The Great Giver – Luke 21:5-19

A text – Luke 21:5-19

⁵ When some were speaking about the temple, how it was adorned with beautiful stones and gifts dedicated to God, he said, ⁶ “As for these things that you see, the days will come when not one stone will be left upon another; all will be thrown down.”

⁷ They asked him, “Teacher, when will this be, and what will be the sign that this is about to take place?” ⁸ And he said, “Beware that you are not led astray, for many will come in my name and say, ‘I am he!’ and, ‘The time is near!’Do not go after them.

⁹ “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified, for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” ¹⁰ Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom; ¹¹ there will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and plagues, and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.

¹² “But before all this occurs, they will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name. ¹³ This will give you an opportunity to testify. ¹⁴ So make up your minds not to prepare your defense in advance, ¹⁵ for I will give you words and a wisdom that none of your opponents will be able to withstand or contradict. ¹⁶ You will be betrayed even by parents and siblings, by relatives and friends, and they will put some of you to death. ¹⁷ You will be hated by all because of my name. ¹⁸ But not a hair of your head will perish. ¹⁹ By your endurance you will gain your souls.

A reflection:

The books of Luke and Acts were written about 60 years after Jesus’s ministry. That means that the people reading/hearing Luke’s stories of Jesus had already been through the destruction of the Temple that Jesus predicts in this passage. Many of them had already been persecuted in the ways Jesus described, several put to death bearing witness to Jesus. Luke’s readers/hearers knew that Jesus understood that believers would experience catastrophic times and specific scary events.

So what do all the frightening predictions mean for believers today? Some think their job is to interpret world events as signs of the end times so they will be ready. Some even predict calendar dates when they expect the end to happen. Human beings can’t help their urge to control things. It is in our nature.

But Jesus’s instructions are very different from that. He says not to prepare our speech for these times. He says to let the event come. Don’t try to control this. Don’t think of how you will testify to the living God’s existence and love for you. No, the living God will be right next to you when bad things happen. When you have a chance to testify, do it – and let the words coming out of your mouth be the words the Lord gives you at that moment. The Lord will know who is in the room with you at that moment and how to reach them so that they might not win, and perhaps they might make their own journey of faith. Endure through hard things and let God speak through you in the moments that count.

It will help us, in such times, if we have nurtured a relationship with God all along. We will have come close enough to God over time that we will hear the words we should speak. Trust me, this has happened to many a believer – too shy ordinarily to share about their faith, but when it has counted, the Lord has come though with wise words and good listening. These things minister both to us and to the people we are with at the time. They are great gifts from the Great Giver.

So the takeaway from the gospel for today is not the doom and gloom. Those things are present in this world – we don’t have to look far to find them. The takeaway is that God is nearer than those things and always providing exactly what the situation calls for if only we will pay attention to the Great Giver.

A prayer:

Lord God, Thank you for loving us. Thank you for being by our side in dangerous times. Help us to know you are there and trust that you will give us what we need, always. Help us to be your followers.  Amen.