Luke 18

Today’s Passage: Luke 18

Jesus is still walking toward Jerusalem, and He is teaching His own how to wait. The chapter opens with two parables about prayer, and Luke does something unusual with both: he tells you the point before he tells you the story. The first is for people tempted to give up praying, and it sets a corrupt small-town judge beside a widow who will not stop knocking. The second is for people who are quite sure of themselves, and it sets two men side by side in the temple, one of them reciting his genuine virtues and the other unable to lift his eyes off the ground. Then the chapter turns from parable to people, and the same theme keeps walking through the door in different clothes. Babies are carried to Jesus and the disciples try to shoo them off. A wealthy ruler comes with a serious question and goes away sad. Peter, hearing all of it, blurts out what the Twelve have given up and receives a promise far larger than anything he thought to ask for. Then Jesus takes those same Twelve aside and tells them plainly, for the third time, exactly what is waiting for Him in Jerusalem, and Luke says flatly that they did not understand a word of it. And at the very end, outside Jericho, a blind beggar who has nothing at all hears a crowd going past, starts shouting, refuses to be silenced, and receives in a moment what the rich man had walked away from. Watch the order Luke builds. A child who can bring nothing. A ruler who brings everything. A beggar who has nothing and asks anyway.

As you read, hold this: God is not a reluctant judge who must be worn down but a Father who hears His own, and His kingdom is given to those who come with empty hands and a cry for mercy.

Luke 18:1–5 (BSB)

¹ Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray at all times and not lose heart: ² “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected men. ³ And there was a widow in that town who kept appealing to him, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ ⁴ For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect men, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps pestering me, I will give her justice. Otherwise, she will wear me out with her perpetual requests.’”

Notice, before anything else, that Luke hands you the meaning in the first line. “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray at all times and not lose heart.” You are not left to guess. This story is about prayer, and specifically about the kind of prayer that keeps going when nothing seems to be happening. Hold that, because it will keep you from misreading everything that follows. Then the two figures step onto the stage, and they are drawn with two strokes each. The judge neither feared God nor respected men, which is as complete a description of a shameless man as you will find anywhere. He was beyond the reach of conscience and beyond the reach of shame. The widow has no name, no money, no advocate, and no leverage. All she has is a case and a voice, and she uses the voice. “Give me justice (ἐκδικέω) ekdikeō, pronounced ek-dee-KEH-oh. Strong's G1556, to vindicate, to give justice to, to avenge a wrong. The verb here, ekdikeō, is stronger than our polite word justice sometimes sounds. It means to vindicate someone, to take up a wronged person’s case and set it right, to see that the one who has been trampled is publicly cleared and the wrong is answered. The related noun turns up in the Greek Old Testament wherever God promises to avenge His oppressed people, and the widow is asking for exactly that: not a favor, not charity, but the verdict that is already hers by right if anyone would only pronounce it. This matters because it tells you what kind of prayer Jesus is talking about. It is not the prayer of someone who wants a comfortable life. It is the cry of people who are genuinely wronged and have no earthly court to appeal to, and who therefore appeal to the only Judge left. Two verses further on, Jesus takes this same verb and puts it in God’s mouth about His own elect, and that is the whole hinge of the parable. The widow’s word becomes God’s promise. Every believer who has ever been slandered, cheated, overlooked, or crushed by a system that had no interest in the truth has an appeal lodged in a higher court than any on earth, and that appeal will be answered. Not ignored. Not filed away. Answered. against my adversary,” she says, and she says it again, and again, and Luke’s tense means she simply would not stop. And in the end she wins. But look closely at why she wins, because Jesus does not hide it and He does not dress it up. The judge does not repent. He does not develop a conscience or a tender heart toward the poor. He talks it over with himself, weighs the nuisance against the effort, and decides that the cheapest way out is to give her what she is asking for. She wears him down. He grants justice for entirely selfish reasons, from a heart that never changed at all. Keep that firmly in view, because the moment you forget it you will misunderstand the next three verses badly.

Luke 18:6–8 (BSB)

⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to the words of the unjust judge. ⁷ Will not God bring about justice for His elect who cry out to Him day and night? Will He delay in helping them? ⁸ I tell you, He will promptly carry out justice on their behalf. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?”

