Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St LukeBurton, Henry
Religion
Expositor's Bible: The Gospel of St Luke
Burton, Henry
Bible. Luke -- Commentaries
Now, even in the physical vision there is a wonderful correspondence
between the sight and the soul, the prospect and introspect. As men read
the outward world they see pretty much the shadow of themselves, their
thoughts, feelings, and ideas. In the German fable the travelled stork
had nothing to say about the beauty of the fields and wonders of the
cities over which it passed, but it could discourse at length about the
delicious frogs it had found in a certain ditch. Exactly the same law
rules up in the higher vision. Men see what they themselves love and
are; the sight is but a sort of projection of the soul. As St. Paul
says, "The natural man receiveth not the things of God;" the things
which God hath prepared for them that love Him are "things which eye saw
not, and ear heard not." And so Jesus gives sight by renewing the soul;
He creates around us a new heaven and a new earth, by creating a new, a
clean heart within us. Within every soul there are the possibilities of
a Paradise, but these possibilities are dormant. The natural heart is a
chaos of confusion and darkness, until it turns towards Jesus as its
Saviour and its Sun, and henceforth revolves around Him in its
ever-narrowing circles.
3. The Gospel of Jesus was a Gospel of Liberty. "He hath sent Me to
proclaim release to the captives," "to set at liberty them that are
bruised." The latter clause is not in the original prophecy, but is a
rough adaptation of another passage in Isaiah (lviii. 6). Probably it
was quoted by Jesus in His address, and so was inserted by the
Evangelist with the passages read; for in the New Testament the
quotations from the Old are grouped together by affinities of spirit,
rather than by the law of textual continuity. The two passages are one
in their proclamation and promise of liberty, but they by no means cover
the same ground. The former speaks of the liberation of captives, those
whom the exigencies of war or some change of fortune have thrown into
prison; the latter speaks of deliverance to the oppressed, those whose
personal liberties may not be impawned, but whose lives are made hard
and bitter under severe exactions, and whose spirits are broken, crushed
beneath a weight of accumulated ills. Speaking generally, we should call
the one an amnesty, and the other an enfranchisement; for one is the
offer of freedom to the captive, the other of freedom to the slave;
while together they form an act of emancipation for humanity,
enfranchising and ennobling each individual son of man, and giving to
him, even the poorest, the freedom of God's world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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