BibleProject | One Story That Leads to JesusSample

If Jesus’ teaching in the opening scene of Luke 17 doesn’t challenge you (intensely), it might be good to read it again more carefully. Jesus is teaching his disciples how to load, aim, and fire God’s most devastating, evil-destroying weapon of all—forgiveness.

We use “forgiveness” to translate the Greek word aphiemi, which conveys the verbal action of “letting go.” Jesus isn’t teaching people to ignore or minimize evil as if forgiveness means moving on or being okay with what happened. He teaches a way of letting it go. That is, refusing to hold a wrong against someone as evidence that they are worse or less than us.

Not long from now, while Roman soldiers are actively killing Jesus on a cross, we will see him actively forgiving them. He refuses to hold their evil against them, compassionately recognizing that they don’t even know what they’re doing (Luke 23:34).

Luke 17’s opening scene shows Jesus teaching his followers to forgive always, without end. The subsequent stories along the winding path to Jerusalem show Jesus and his followers living the way of forgiveness one step at a time.

They encounter 10 people suffering from leprosy along the way. The lepers beg for mercy, so he tells them to go get inspected by the temple priests. As they go in faith toward Jerusalem, they experience healing. They’re set free from the oppression of disease! Of the 10 lepers, only one—a Samaritan and outsider in their day—runs back to Jesus, shouting God’s praises and bowing with thankfulness. Luke advances a pattern we’ve already seen. The outsiders receive God’s Kingdom while the insiders overlook it.

You’ll see the same pattern emerge through the series of parables that follow, all building toward the idea that God’s mercy extends to Israelites and non-Israelites without partiality. God provides healing and forgiveness without end, the same kind of thing Jesus teaches in the opening scene of Luke 17.

Reflection Questions

• Compare Luke 18:9-14 to Luke 14:7-11. What connections can you find between these two stories? What does this say about how Jesus followers relate to God and others?
• Compare Jesus’ healing of the leprosy with Namaan’s story in 2 Kings 5. What similarities do you notice? What does this tell us about God’s consistent attitude toward perceived outsiders?