11/18/2024 – Day 148 – Luke – Chapters 7 – 8 / The suffering woman looking for the miracle cure, not lost in the crowd. (Luke 8: 43 – 48)
Last cycle on posts, 07/25/2022, we cover Chapter 7: Faith of the Centurion; Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead. Also, in Chapter 8: Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter. I still can’t conjecture an answer as to why Jesus told Jairus’ family not to share the miracle with others, but not so with the widow. Thoughts? / Reflections? We don’t have to know why… Just trust and obey!
I used a parallel synoptic gospel listing of stories from the web to determine that this story is also covered in Matthew 9: 18-26 (Day 022) and Mark 5: 21-43 (Day 085) in addition to here is Luke. It was a personal surprise that I hadn’t covered it any previous post. With so much to cover, I try to cover new ground each cycle. Why a surprise? In the Chosen series, the scene of this woman and Jesus moved me perhaps more than any other scene. The actor playing Yeshua (Jesus), exemplified perhaps the last sentence of this commentary from Barclay I am going to share with you, at least as well as any human could: “God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love.”
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Perhaps too much down the “bunny trail” on this section , but I’ll leave it. You can go down one to the next section, the commentary for today’s reading (highlighted title):
So, a little about William Barclay’s bible commentary here – his little blue color coded book for the gospel of Luke (ISBN reference 0-664-24103-4): I’ve been told by two different pastors that share my opinion that Barclay’s commentary insights are extremely insightful. They are verifiable with one notable exception that seems to pop up every now and then, and it is this: For some reason, he seems to discount Jesus’ miracles.
In today’s reading, it was the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Jesus notes in vs. 8:52 that “she is not dead but asleep”, which Barclay used as a springboard to say that “it may well be that here we have we have a real miracle of diagnosis; that Jesus saw the girl was in deep trance and that she was on the point of buried alive.” Well, Jesus said of Lazarus, “he is sleeping”, before he raised him from the dead. So, why not there? Or with the widow’s son also in today’s reading? He did go on to add that “evidence of the tombs in Palestine it is clear that many were buried alive.” The point: I suspect that every once in awhile Barclay is wrong but I am not going to avoid using him from time to time. He helps to bring me to the realization that the LORD is unfathomable, we cannot capture his love and his power!
_____________________________________________________________________________-
So here is the insightful Barclay excerpt from “Not Lost in the Crowd” – Luke 8: 43-48:
“This story laid hold on the heart and the imagination of the early church. It was believed that the woman was a gentile from Caesarea Philippi. Eusebius, the great church historian (A.D. 300), relates how it was said that the woman had at her own cost erected a statue commemorating her cure in her native city. it was said that that (sic) statue remained there until Julian, the Roman Emperor who tried to bring back the pagan gods, destroyed it, and erected his own in place of it, only to see his own statue blasted by a thunderbolt from God.
The shame of the woman was that ceremonially she was unclean (Leviticus 15: 19-33). Her issue of blood had cut her off from life. That was why she did not come openly to Jesus but crept up in the crowd; and that was why at first she was so embarrassed when Jesus asked who touched him…
Luke the doctor is here in evidence again. Mark says of the woman that she had spent her all on the doctors and was no better but rather grew worse (Mark 5:26). Luke misses out the final phrase, because he did not like this gibe against the doctors! (Jimmy comment: Now here is a Barclay conjecture that is highly possible as we know doctors avoid criticizing other doctors at all cost. haha)
The lovely thing about this story is that from the moment Jesus was face to face with the woman, there seemed to be nobody there but he and she. It happened in the middle of a crowd; but the crowd was forgotten and Jesus spoke to that woman as if she was the only person in the world. She was a poor, unimportant sufferer, with a trouble that made her unclean, and yet to that one unimportant person Jesus gave all of himself.
We are very apt to attach labels to people and to treat them according to their relative importance. To Jesus a person had none of these man-made labels. He or she was simply a human soul in need. Love never thinks of people in terms of human importances.
Almost everybody would have regarded the woman in the crowd as totally unimportant. For Jesus she was someone in need, and therefore he, as it were, withdrew from the crowd and gave himself to her. ‘God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love.'”
(Jimmy comment: So, we will never completely comprehend the magnitude of the LORD’s love for us, but brother William Barclay, the messenger, brought us a little bit closer. And that is always a blessing!)
Soli Deo Gloria!