Here is where you must be careful, because this parable turns on contrast and not on comparison. Jesus is not saying that God is like that judge. He is saying that God is nothing like that judge, and that this is the good news. The logic runs from the lesser to the greater, and it runs like this: if even a corrupt man with no fear of God and no regard for people will finally act for a widow simply because she will not stop asking, then what will your Father do, who is not corrupt, who loves His own, who has bound Himself to them by covenant, and who called them His elect? The judge helped a stranger he found annoying. God hears children He chose and loves. Every single term in the comparison is reversed. So do not read this story and conclude that prayer is a wearing-down of a reluctant God, as though heaven were a door you must batter until someone inside gives up. That is precisely the picture Jesus is dismantling. Scripture never once presents God as needing to be pestered into caring about the powerless. Quite the opposite:

"A father of the fatherless and a defender of widows is God in His holy habitation." Psalm 68:5 (BSB)

That is who is listening. And so Jesus can say, “He will promptly carry out justice on their behalf.” The word does not promise that the answer comes tomorrow morning; the saints who cry out day and night in this chapter are clearly people who have been crying for a long while. It promises that when God acts, He acts decisively and without dragging His feet, and that the appearance of delay is not indifference. Then comes the last line, and it must be handled gently, because it is a question and not a verdict. “Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will He find faith on earth?” Jesus does not answer it. He leaves it hanging in the air over the whole church, and He leaves it hanging tenderly, because it is aimed at exactly the thing the parable has been about from verse one: not whether God will be faithful, which is settled, but whether His people will still be praying when He arrives. The danger is never that the widow’s Judge will fail her. The danger is that she stops coming. So the question is not meant to make you anxious about your standing. It is meant to put you back on your knees.

Luke 18:9–12 (BSB)

⁹ To some who trusted in their own righteousness and viewed others with contempt, He also told this parable: ¹⁰ “Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. ¹¹ The Pharisee stood by himself and prayed, ‘God, I thank You that I am not like other men—swindlers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector. ¹² I fast twice a week and pay tithes of all that I acquire.’

Again Luke tells you first who the story is for, and it is a mercy that he does, because it means every reader is warned before the parable lands. It is for “some who trusted in their own righteousness and viewed others with contempt,” and notice how tightly those two things are bolted together. They always come as a pair. A person who is resting his weight on his own record will always, sooner or later, need someone below him to make the record look good, because a righteousness measured against other people requires other people to be worse. So the two halves of that verse are really one disease. Now watch the Pharisee. He goes up to the temple, which is right. He prays, which is right. He gives thanks to God rather than boasting outright, which sounds right. He stands by himself, apart from the crowd, and the Greek can be read either as praying by himself or as praying about himself, and honestly both are true of him. And then comes the thing that makes this parable so searching, so much sharper than a simple story about a hypocrite: everything he says is true. He is not lying. So far as anyone in that court could tell, he really was not a swindler or an adulterer. He really did fast twice a week, which no law required of him, and he really did tithe everything he acquired, going beyond the letter of Moses at his own expense. This was a disciplined, serious, morally clean man, and if he lived in your town he would be at every service and give more than his share. That is what makes the parable so dangerous to us. Jesus does not attack him for a secret sin. He is condemned for the one thing that is invisible from the outside and fatal on the inside: he came to God holding out his own record, and he measured it against a man kneeling twenty feet away.

Luke 18:13–14 (BSB)

¹³ But the tax collector stood at a distance, unwilling even to lift up his eyes to heaven. Instead, he beat his breast and said, ‘God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’ ¹⁴ I tell you, this man, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified. For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”

