Luke 10

Today’s Passage: Luke 10

This is one of the great chapters of the Gospel, and it moves like a day with four rooms in it. First the Lord appoints seventy-two others and sends them out two by two ahead of Him, into every town He was about to visit, with instructions so spare they sound almost reckless: no purse, no bag, no sandals, no lingering greetings on the road. They go as lambs among wolves, and they go announcing that the kingdom of God has come near. Then comes the hard word, the woes on the towns that had seen most and repented least, and a sentence that fastens the messengers to the Master so tightly they cannot be separated: whoever listens to you listens to Me. Then the seventy-two come back thrilled, because even the demons submitted to them, and Jesus takes their joy and lifts it to a better object. Rejoice instead that your names are written in heaven. And right there, in the middle of a chapter full of work, He rejoices in the Holy Spirit and thanks His Father for hiding these things from the wise and revealing them to little children, and tells His disciples privately that prophets and kings longed to see what their eyes were seeing. Then an expert in the law stands up to test Him, and out of that test comes the parable of the Samaritan on the Jericho road. And then, at the end of a chapter about being sent and doing mercy, the Lord walks into a house and says that a woman sitting still at His feet has chosen the good portion. Watch how those last two stories lean on each other. Neither one can be read without the other.

As you read, hold this: The kingdom of God comes near through servants who are sent, and what lasts in the end is not the power in your hands but the name written in heaven, the mercy shown to the man in the ditch, and the one thing chosen at His feet.

Luke 10:1–5 (BSB)

¹ After this, the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of Him to every town and place He was about to visit. ² And He told them, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into His harvest. ³ Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves. ⁴ Carry no purse or bag or sandals. Do not greet anyone along the road. ⁵ Whatever house you enter, begin by saying, ‘Peace to this house.’

Notice first that they are sent ahead of Him, to the towns He Himself was about to visit. That is the whole shape of Christian service in one phrase. These men are not replacements for Jesus and they are not agents working a territory He will never see. They are the knock at the door before the Master arrives. Then hear the image He gives them for the world they are walking into. Not a barren field, a ripe one. “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few.” When a harvest is ready and the crew is short, the loss is not theoretical, and the first thing He tells them to do about it is not to recruit but to pray: ask the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into His harvest. It is His field, His grain, His to staff. And the prayer has a way of answering itself, because a man who genuinely prays that prayer usually finds himself walking down the road with a message in his mouth. Then, in the same breath, the sober word: “Go! I am sending you out like lambs among wolves.” He does not promise them a warm reception. He does not soften what the world does to lambs. He simply says go, and the only comfort in the sentence is the middle of it, that it is He who is sending them. The travel orders are almost embarrassingly light. No purse, no bag, no spare sandals, and no greetings along the road, which was not rudeness but urgency, for an eastern greeting could swallow an hour in courtesies. They are to travel like men who cannot afford to be delayed and cannot afford to be self-sufficient. And the first word out of their mouths in any house is not a demand or an argument. It is a blessing: “Peace to this house.”

Luke 10:6–11 (BSB)

⁶ If a man of peace is there, your peace will rest on him; if not, it will return to you. ⁷ Stay at the same house, eating and drinking whatever you are offered. For the worker is worthy of his wages. Do not move around from house to house. ⁸ If you enter a town and they welcome you, eat whatever is set before you. ⁹ Heal the sick who are there and tell them, ‘The kingdom of God is near you.’ ¹⁰ But if you enter a town and they do not welcome you, go into the streets and declare, ¹¹ ‘Even the dust of your town that clings to our feet, we wipe off as a testimony against you. Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God is near.’

The house of peace is where the mission takes root. A blessing spoken over a household is not wasted breath: if there is a man of peace under that roof it settles on him, and if there is not, it comes back to the one who spoke it, like a letter returned unopened. Then come two small instructions that have saved a great deal of trouble in the centuries since. Stay put in one house, and eat what you are given. The first keeps a messenger from shopping around for a better table and quietly turning the gospel into a career of comfort. The second keeps him from making his hosts feel judged at their own meal. He is to receive their hospitality as wages honestly earned, since the worker is worthy of his wages, and then get on with the work. And the work is stated plainly: heal the sick, and tell them the kingdom of God is near you. Word and deed together, mercy in the hands and the announcement on the lips, and neither one doing duty for the other.

