Twelve Pairs of Empty Hands

In this installment of a verse-by-verse Adult Sunday School series through Luke, Charles Sebold takes up Luke 9:1-17 and picks up Luke's unanswered question from the storm on the lake: "Who then is this?" Having shown His authority over wind, demons, disease, and death, the Lord now lends that authority to twelve men and sends them out deliberately empty-handed, with no staff, bag, bread, money, or second tunic, so that when a fever breaks or a demon flees no village can mistake whose power it was. He makes each of them a beggar before He makes him a missionary, and the shaking of dust off the feet leaves a covenant town that refuses the kingdom outside it by its own refusal. Word reaches Herod Antipas, who asks the same question from a throne rather than from a sinking boat; Luke withholds the spectacle of John's beheading and keeps the camera on the question, because Herod wants a show and not an answer. Withdrawing across the border to Bethsaida, Jesus welcomes the crowd that ruins His rest and hands the twelve an impossible assignment: "You give them something to eat." In a wilderness, seated in fifties as Moses once seated Israel, God spreads a table; the Lord takes, blesses, breaks, and gives, the four verbs Luke will sound again at the Supper and at Emmaus; and twelve men who said "send them away" carry home twelve baskets of His provision. The lesson presses the slowness of disciples the Lord refuses to discard, and the widening sense of God's true scale that marks a maturing Christian life.