Now look at the other man, and take your time, because there is more in his few words than in the Pharisee’s whole speech. He stands at a distance, not pushing forward into the holy place, as though he knows he has no business being any closer. He will not raise his eyes, which was the ordinary posture of prayer in Israel, so this is a man deliberately refusing the normal privilege of a worshiper. He beats his breast, a gesture of grief so raw that it is what the crowds do at the cross. And then he prays seven words in Greek, and every one of them counts. “God, have mercy (ἱλάσκομαι) hilaskomai, pronounced hee-LAS-koh-my. Strong's G2433, to be merciful, to make atonement for. The word this man reaches for is not the common Greek word for pity. It is hilaskomai, and it belongs to the altar. In the Greek Old Testament its family of words clusters around the sacrifices, the mercy seat, the Day of Atonement, the place where blood was applied and sin was covered. So the cry is not merely “be kind to me.” It is closer to “be atoned toward me,” “let the sacrifice stand for me,” and remember where the man is standing while he says it. He is in the temple courts, quite possibly at the very hour when the lamb was burning on the altar and the smoke was going up, and he is asking God to let that mean something for him. He has no righteousness to bring, so he points away from himself toward a covering God Himself provided. He could not have known how completely that prayer would be answered. The same word family is used of the Lord Jesus, that He became a merciful and faithful high priest in order to make atonement for the sins of the people, and that He Himself is the atoning sacrifice for our sins. The tax collector prayed toward an altar in Jerusalem. We pray toward a cross outside its wall. But it is the same prayer, and it is still the only one that works, and it has never once been refused. on me, a sinner.” Not a sinner among many; the Greek article makes it the sinner, as though he were the only one in the building and possibly the only one in the world. He offers no defense, no comparison, no fasting record, no promise to do better. He does not even ask for a specific favor. He asks God to be merciful to him on some ground other than himself, and he has nothing else to say. If those words sound familiar it is because Israel had been praying them for a thousand years, in the psalm David wrote when the prophet came to him after the worst season of his life:

"For the choirmaster. A Psalm of David. When Nathan the prophet came to him after his adultery with Bathsheba. Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your loving devotion; according to Your great compassion, blot out my transgressions." Psalm 51:1 (BSB)

And now the verdict, which is the most startling sentence in the chapter: “I tell you, this man, rather than the Pharisee, went home justified (δικαιόω) dikaioō, pronounced dee-kai-OH-oh. Strong's G1344, to declare righteous, to justify, acquit. Dikaioō is a courtroom word, and that is exactly why it is so strong here. It does not mean to make a man gradually better. It means to declare a verdict, to pronounce a person in the right, to hand down the judgment that his case is settled and there is no charge left standing against him. Judges in Israel were told to justify the righteous and condemn the wicked, that is, to say out loud who was in the right. So when Jesus says this tax collector went home justified, He is announcing a verdict from the bench of heaven over a man who by every visible measure deserved the opposite. And notice the tense of it. He went home justified, that same afternoon, on the strength of a seven-word prayer. Not on probation. Not provisionally, pending improvement. Declared right with God and sent home. This is the very word Paul will later carry through Romans, that sinners are justified freely by God’s grace through the redemption in Christ Jesus, and that having been justified by faith we have peace with God. What the apostle will unfold in careful argument, the Lord here simply does, in a story, in a temple courtyard, for a man nobody thought God was listening to. The ground of it is never our record. The ground is a mercy God Himself provides, received by a soul that has finally stopped bringing anything else. .” Not the man with the record. The man with nothing. He walked into that temple as a thief and walked out of it right with God, and nothing about his résumé had changed in the interval. Sit with that for a moment, because it is the gospel in a single sentence, told by the Lord Himself years before Paul would spend a letter explaining it. Then Jesus states the principle underneath, and it is a law of God’s universe as fixed as gravity: “everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” God has arranged reality so that self-promotion always ends in the fall and self-abasement always ends in being lifted up, and He has arranged it that way not to spoil our fun but because pride is the one posture in which grace cannot be received. A hand full of its own merit cannot take hold of anything. Note carefully, too, what the parable is not saying. It is not that God prefers scoundrels to disciplined people, and it is certainly not a license to think less of the Pharisee, since to walk out of this story despising him is to have become him. It is that no one is ever accepted for what he brings. Praise God for that. If the door had been marked for good people only, it would have been shut against every one of us.

