Jesus’ ministry has started. He is already turning the world around him on its head. His teaching has attracted the crowds, he has disciples following him, and he has a very successful healing ministry. In the two chapters leading up to chapter six, Jesus is seen often going off to lonely places for solitude and prayer (4:42, 5:16). We even see Jesus walking away from good ministry because he has a specific mission and must not be deterred. In a world filled with frantic action, chaos, and busyness, Jesus demonstrates what a sane life looks like. Slow down. Be silent. Be alone. Pray. What would life look like if your decisions were born out of this kind of God-given peace rather than the chaos of this world? Your life would probably start to look upside-down to a world that is convinced it is right-side up.
Our text for this week begins in Luke 6:12. Jesus looks out over the crowd that has followed him for a time and knows the movement has begun. He came to reclaim the Kingdom for God, to turn the world right-side up, and to reestablish the Kingdom mission for God’s people. He needs to choose a representative 12. He spends the entire night in prayer before making his decision on who he would call. I want to take a moment to make a plug that Jesus’ prayer life was more than just presenting a list of requests before the Father and ending the prayer with “thy will be done.” Praying all night would have been a dialogue with God in meditation. He would have used scripture to guide his prayers and listened for what the Father might be telling him. He would have weighed what he thought he was hearing. As he lifted up each name for the 12, he would have waited for peace to rest on him with each one. After praying all night, he would have a clear understanding on who would be called. This is just a glimpse of what his prayer life might have looked like based on the Jewish mystic practices of prayer. Meditating on God’s word is seen all throughout the Psalms (1, 4, 19, 49, 119, and 143 to get you started).
Jesus spent the night in prayer because he wasn’t just choosing 12. He was making a bold symbolic move in sight of all the disciples who were following him. If you walked up to a group of people in a gym who were all playing basketball and chose five to go to the other end of the court with you, everyone in the gym would quickly put two and two together that you were forming a basketball team. When Jesus chooses 12 men, it isn’t because he thinks poorly of women (Luke’s Gospel elevates women on a regular basis). He chooses 12 men because out of the 12 sons of Jacob came the 12 tribes of Israel. Everyone would see Jesus’ actions as symbolic of the “New Israel” being brought into existence before them.
Jesus was re-establishing Israel. With the New Israel, Jesus re-establishes a Kingdom ethic. He takes them back to the basics of what it means to live as citizens in God’s Kingdom. If these 12 are going to carry this up-side down Kingdom into a right-side up world, they would need a way of life that reflects what the Kingdom is all about. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus gives this sermon out on a plain. Read through Jesus’ sermon slowly and let it examine your life (Luke 6:17-49). What areas of your life still need to be turned upside-down so that your life looks like that of a citizen of the Kingdom?