Luke 9:61,62

3 d. Luke 9:61-62.

This third instance belongs only to Luke. It is, as it were, the synthesis of the two others. This man offers himself, like the first; and yet he temporizes like the second. The word ἀποτάσσεσθαι, strictly, to leave one's place in the ranks, rather denotes here separation from the members of his house, than renunciation of his goods (Luke 14:33). The preposition εἰς, which follows τοῖς, is better explained by taking the pronoun in the masculine sense.

There are, in the answer of Jesus, at once a call to examine himself, and a summons to a more thorough decision. The figure is that of a man who, while engaged in labour (aor. ἐπιβαλών), instead of keeping his eye on the furrow which he is drawing (pres. βλέπων), looks behind at some object which attracts his interest. He is only half at work, and half work only will be the result. What will come of the divine work in the hands of a man who devotes himself to it with a heart preoccupied with other cares? A heroic impulse, without after-thought, is the condition of Christian service.

In the words, fit for the kingdom of God, the two ideas of self-discipline and of work to influence others are not separated, as indeed they form but one. This summons to entire renunciation is much more naturally explained by the situation of Luke than by that of Matthew.

Those three events had evidently been joined together by tradition, on account of their homogeneous nature, like the two Sabbatic scenes, Luke 6:1-11. They were examples of the discriminating wisdom with which Jesus treated the most diverse cases. This group of episodes was incorporated by the evangelists of the primitive Church in either of the traditional cycles indifferently. Accordingly, in Matthew it takes its place in the cycle of the Gadarene journey. Luke, more exact in his researches, has undoubtedly restored it to its true historical situation. For although the three events did not occur at the same time, as might appear to be the case if we were to take his narrative literally, all the three nevertheless belong to the same epoch, that of the final departure from Galilee. Holtzmann, who will have it that Matthew and Luke both borrowed this piece from the Logia, is obliged to ask why Matthew has cut off the third case? His answer is: Matthew imagined that this third personage was no other than the rich young man whose history he reckoned on giving later, in the form in which he found it in the other common source, the original Mark. Luke had not the same perspicacity; and hence he has twice related the same fact in two different forms. But the rich young man had no thought of asking Jesus to be allowed to follow Him; what filled his mind was the idea of some work to be done which would secure his salvation. The state of soul and the conversation are wholly different. At all events, if the fact was the same, it would be more natural to allow that it had taken two different forms in the tradition, and that Luke, not having the same sources as Matthew, reproduced both without suspecting their identity.