Luke 18:15–17 (BSB)

¹⁵ Now people were even bringing their babies to Jesus for Him to place His hands on them. And when the disciples saw this, they rebuked those who brought them. ¹⁶ But Jesus called the children to Him and said, “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them! For the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁷ Truly I tell you, anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

Luke sets this next, and the placement is not an accident. The ink is barely dry on a parable about a man with nothing, and here come the people with nothing at all. Infants. The word Luke uses means the smallest ones, babies in arms, and their parents are bringing them simply to be touched and blessed. The disciples try to stop it, and it is worth being honest about why. They were not monsters. They were protecting their Master’s time. There were important matters on this road, crowds to teach, a ruler about to arrive with a serious theological question, and babies do not advance an agenda. So they rebuked the parents. And Jesus overrules them on the spot, with a warmth that has echoed down twenty centuries: “Let the little children come to Me, and do not hinder them!” Then He tells them why, and it is not sentiment about innocence. He does not say the kingdom belongs to children because children are sweet or pure. He says it belongs to “such as these,” and then explains it in the next breath: “anyone who does not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” An infant contributes nothing to the transaction. It cannot earn a place in the family, cannot argue its worthiness, cannot bring a record of fasting and tithing. It can only be carried and only receive. That is the qualification. Everyone who has ever entered the kingdom of God came in that way, in someone’s arms, empty-handed. And notice that the Lord is not merely tolerating these children. He calls them to Himself and lays His hands on them. There is no one too small to be brought to Jesus, and no one too small for Him to want.

Luke 18:18–22 (BSB)

¹⁸ Then a certain ruler asked Him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” ¹⁹ “Why do you call Me good?” Jesus replied. “No one is good except God alone. ²⁰ You know the commandments: ‘Do not commit adultery, do not murder, do not steal, do not bear false witness, honor your father and mother.’” ²¹ “All these I have kept from my youth,” he said. ²² On hearing this, Jesus told him, “You still lack one thing: Sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.”

And now, immediately after the infants, a man arrives who is everything an infant is not. He is a ruler, a man of standing in his community, and Luke will tell us in a moment that he is extremely wealthy. He is also, by every sign, sincere. He asks the greatest question a human being can ask, and he asks it of the right Person. But listen to the shape of it: “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” There is the whole problem, sitting in one word, and it is the Pharisee’s word from the temple. He is not asking how to receive; he is asking what to accomplish. Jesus begins by pressing on his opening compliment. “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone.” That is not the Lord denying His own goodness, and it is certainly not Him denying that He is God. He is doing something far more searching: He is asking this man whether he has any idea what he just said. If good is a word that belongs to God alone, then either the address was a piece of polite flattery or it was a confession, and the man had better decide which. Then Jesus lists the commandments, and He lists the second table, the ones about neighbors, precisely the ones a decent public man could check off. And the ruler does check them off, with no apparent hesitation: “All these I have kept from my youth.” Then comes the sentence, and it is spoken to a particular man with a particular grip on his heart. “You still lack one thing: Sell everything you own and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow Me.” Mark’s account tells us that Jesus looked at him and loved him, and you can feel that here. This is not a trap. It is a surgeon’s hand going straight to the one thing that has to come out.

Luke 18:23–27 (BSB)

²³ But when the ruler heard this, he became very sad, because he was extremely wealthy. ²⁴ Seeing the man’s sadness, Jesus said, “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of God! ²⁵ Indeed, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” ²⁶ Those who heard this asked, “Who then can be saved?” ²⁷ But Jesus said, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.”

Do not hurry past the sadness. Luke does not say the ruler sneered, or argued, or stormed off. He says the man became very sad, and that grief is one of the saddest notes in the Gospel. Here was somebody who genuinely wanted eternal life, who had kept himself clean by every visible standard, who came running to the right Teacher, and who discovered that there was one thing he wanted more. He had asked what he must do, and he was told, and he could not do it. Now, be careful here in two directions at once. Do not universalize this into a command that every believer must sell everything, because Jesus did not say that to Zacchaeus in the next chapter, or to the women who funded His ministry out of their own means, or to Joseph of Arimathea. And do not defuse it either, by explaining it away until it costs nobody anything. The old story about a small gate in Jerusalem called the Needle’s Eye has no evidence behind it, and it exists mostly to make this verse survivable. Jesus meant the sewing needle and He meant the largest animal in Palestine, and the picture is deliberately absurd. It is not difficult. It is impossible. Riches are not merely a distraction; they create the settled illusion that a person is fine, that he has options, that he is the sort of man who gives rather than receives. And the kingdom is only ever entered by receiving. The listeners understand exactly how severe this is, which is why they ask, in something close to despair, “Who then can be saved?” If the rich and respectable cannot get in, what hope is there for anyone? And here is the hope of the whole scene, and you should read it slowly: “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” Not easier with God. Possible with God, where it had been flatly impossible. God saves rich men. He saves poor men. He saves men who have kept the commandments from their youth and men who have broken every one of them. But He never does it because they managed it. He does it because He is able, and because He delights to do what no one else can.

