Don't be Afraid
Luke 12 : 1-35 Today is the last of our Bible Studies for a while and we find ourselves in the middle of Luke’s Gospel, with a sense of increasing danger. Jesus is among a crowd, so big that people are trampling on each other. This isn’t some sort of orderly Church procession. It’s more like the Hillsborough tragedy or some type of Beatlemania. It’s getting dark and dangerous. Jesus and the Pharisees are at each other’s throats. How are we to interpret this. Don’t forget that by the time Luke wrote his Gospel, the relationship between the early church and the Judaic community was already strained and was breaking down. We see some of that here, in the way that Jesus’ relationship with them is portrayed. The pharisaical movement had a lot going for it, they were on the side of the poor and the oppressed. However it has sometimes been portrayed as a scheming giant by early Christian literature. We need to be careful n...