There are several verses in this chapter, (22-37) that overlap with what is called “the Olivet Discourse” in Matthew 24 where Jesus talks about Judgment Day. I will go over that content when we get to Matthew 24.

SIN & FORGIVENESS

Luke 17:3-4 is a summary of Matthew 18.

“Pay attention to yourselves! If your brother sins, rebuke him, and if he repents, forgive him, and if he sins against you seven times in the day, and turns to you seven times, saying, ‘I repent,’ you must forgive him.”
‭‭Luke‬ ‭17‬:‭3‬-‭4‬ ‭ESV‬‬

I think we mostly have trouble with rebuking brothers and sisters who sin, hearing a rebuke for our own sin, repenting when we have sinned against another believer, and forgiving someone seven times in a day.

🤓 So… all of it.

Yeah.

😏 That’s like saying, apart from the melody, the harmony, and the rhythm the music was good.

I can sympathize with the disciples asking Jesus to increase their faith. Forgiving someone seven times in a day for the same stupid thing? Is that even humanly possible? I don’t think it’s humanly possible, but with God all things are possible to him who believes.

FAITH

And why is our my faith so small? [I’ll speak for myself] I have a stubborn little mulberry shoot that keeps growing through a crack in the edge of a driveway retaining wall. I have never even considered telling it to pull itself up and be planted in the sea. I just keep whacking it off with the mower.

☝️🤓 O ye of little faith.

Thanks a lot.

Jesus didn’t say we need to have faith as big as a mustard seed. He said, “If you had faith like a mustard seed…”

If Jesus had said, “If you had faith like Bob…” I’d want to know about Bob’s faith.

But He said, “If you had faith like a mustard seed…” So it makes me wonder what kind of faith a mustard seed has.

🤔 Does a mustard seed have faith? I mean, it’s a seed. Do seeds have faith?

Well… actually, they kinda do.

We call it DNA.

All of the genetic information needed to make a mustard plant is in a mustard seed. A seed holds a future packed inside in a dormant state. There’s as much DNA and potential for unlimited future generations in the seed that immediately sprouts as the seed that gets put in a jar and saved and lies dormant. It’s not like the seed develops DNA only if it gets planted.

It anticipates the future just by existing.

If a seed could be said to “believe” then every seed believes it will be planted and grow. Otherwise why have the DNA?

If faith is knowing that something is possible even when the circumstances appear otherwise, then it looks like a biblical mustard seed (black mustard) will hold on and believe for 50-60+ YEARS.

May we have faith LIKE the mustard seed.

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SERVING

And supposing we DID have faith like a mustard seed and did marvelous things with it, I think the teaching about being an “unworthy servant” is meant to keep people from getting proud of their faith and obedience – as if we did some great thing.

In Bible College, our street evangelism team was led by an older student, a former Marine. And when we would drive back to campus after a couple hours of street witnessing, he would include this text in his prayer. “Lord, we are unprofitable servants. We have done only what is required of us.” And I would secretly get a bit perturbed at this because I was thinking, “uh…this was not required of me. This is completely extra-curricular. And it’s WAY out of my comfort zone. I could have stayed in the dorm. But I didn’t. There should be extra stars in my crown for this.” But he was right. How challenging it is to quit patting ourselves on the back long enough to serve.

THE TEN LEPERS

I’m sure we all understand why a group of 10 lepers would be outside of a village. Their sickness made them unclean.

Jesus didn’t touch them or even say “be healed.” He just told them to go show themselves to the priests.

Interesting request. They are on the border of Galilee and Samaria. That’s somewhere around 70-90 miles from the temple.

There may have been some priests closer in a Levitical community?? I dunno. The text also gives no indication how far they had gone before they were cleansed and then realized it. It could’ve been minutes. It could’ve been hours.

The Samaritan man didn’t know that Jesus was the world’s “great High Priest.” As a Samaritan, he wouldn’t have been allowed into the temple to see a Levitical priest anyway. But he did show himself to the Priest that mattered. AND he was grateful.

How often do we enjoy blessings – perhaps far less dramatic, but blessings nonetheless – and forget to thank the Lord for them?

Some of my personal favorite (material) blessings:

• A washing machine and dryer
• Hot running water
• Indoor plumbing
• A reliable car
• Work that I enjoy

🤨 You make a list of blessings and… a washing machine makes it to the top? Are you serious?

Have you ever done laundry by hand?

😏 I don’t have hands. Or laundry.

Oh… I can fix that, Smarty Pants.

✋🙄🤚🩳🩲🧦👕👖👔🧦🩲👕🩳👖

You were saying?

😑 A washing machine is fine thing to be thankful for.