But not every town welcomes them, and the Lord tells them what to do about that too, which is a mercy, because otherwise a rejected messenger will conclude he has failed. They are to shake off even the dust and go, publicly, so that the town knows what it has done. And then look very carefully at what they still have to say on their way out: “Yet be sure of this: The kingdom of God is near.” The message does not change when it is refused. The kingdom did not stop being near because a town shut its doors on it. It was near when they welcomed it and it is near when they turn it away, and that is precisely what makes the refusal so serious. This is worth carrying with you into every conversation about Christ that seems to go nowhere. Your task is to tell the truth and leave it standing. Whether it is received is not in your hands, and the truth of it never depended on the reception.

Luke 10:12–16 (BSB)

¹² I tell you, it will be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town. ¹³ Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. ¹⁴ But it will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. ¹⁵ And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to heaven? No, you will be brought down to Hades! ¹⁶ Whoever listens to you listens to Me; whoever rejects you rejects Me; and whoever rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.”

These are hard words and we will not file the edges off them. The Lord names three towns of Galilee, the very towns where He had done most of His work, and He tells them that pagan Tyre and Sidon, and even Sodom, will find the judgment more bearable than they will. Sit with that. It means judgment is real, it is personal, and it is not uniform: there are degrees, and light received is the measure. The town that heard nothing will not answer for what it never heard. The town that watched the Son of God heal its sick in its own streets and went on with business as usual will answer for exactly that. Capernaum had been His home base, lifted up to heaven in privilege, and He says it will be brought down. Notice that these are not the words of a man enjoying Himself. Anyone who has read Luke knows that when this same Lord finally comes over the ridge and sees Jerusalem, He weeps over it. There is no relish in heaven over a lost town. But there is no pretending either, and love that never warns is not love.

Then verse sixteen, which is one of the most staggering sentences He ever spoke to ordinary men. “Whoever listens to you listens to Me; whoever rejects you rejects Me; and whoever rejects Me rejects the One who sent Me.” Follow the chain link by link. A villager hears a tired traveler at his door, and behind that traveler stands Christ, and behind Christ stands the Father who sent Him. That is why the stakes are so high in a moment that looks so small. It also settles two things at once for anyone who carries this message. It is a tremendous dignity, because the humblest believer speaking the truth about Jesus is not merely offering an opinion. And it is a tremendous restraint, because the authority in the sentence belongs entirely to the One who sent you, and it attaches only to His message. It is never a warrant to demand that people submit to us.

Luke 10:17–22 (BSB)

¹⁷ The seventy-two returned with joy and said, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name.” ¹⁸ So He told them, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. ¹⁹ Behold, I have given you authority to tread on snakes and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you. ²⁰ Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” ²¹ At that time Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and declared, “I praise You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because You have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was well-pleasing in Your sight. ²² All things have been entrusted to Me by My Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him.”

They come back glowing, and you cannot blame them. They had gone out with nothing and found that hell itself gave way at the name of Jesus, and they say so with a kind of wonder: “Lord, even the demons submit to us in Your name.” His answer opens a window we would never have had otherwise. “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven.” Believers have long differed over exactly which fall He means, whether He is looking back to the original ruin of the evil one, or watching the enemy’s grip break as seventy-two nobodies preach through the villages of Galilee, or looking ahead to the cross where the decisive blow lands. What is not in doubt is who is speaking, and that He speaks as one who was there and saw it. The authority He gives them over snakes and scorpions and all the power of the enemy is real authority, delegated in that hour to those He had sent, and it was never handed out as a dare. Nobody in this passage goes looking for danger to prove something.

And then the correction, gently placed and absolutely necessary: “Nevertheless, do not rejoice that the spirits submit to you, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” He does not tell them the power was fake or the joy was wrong. He tells them it is the smaller thing. Any joy that rests on what happened through you today will rise and fall with tomorrow’s results, and a life built on spiritual excitement is a life at the mercy of its own weather. But a name written in heaven was written there by Another, before you had done a single useful thing, and it does not come off the page on a barren day.

