“All things have been handed over to me by my Father, and no one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.”
Jesus makes extraordinary claims for himself. He claims to have the authority of God. He claims to have unique intimacy with his Heavenly Father. He claims to be the only one who can truly and fully reveal God to us. Either Jesus is crazy, in which case we can safely ignore him, or he’s the real deal, in which case we embrace him as Lord and Savior.
Today’s verse is extraordinary. It was uttered either by someone who was extraordinarily arrogant and mistaken or by someone with an extraordinary relationship with God the Father. I’m reminded of one of my favorite lines from C.S. Lewis’s classic, Mere Christianity:
“A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg—or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice” (p. 52).
I’m writing as a Christian, as one who believes that Jesus was neither a poached egg incarnate nor the Devil. I take Jesus at his word in Luke 10:22. Thus I marvel at his absolutely extraordinary claims. First of all, Jesus claimed extraordinary authority. “All things have been handed over to me by my Father” was a way of saying he had been given the very authority of God, authority over everything. Later, Jesus would say this even more directly (see Matthew 28:18).
Second, Jesus claimed to have extraordinary intimacy with his Heavenly Father: “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, or who the Father is except the Son” (Luke 10:22). This isn’t just theological knowledge, but deeply personal knowledge as well. The Son and the Father know each other deeply, truly, intimately, uniquely.
Third, Jesus claimed to be the source of extraordinary revelation. Not only did he know the Father like no other, but Jesus alone was able to reveal the Father “to who the Son choose to reveal him” (10:22). If somebody stands up and says, “I alone can reveal God to you in the fulness of truth,” that person is probably in the poached egg section of the buffet, unless he happens to be Jesus.
We’ll continue to use Luke as our focal text. But I’m going to jump ahead to chapter 19 so we can walk with Jesus during the last days of his life. We’ll begin with his encounter with Zacchaeus and conclude on Holy Saturday with Jesus’s burial. Don’t worry, we’ll circle back to Luke 10 so we can cover the entire gospel.
Comments