11/18/2024 – Day 148 – Luke – Chapters 7 – 8 / The suffering woman looking for the miracle cure, not lost in the crowd. (Luke 8: 43 – 48)
Last cycle on posts, 07/25/2022, we cover Chapter 7: Faith of the Centurion; Jesus raises the widow’s son from the dead. Also, in Chapter 8: Jesus raises Jairus’ daughter. I still can’t conjecture an answer as to why Jesus told Jairus’ family not to share the miracle with others, but not so with the widow. Thoughts? / Reflections? We don’t have to know why… Just trust and obey!
I used a parallel synoptic gospel listing of stories from the web to determine that this story is also covered in Matthew 9: 18-26 (Day 022) and Mark 5: 21-43 (Day 085) in addition to here is Luke. It was a personal surprise that I hadn’t covered it any previous post. With so much to cover, I try to cover new ground each cycle. Why a surprise? In the Chosen series, the scene of this woman and Jesus moved me perhaps more than any other scene. The actor playing Yeshua (Jesus), exemplified perhaps the last sentence of this commentary from Barclay I am going to share with you, at least as well as any human could: “God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love.”
______________________________________________________
Perhaps too much down the “bunny trail” on this section , but I’ll leave it. You can go down one to the next section, the commentary for today’s reading (highlighted title):
So, a little about William Barclay’s bible commentary here – his little blue color coded book for the gospel of Luke (ISBN reference 0-664-24103-4): I’ve been told by two different pastors that share my opinion that Barclay’s commentary insights are extremely insightful. They are verifiable with one notable exception that seems to pop up every now and then, and it is this: For some reason, he seems to discount Jesus’ miracles.
In today’s reading, it was the raising of Jairus’ daughter from the dead. Jesus notes in vs. 8:52 that “she is not dead but asleep”, which Barclay used as a springboard to say that “it may well be that here we have we have a real miracle of diagnosis; that Jesus saw the girl was in deep trance and that she was on the point of buried alive.” Well, Jesus said of Lazarus, “he is sleeping”, before he raised him from the dead. So, why not there? Or with the widow’s son also in today’s reading? He did go on to add that “evidence of the tombs in Palestine it is clear that many were buried alive.” The point: I suspect that every once in awhile Barclay is wrong but I am not going to avoid using him from time to time. He helps to bring me to the realization that the LORD is unfathomable, we cannot capture his love and his power!
_____________________________________________________________________________-
So here is the insightful Barclay excerpt from “Not Lost in the Crowd” – Luke 8: 43-48:
“This story laid hold on the heart and the imagination of the early church. It was believed that the woman was a gentile from Caesarea Philippi. Eusebius, the great church historian (A.D. 300), relates how it was said that the woman had at her own cost erected a statue commemorating her cure in her native city. it was said that that (sic) statue remained there until Julian, the Roman Emperor who tried to bring back the pagan gods, destroyed it, and erected his own in place of it, only to see his own statue blasted by a thunderbolt from God.
The shame of the woman was that ceremonially she was unclean (Leviticus 15: 19-33). Her issue of blood had cut her off from life. That was why she did not come openly to Jesus but crept up in the crowd; and that was why at first she was so embarrassed when Jesus asked who touched him…
Luke the doctor is here in evidence again. Mark says of the woman that she had spent her all on the doctors and was no better but rather grew worse (Mark 5:26). Luke misses out the final phrase, because he did not like this gibe against the doctors! (Jimmy comment: Now here is a Barclay conjecture that is highly possible as we know doctors avoid criticizing other doctors at all cost. haha)
The lovely thing about this story is that from the moment Jesus was face to face with the woman, there seemed to be nobody there but he and she. It happened in the middle of a crowd; but the crowd was forgotten and Jesus spoke to that woman as if she was the only person in the world. She was a poor, unimportant sufferer, with a trouble that made her unclean, and yet to that one unimportant person Jesus gave all of himself.
We are very apt to attach labels to people and to treat them according to their relative importance. To Jesus a person had none of these man-made labels. He or she was simply a human soul in need. Love never thinks of people in terms of human importances.
Almost everybody would have regarded the woman in the crowd as totally unimportant. For Jesus she was someone in need, and therefore he, as it were, withdrew from the crowd and gave himself to her. ‘God loves each one of us as if there was only one of us to love.'”
(Jimmy comment: So, we will never completely comprehend the magnitude of the LORD’s love for us, but brother William Barclay, the messenger, brought us a little bit closer. And that is always a blessing!)
Soli Deo Gloria!