NOTES for Luk 18:31-34

As we read today's passage, we notice a gap between what people expect from Christ's coming and what actually happens. To a large extent, of course, this is due to the narrowness and earthbound character of the Jews' expectations, which are very human and therefore primitive. But for all the others whom the Lord calls, who open the Gospel and do not come from a Jewish background, this gap matters too. We feel a deep need for God's saving action, if only because we sense our helplessness in the face of suffering and death. We truly need deliverance and recognise that need. The biblical prophets say more than once in the Lord's name that this is precisely what Christ's coming is to bring about. What more, it would seem, is needed? Everyone, God and human beings alike, wants ‘everything to be all right’. Is this not relevant to us too, as we come to God today?

But the Lord tells the disciples that He will be betrayed, mocked and killed—and will rise on the third day. His death does not fit at all within the human wish for ‘everything to be all right’. It is very important that Christ's death is inexplicable from a human point of view, and that the disciples cannot understand His words. For if the sacrifice of the Cross could be explained rationally, it would mean that God had been compelled to it by external circumstances. But Christ's death on the Cross is a manifestation of divine love for humanity that we have done nothing to deserve. And in it the deliverance of the world is accomplished.

The disciples' incomprehension shows clearly how God's design for a world in which everything is ‘very good’ differs from the human wish for ‘everything to be all right’. God envisages the presence of eternal life in the world, while we envisage merely the absence of death. These are far from the same thing—and how much better the first is than the second.