Let’s not just take the Lord’s blessings and run. Let’s be thankful. The next time you throw a load of laundry in a washing machine, you can be thankful you don’t have to do this chore by hand. And if you DO have to wash clothes by hand, you can be thankful for having clothes and hands and water to wash them.

🤓 That sounds like The Glad Game.

🤨 The what?

🤓 The Glad Game – from the movie Pollyanna. Here’s a 5-minute clip that’ll explain.

🙄 Hands and laundry. Now a video about “The Glad Game?” I swear y’all are tryin’ to kill me.

🤓 Just watch it….

🎥📼📀🎬🎞️🍿 [watches Pollyanna clip]

😏 Alright. It was ok. Funny that they named the mortician Mr. Murgue. That’s one “o” away from a morgue.

☝️🤓 Now that we’re all happy again, Moving right along…

Thank you.

THE KINGDOM

“Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming in ways that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.”
‭‭Luke‬ ‭17‬:‭20‬-‭21‬ ‭ESV‬‬

When we get an idea planted in our heads, it can be really difficult to think outside of that box. 📦

The people around Jesus, even His own disciples, have an idea in their heads that “the Kingdom of God” will be like “the Kingdom of David.” It’ll be visible with a king and an army and a palace and banners waving in a clear blue sky. There will be borders and cities and towns and little country villages. There will be written laws and law enforcement. Money and economy. Trade with other nations. Art and custom and culture and national pride… You know- a kingdom.

Jesus keeps talking about a kingdom. He goes around from town to town teaching “The Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Well alrighty then. Could we a get a timeline on the launch, Jesus? Are we thinking next year? Or are we thinking more time to put together an army to overthrow the Romans?

What Jesus is doing is beyond cosmically grand in scale and the people are stuck thinking on a human scale. It makes me think of this:

This is a hilltop in Peru. For centuries people knew these old structures were up there. They aren’t houses or temples though. Archeologists and scientists were baffled.

They are towers that date to around 400BC. That’s around the deaths of Ezra and Nehemiah. But they clearly aren’t a defensive wall. Why would someone build 13 towers on a hill? In the valley below there was another site. How did the two connect?

In 2007 a Peruvian archeologist and his British colleague realized that the towers on the far left and right marked the position of the rising sun at the solstices. When they figured that out, the rest made sense. The ancient builders had turned the whole hilltop into a gigantic clock; many acres in size.

It was so big, it was like it was too big to see. And for centuries, it was marking time and no one knew it; though it was plain as day (pun intended).

The Kingdom of God is SO much bigger than a country and a palace. It’s greater than the whole of the physical universe in scope. It encompasses what might be called – not the microcosm or the macrocosm but the metacosm. That’s the eternal, spiritual reality in which the physical universe exists.

And here’s the mind-bender…

😵‍💫 My mind is bent already.

You can’t put this Kingdom in a box or confine it to one country, but it will fit inside of you.

Imagine your body is like a whole universe. The trillions of cells are like the trillions of stars. Each cell filled with worlds and wonders we barely understand. Are you actually small? Or are we just used to our scale? Atoms are small. If an atom was as large as a grain of sand, you would be the size of an entire planet. Plenty of room inside for a Kingdom.

Jesus was announcing a spiritual kingdom, not an earthly one. But what even IS that?

The historic European Church (in my opinion) often reverted to an unspiritual concept of the Kingdom. When Popes and Archbishops had soldiers at their commands and piles of gold and miles of land in their possession, the “Kingdom” was thought of as a very physical, political thing with borders you could walk across or defend. Probably Vatican City is the only spot on earth where that perception lives on.

In post, post-modern America we are more in danger of thinking of the Kingdom as an intellectual property (IP) that has become public domain and is currently being adapted by many different worldview communities; some claiming they are being faithful to the original, other celebrating their adaptation. We may perhaps be in danger of thinking that the Kingdom of God is nothing more than an idea open to interpretation.

The Kingdom isn’t food and houses and possessions. It isn’t physical stuff. But it also isn’t a thought experiment or an intellectual idea. It exists… within those who are born of the Spirit, yes, but fundamentally independent of humans, in a reality beyond our perception. Jesus is the King of this Kingdom. And the territory of the Kingdom extends to wherever Jesus is King. There are plenty of rebels who have set up their own kingdoms within the King’s realm and they refuse to come under His authority. They aren’t really a confederacy. It’s more like every rebel for himself.

I think it’s a good idea to travel through the country of my vast being and make sure all of the regions of my body and soul have surrendered to the King. No holdouts hiding in some lone stronghold, afraid of what will happen if I surrender. He is kind. And He is good. He’s not a tyrant who punishes those who surrender. He’s our loving Father who only wants to welcome us home.