"But nothing unclean will ever enter it, nor anyone who practices an abomination or a lie, but only those whose names are written in the Lamb’s Book of Life." Revelation 21:27 (BSB)

Then comes something Luke loves to show us, and it is worth stopping to praise God for it. Jesus rejoiced in the Holy Spirit. Here is the Son, full of joy, speaking to the Father, in the Spirit, and we are permitted to listen. And what draws out His joy? That the Father has hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children, and that this was well-pleasing in His sight. Not a word here despises learning, but a great deal here levels the ground. God did not arrange salvation so that clever people would arrive first. He reveals Himself to those who come with nothing in their hands. Then verse twenty-two lays the foundation under everything: all things entrusted to the Son by the Father, and a mutual knowledge between Father and Son that no creature can break into. If you want to know God, there is exactly one door, and it is the Son who chooses to reveal Him. That is either an intolerable arrogance or it is the plainest claim to deity in Luke’s Gospel, and the man saying it had just come in from a day of sending out workers into a harvest He called His own.

Luke 10:23–27 (BSB)

²³ Then Jesus turned to the disciples and said privately, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. ²⁴ For I tell you that many prophets and kings desired to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.” ²⁵ One day an expert in the law stood up to test Him. “Teacher,” he asked, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ²⁶ “What is written in the Law?” Jesus replied. “How do you read it?” ²⁷ He answered, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

He turns and says it privately, which is its own kindness, the sort of thing a man says quietly to his friends. Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. Think of Abraham, of Moses, of David, of Isaiah, men who leaned out over the centuries straining toward this and were given only a promise to hold. These ordinary Galileans were watching it walk around. And here is the quiet application for anyone reading this page: you hold in your hands the finished account of what those men longed to see. Familiarity is the great thief. Ask God to let you feel again how astonishing it is that you may simply open a book and read the words of the Son of God.

Then an expert in the law gets to his feet, and Luke tells us his motive without any softening: he stood up to test Him. His question is enormous and his heart is not in it. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Notice that Jesus does not answer the question. He hands it back. “What is written in the Law? How do you read it?” That second question is the sharper of the two, because a man may know the text perfectly and read it in a way that lets him off. The lawyer answers beautifully, joining the great daily confession of Israel, love the LORD your God with everything you are, to a single line buried in Leviticus, love your neighbor (πλησίον) plēsion, pronounced play-SEE-on. Strong's G4139, neighbor, the one near. The Greek word behind “neighbor” is not a warm word and it is not a word about affection. Plēsion is simply an adverb turned into a noun, and it means the one near, the person who happens to be close by. That is all. The Greek translators of the Old Testament used it for the Hebrew rea, which is equally plain: your fellow, the other man. So the commandment in Leviticus, in its own setting, is telling Israel how to live with the man in the next tent, and the surrounding verses spell it out in the least romantic terms imaginable, about wages paid on time and grain left standing at the edge of the field. Keep that in mind through the story that follows, because the lawyer is about to try to make plēsion into a category with a boundary around it, a word he can define and therefore control, and Jesus will refuse to let him. The word never described a class of qualified people. It described proximity. The one near. And once you see that, you begin to notice how many neighbors you have been walking past, on the assumption that a neighbor is someone you choose. as yourself. Nobody had asked him to put those two together. He knew his Bible. Here are the two texts he is quoting, and it is worth seeing them in their own soil:

"And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength." Deuteronomy 6:5 (BSB)

"Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against any of your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the LORD." Leviticus 19:18 (BSB)

Luke 10:28–32 (BSB)

²⁸ “You have answered correctly,” Jesus said. “Do this and you will live.” ²⁹ But wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” ³⁰ Jesus took up this question and said, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell into the hands of robbers. They stripped him, beat him, and went away, leaving him half dead. ³¹ Now by chance a priest was going down the same road, but when he saw him, he passed by on the other side. ³² So too, when a Levite came to that spot and saw him, he passed by on the other side.

“You have answered correctly. Do this and you will live.” That is not Jesus teaching salvation by effort; it is Jesus holding up the standard the man himself had just recited, and letting it do its work. Perfect love of God with the whole heart and perfect love of the neighbor as oneself would indeed be life. The lawyer feels the ground shift under him, and Luke names exactly what happens next. “Wanting to justify himself, he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” There it is. He is looking for a fence. If the neighbor can be defined, then the duty can be finished, and a man can go home at night having loved everyone on the list. That is what the question is for. And Jesus, instead of answering it, tells a story that quietly dismantles the whole way of thinking behind it.

