Luke 14:1 Commentary and Bible Study

(Synoptics: Luke 14:1-6)Luke 14 opens with hostility directed towards the Lord Jesus Christ. The parable in verse 7 was given after what can only be described as an accumulation of aggravation. Almost every incident that happens is an aggravation to the Lord Jesus Christ. Of course, not for one moment was he aggravated in the sense that we sometimes are when we become irritable. But there is no doubt that all the incidents leading up to this parable were provocative. At the end of Christ's public ministry, the Sanhedrin Council of the Jews, the chief priests, the scribes, the Pharisees, had decided that they were somehow going to take him, and have him tried and executed; they were therefore at this stage actively plotting against him. It is clearly laid out in the Gospel of John, and so we are aware that this invitation to eat is not an honest, genuine occasion. This Pharisee is described as one of the chief Pharisees. The original Greek simply says that he was one of the rulers who was a Pharisee, and that means he was a member of that Jewish Council of seventy. This was an attempt to trap Christ, to get him to do something or to say something they could use against him, so here he is, on probably the very last Sabbath of his public ministry. ‘To eat bread’, says the record, but this was quite a substantial and formal meal, as the parable in verse 7 implies.Christ is now in the house of this leading Pharisees for hospitality. But do they welcome him? Do they listen to him? Do they ask him serious questions? No, they watch him. They send hostile glares in his direction. They are proud and sullen; they are not going to submit to being taught by him. As far as they were concerned, this man mixed with the publicans and sinners. This man was talking about mankind as sinful; he was criticizing the scribes and the Pharisees, their own party, and that upset them. Their pride was offended. As he goes into that house, there they are, all so proud. They don't need mercy. They don't need that kind of message. They don't want to hear that the only way to God is to seek pardon and forgiveness. They are far too high and mighty for that. In fact they were watching him because there happened to be a man there, who had a form of paralysis in a limb, and suddenly they were aware that the Lord Jesus Christ was paying attention to this poor man, and that he was likely to do something. Immediately their minds were focused on legalistic concerns: ‘Is he going to heal on the Sabbath day?’ – which in their judgment constituted working on the Sabbath. They thought they were good and godly people. Actually, they had hearts of flint. They were religious bigots, and yet, because they carried out this meticulous, legalistic observance of the ceremonial law, they imagined they were marvellous people. That is the beginning of the aggravation.‘And, behold,’ – surprise, surprise! – ‘there was a certain man before him which had the dropsy.’ He is a plant, of course, invited to the occasion to incriminate the Lord. He is diseased with the dropsy as it's called in our Authorised Version. They don't want him, but he has been asked because they anticipate that Christ will heal him, and they thought then they would be able to bring charges against him. We know the sick man doesn't belong to that circle because a little later when the Lord Jesus Christ heals him, the text says something very significant: ‘He healed him and let him go’, which means he let him go home. He was ready to leave immediately because he was out of the place. This is the only case of dropsy – or oedema as we now call it – in the Bible. It means that somebody has got an accumulation of some watery liquids in some cavity or tissue of the body.