TOPIC: SYNOPTIC GOSPELS
By Len Mier
QUESTION: Who are the “strangers” that the trial of Jesus, as presented in the Gospel of Luke, challenges me to accept?
ESSAY 3
I think Luke is trying to challenge me to move beyond my own comfort level in every day interactions with people. The strangers that Luke seems to present are all those individuals and groups that I would view as different than myself. Living in a community that was at one time primarily a Christian community the population dynamics have moved to where the Christian in the community is now the minority. I am now like Luke’s stronger.

The stranger idea gives me a new meaning of the Gospel message. I need to bring out the core message of the gospel in the way I live the message. The Good News is not just words but actions and attitudes. Luke’s Jesus went to those on the fringe of society or different and brought them into the kingdom. As a stranger in the community, outside of that which wields social power, this should not diminish my drive to evangelize in the way I act.

The challenge is to bring the core message of the gospel into a community that sees this message as foreign and not their own, just as Jesus brought the message to those who are the strangers in Luke’s Gospel. Bringing the message to others by my interactions with them forces me to accept more the Gospel message of love which is more than a mere human principle of tolerance, but is the Divine principle of loving ones neighbor as ones self..

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All the gospels record that the Jewish Sanhedrin called people to witness to the fact that Jesus said that they could destroy the temple in three days and He would rebuild it. Of course Jesus was not talking about the Jerusalem Temple building but His enemies did make this interpretation.
Who were the people, in your mind, that came forward to testify against Jesus? Where they the people who had listened to His teaching and witnessed the cures that He had performed? Or were they people who had only heard about Him and, at the instigation of the religious leaders, agreed to testify against Him.
What are your thoughts on this topic? How would you respond to this question?
There are no right or wrong answers to this question. It is not a matter of analysis of a Gospel passage. It is all a matter of how you relate to what the Gospels present to us.