A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Jesus gives him no nationality, no trade, no name. He is simply a man, stripped of everything that would let you place him, and by the end of verse thirty he is stripped literally, beaten, and left half dead in the road, which means he cannot speak and cannot be identified. He is now nothing but a need. Then the priest comes down the same road, and we must be careful here, because the moment we make him a cartoon villain we have lost the parable. Consider what he was facing. A man who looked dead, on a road famous for ambushes, where robbers were known to use a decoy to draw a traveler in. The Law was serious about a priest and a corpse: contact with the dead made a man unclean for a week and shut him out of the service of the house of God. He had duties, obligations, a household of dependents, and reasons that any of us could rehearse in a second. And the Levite, coming along after, does the same thing. Feel the pull of it honestly before you condemn them. Every one of us has a set of reasons that fit neatly into the gap between seeing a need and stopping. The parable is not attacking two bad men. It is showing us how respectable the failure looks from inside.

Luke 10:33–37 (BSB)

³³ But a Samaritan on a journey came upon him, and when he saw him, he had compassion. ³⁴ He went to him and bandaged his wounds, pouring on oil and wine. Then he put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, and took care of him. ³⁵ The next day he took out two denarii and gave them to the innkeeper. ‘Take care of him,’ he said, ‘and on my return I will repay you for any additional expense.’ ³⁶ Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” ³⁷ “The one who showed him mercy,” replied the expert in the law. Then Jesus told him, “Go and do likewise.”

And now the hinge of the whole story, which the modern reader almost always misses because we have made the word Samaritan into a compliment. To that audience it was a slur. This is the despised man, the heretic, the one whose village had refused the Lord Himself only a chapter earlier. Jesus could have made the third traveler an ordinary Israelite and left the clergy embarrassed, and the story would still have stung. Instead He makes the hero the one man in the world His hearers had been raised to look down on. If you want to feel the parable as they felt it, put in that place the person your own circle has agreed it is safe to despise. That is the man kneeling in the dust with the bandages.

Watch what he actually does, because Luke slows the story right down to let us count it. He came where the man was. He saw him. He had compassion (σπλαγχνίζομαι) splanchnizomai, pronounced splangkh-NID-zom-ahee. Strong's G4697, to be moved with compassion in the inward parts. Splanchnizomai is one of the most physical words in the New Testament. It comes from splanchna, the inward parts, the guts, which the ancient world regarded as the seat of the deepest feeling, the place where you feel a thing before you have decided anything about it. So the word does not mean he thought the man’s situation was regrettable. It means something turned over inside him. And here is what makes the word tremble: in the Gospels it is used almost exclusively of Jesus Himself, who was moved with compassion when He saw the crowds harassed and helpless, and when He met a widow following her only son’s coffin out of the gate at Nain. Luke uses it in only three places, and the other two are that widow and the father who sees the prodigal a long way off and runs. So when Luke hangs this word on the Samaritan, he is describing him with the Lord’s own inward motion. Compassion of this kind is not a warm feeling that stays in the chest; every time this word appears, feet move. Ask God for that. Not merely for a tender opinion about suffering people, but for the kind of pity that gets a man off his donkey. . Then seven verbs in a row: he went to him, bandaged his wounds, poured on oil and wine, put him on his own animal, brought him to an inn, took care of him, and paid. He handled a stranger’s blood with his own hands. He walked so the man could ride. He spent his own oil and wine, gave up his day and his schedule, and then left money behind, two denarii, roughly two days’ wages for a laborer, enough for a good stretch of care at a village inn. And then the open-ended line that no calculating heart would ever say: “on my return I will repay you for any additional expense.” He does not cap it. He signs a blank promise for a man he has never met and will probably never see again.

Then the question, and it is not the one the lawyer asked. He had asked, who is my neighbor?, meaning: where is the edge of my obligation, who qualifies? Jesus asks, “Which of these three do you think was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?” Do you see what He has done? He has turned the question inside out. The lawyer wanted to stand at the center and draw a circle around himself. Jesus puts him in the ditch, half dead, and asks him who he would want coming down the road. The neighbor in the story is not a category to be identified; the neighbor is a thing to be done. And once the question is put that way, no line can be drawn anywhere, because you can never know in advance who the next man in the road will be. The lawyer cannot even bring himself to say the word Samaritan. He answers, “The one who showed him mercy (ἔλεος) eleos, pronounced EH-leh-oss. Strong's G1656, mercy, loyal covenant kindness toward the needy. Eleos is the Greek word the Old Testament translators reached for again and again to render the Hebrew chesed, that great covenant word for God’s loyal, steadfast, undeserved kindness, the love that keeps its promises to people who have not kept theirs. That is the family the lawyer’s word belongs to. So when he says the neighbor was “the one who showed him mercy,” he has stumbled onto the exact term the Scriptures use for what God is like. Mercy in the Bible is never merely a mood. It is loyal love with its sleeves rolled up, help given to the helpless because the helper has decided to be bound to them, not because they earned it. And this is why the parable is not finally a lesson in charity. The man in the ditch, stripped and beaten and unable to do a thing for himself, is a fair picture of every one of us before God, and the One who crossed the road and came where we were, at His own cost, is the Lord who is telling the story. We love mercy because we have received it. “Go and do likewise” is not a heavy new law laid on a struggling reader; it is the natural motion of a man who knows what was once done for him on a road he could not walk himself. ,” which is true, and honest, and the best he can manage. And Jesus, who has been so patient with him, gives him no new theology at all, only three words that will follow him home: “Go and do likewise.”

