judgment, then hope to make a case for righteousness on the basis of the Law. The Law does nothing but condemn you, and you are on your way to be judged right now.”

Or, as Peter put it at Pentecost to the same crowd, “Save yourselves from this crooked generation.”