Luke 18:28–30 (BSB)

²⁸ “Look,” said Peter, “we have left all we had to follow You.” ²⁹ “Truly I tell you,” Jesus replied, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God ³⁰ will fail to receive many times more in this age—and in the age to come, eternal life.”

Peter, being Peter, says out loud what the others are thinking. He has just watched a wealthy man walk away sad rather than give up what he had, and Peter looks at his own boat and nets somewhere back in Galilee and says, “Look, we have left all we had to follow You.” There is a little of the old accounting in it, a hint of the temple prayer, and the Lord could have said so. He does not. He takes the question seriously and answers it with a promise so generous it should stop us in our tracks. No one, He says, ever leaves home or family for the sake of the kingdom of God and comes out behind. They will receive many times more in this age, and in the age to come, eternal life. Notice that both halves are real. The age to come is the greater half, of course, and eternal life is the thing the ruler asked about and went away without. But Jesus does not push the whole payment into the future. He says in this age as well, and every believer who has been welcomed at a stranger’s table in a distant city, or found brothers and sisters where he had none, or been carried through a hard season by people who owed him nothing, knows exactly what He means. God is nobody’s debtor. And do not miss the deepest comfort hidden in that promise: the ruler kept his money and lost the treasure, while men who kept nothing were promised more than they had ever owned. Whatever you have laid down for the sake of Christ was never a loss. It was an exchange, and the terms are His, and He has never yet been outgiven.

Luke 18:31–34 (BSB)

³¹ Then Jesus took the Twelve aside and said to them, “Look, we are going up to Jerusalem, and everything the prophets have written about the Son of Man will be fulfilled. ³² He will be delivered over to the Gentiles and will be mocked and insulted and spit upon. ³³ They will flog Him and kill Him, and on the third day He will rise again.” ³⁴ But the disciples did not understand any of these things. The meaning was hidden from them, and they did not comprehend what He was saying.

He takes the Twelve aside, away from the crowd, and tells them for the third time where this road ends. And this time He tells them everything. Not a hint, not a riddle: delivered over to the Gentiles, mocked, insulted, spat upon, flogged, killed, and on the third day risen again. Every item on that list will happen, exactly as He says it, within a matter of weeks. And notice what He says first, before any of the details: “everything the prophets have written about the Son of Man will be fulfilled.” He is not walking into a disaster. He is walking into Scripture. What is about to be done to Him by the worst impulses of men was written centuries before by the Spirit of God, and He knows every line of it, and He goes up to Jerusalem anyway. Sit with that. He could see the whole thing from Jericho, in order, and He did not slow down. Then Luke adds a sentence that is almost unbearable in its plainness. “But the disciples did not understand any of these things. The meaning was hidden from them, and they did not comprehend what He was saying.” Not some of it. Any of it. They had been told, in words a child could follow, and it went straight past them, because they had a Messiah in their heads who did not die, and a man will not hear what he has already decided cannot be true. There is no cruelty in Luke’s report, only honesty, and there is grace in it too, because these same bewildered men will one day preach this crucified and risen Christ across the world. What changed? He changed them. Luke tells us at the end of his Gospel what it took:

"Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures." Luke 24:45 (BSB)

That is still how anyone sees it. Not by cleverness, and not by having the right expectations, but because the risen Lord opens a mind that could not open itself.