Luke 10:38–42 (BSB)

³⁸ As they traveled along, Jesus entered a village where a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. ³⁹ She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to His message. ⁴⁰ But Martha was distracted by all the preparations to be made. She came to Jesus and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me!” ⁴¹ “Martha, Martha,” the Lord replied, “you are worried and upset about many things. ⁴² But only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Luke sets this scene immediately after the Samaritan on purpose, and the two together keep each other honest. Begin by giving Martha her due, because the text does. It is Martha who welcomes Him into her home. That is a real act of faith and courage in a world where a woman opening her house to a traveling teacher and his company was taking on an enormous burden of work and no small amount of talk. Luke, of all the Gospel writers, honors serving hands; he is the one who tells us about the women who supported the ministry out of their own means, and he will write a second book full of tables and hospitality and open doors. Nothing here says that the preparations did not matter or that somebody should not have made them. Somebody had to.

And then there is Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to His message. Do not read that as idleness. To sit at a teacher’s feet was the posture of a disciple, and for a woman in that culture it was to take a seat that custom had not offered her. Nobody sends her away. The Lord lets her stay. Whatever else this passage is doing, it is telling every reader that the deep things of God are not the preserve of the qualified, and that a woman with her Bible open is exactly where she belongs.

What goes wrong is not the serving. Luke says Martha was “distracted by all the preparations to be made,” pulled in pieces, and the trouble surfaces in what she says: “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me!” Notice the drift. It begins with a good work for Him and it ends with an accusation against Him and a command to Him. That can happen to anyone whose hands are full. And now hear how He answers. He does not scold, He does not take sides in a family argument, and He does not tell her to stop cooking. He says her name twice. “Martha, Martha.” Anyone who has ever been spoken to that way knows there is more tenderness in a repeated name than in a paragraph of comfort. Then He names the real trouble, and it is not the work at all: “you are worried (μεριμνάω) merimnaō, pronounced meh-rim-NAH-oh. Strong's G3309, to worry, be anxious, be pulled apart by care. Merimnaō is the standard New Testament word for anxious care, and it is very likely built on a root meaning to divide or to be pulled apart. That is precisely the picture. It is not effort, and it is not diligence; it is a mind fragmented among competing cares, each one tugging at a different corner of you. It is the same word the Lord uses when He tells us not to be anxious about our lives, what we will eat or what we will wear, and the same word Paul uses when he says to be anxious for nothing but in everything to make our requests known to God. Note carefully what Scripture does and does not condemn. Working hard is not merimnaō. Feeding people is not merimnaō. Being torn to pieces by the many things until you have no room left for the One thing, and no kindness left for your sister, is. Which means the cure was never to do less. It was to receive the one thing back, to let the Lord gather the scattered pieces of a heart at His own feet, and then to get up and set the table with a settled mind. and upset about many things.” The many things had gotten inside her.

“But only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her.” Do not turn that into a rebuke of busy people, and do not use it as a stick. He is not ranking two sisters as though one were spiritual and the other worldly, and He is certainly not telling Martha that hospitality is beneath Him after He has just accepted hers. He is telling a woman He loves that the one thing that cannot be taken away is Himself, and that Mary has laid hold of it, and He will not take it from her to settle a dispute about the kitchen. Every other portion in this life gets taken away eventually. The meal is eaten, the house is emptied, the strength gives out. What is received from Him is kept. And whichever sister you recognize in yourself today, and most of us are both of them in the course of a single week, the invitation in the room is the same, and He is the one making it.