Biblion Bible Commentary
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More Than a Prophet
Luke 7:24-35
24 When John’s messengers had departed, he began to tell the multitudes about John, “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? · WEB
The tribute to John, and a note about who had already accepted him — the tax collectors, not the lawyers.
"What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind?" Luke 7:24.
The tribute is given in Matthew's account Matthew 11:7–19 — the three questions, the quotation from Malachi with its pronoun turned, and the paradox that the greatest man born of women is outranked by the least in the kingdom.
One detail of this telling is sharpened. "Those who are gorgeously dressed and live delicately are in kings' courts" Luke 7:25. The man being praised is at that moment in a king's prison, put there by the occupant of the court, and the sentence brushes past that without naming it.
What belongs to this account alone is the two verses in the middle, and they are the writer's own comment rather than reported speech.
When all the people and the tax collectors heard this, they declared God to be just, having been baptized with John's baptism. But the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected the counsel of God, not being baptized by him themselves Luke 7:29–30.
The verdict is split down a line the whole book keeps drawing. Ordinary people and tax collectors had gone to the Jordan; the professionals had not. And the two halves of the sentence are stated as equivalents: to be baptized by John was to declare God to be just, and to decline was to reject the counsel of God for oneself.
That last phrase is unusually severe and unusually precise. God had a purpose concerning them, and they set it aside — for themselves rather than for anybody else. Nobody stopped them; they stopped. And what looks like caution about an unusual preacher turns out, in the account's judgment, to be a decision about God.
"They are like children who sit in the marketplace and call to one another, saying, 'We piped to you, and you didn't dance. We mourned, and you didn't weep'" Luke 7:32.
The picture is children who will not join either game. John came fasting and was called demon-possessed; the Son of Man came eating and was called a glutton and a drunkard Luke 7:33–34. The complaint is never about the message and always about the manner, and it changes to fit whichever manner arrives. A generation that objects to both has shown that the objection was never the reason.
The insult is worth keeping: a friend of tax collectors and sinners. It was meant to end the argument, and this Gospel simply accepts it as a description — the next paragraph is a dinner party where exactly that is demonstrated.
"Wisdom is justified by all her children" Luke 7:35. Wisdom is vindicated by what it produces rather than by winning the debate, and the children in question have just been named two verses earlier: the people and the tax collectors who went to the river.
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