Luke 18:35–39 (BSB)

³⁵ As Jesus drew near to Jericho, a blind man was sitting beside the road, begging. ³⁶ When he heard the crowd going by, he asked what was happening. ³⁷ “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by,” they told him. ³⁸ So he called out, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” ³⁹ Those who led the way admonished him to be silent, but he cried out all the louder, “Son of David, have mercy on me!”

And now, at the end of a chapter about who gets into the kingdom, God brings on a man with nothing whatever. He is blind, he is a beggar, he is sitting in the dust at the edge of the road, and he cannot even see what is happening. He has to ask. Somebody tells him, “Jesus of Nazareth is passing by,” and something in that man leaps. He shouts, and listen to what he shouts, because it is more theology than the Twelve have managed all chapter: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” A blind beggar outside Jericho has grasped what the disciples with their eyes wide open have not. This is the promised King of David’s line, and He is coming down this road, and He is coming right now, and there will not be another chance. So he asks for the only thing a man in his position can ask for, and it is the same word the tax collector used in the temple. Mercy. Not justice, not a hearing, not a fair share. Mercy. And then the crowd does what crowds do. Those at the front tell him to be quiet, because he is an embarrassment, a noise, an interruption of an important procession, exactly as the babies had been an interruption a few verses ago. And here the widow from the beginning of the chapter walks back onto the stage in different clothes, because he will not stop. He cries out all the louder. This is precisely what Jesus told them to do in verse one, to pray at all times and not lose heart, and the first person in Luke’s Gospel to actually do it is a blind man that everyone was trying to silence.

Luke 18:40–43 (BSB)

⁴⁰ Jesus stopped and directed that the man be brought to Him. When he had come near, Jesus asked him, ⁴¹ “What do you want Me to do for you?” “Lord,” he said, “let me see again.” ⁴² “Receive your sight!” Jesus replied. “Your faith has healed you.” ⁴³ Immediately he received his sight and followed Jesus, glorifying God. And all the people, when they saw it, gave praise to God.

Jesus stopped. Two words, and they are worth a long look. The Son of God, walking the last miles toward His crucifixion with everything the prophets wrote about Him waiting at the end of the road, halts the entire procession for one beggar the crowd wanted quiet. He does not shout an answer over His shoulder. He has the man brought to Him, and then He asks a question He certainly did not need to ask: “What do you want Me to do for you?” That is the Lord giving a man his dignity back before He gives him his eyes, letting him speak his own request in his own voice while the crowd that silenced him listens. And the answer comes: “Lord, let me see again (ἀναβλέπω) anablepō, pronounced ah-nah-BLEP-oh. Strong's G308, to look up, to receive sight again. Anablepō is built from the ordinary verb for looking, blepō, with a small prefix on the front that means both up and again, and the Gospels use the word in both senses. It is what a man does when he raises his eyes toward heaven, and it is what a blind man does when sight is restored to him, and the beggar’s request holds the two together. He wants to look up again. He had been staring into the dark at the edge of a road, and the one thing he asks the Son of David for is to have his face lifted toward the light. Luke has already shown you the opposite posture in this same chapter, in a man who stood at a distance and was unwilling to raise his eyes to heaven at all, because he knew what he was. Both men are given exactly what they need, and both are given it by mercy. There is a whole doctrine folded into one small verb here. The sinner cannot lift his own eyes, and the blind man cannot open his own, and neither one has to. The Lord stops on the road, asks what you want, and gives sight to a man who could only sit in the dust and shout for it. And what those new eyes do first is follow Him and glorify God, which is what sight was always for. .” Then a word, and it is done. “Receive your sight! Your faith has healed you.” No process, no delay, no conditions, and the healing includes more than eyes, because the word Jesus uses for healed is the ordinary word for saved. What was impossible with man has just happened, in a moment, on the roadside, by the power of God. And look at what the man does with his new eyes. He does not run home. He follows Jesus down the road, glorifying God, which means the first thing those eyes ever look at is the Savior, and the first thing that voice does with its freedom is praise. The whole crowd catches it and gives praise to God with him. Now set him beside the ruler and let Luke’s arrangement do its work. One man had everything and went away sad. One man had nothing and followed rejoicing. The difference was not their circumstances. It was that one of them came asking to be given, and the other came asking what he could do.