Luke 8:1-3 The Women Following Jesus
Good morning! I’m very glad to be with you all this morning, this truly is the best part of my week. This has been a challenging week, nothing out of the ordinary, just life happening. And when I sat down to study this week in preparation for this sermon I admit, my first thought was “Lord, I could use something easy, a text that will preach itself.” Maybe the parable of the Sower, that’s an easy one!
Well, maybe next week will be easy. Today we are going to look at Luke 8:1-3, the parable of the Sower is Luke 8:4-8. So turn with me in your Bibles to Luke 8:1-3, page 864 in the pew Bibles.
Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God. And the twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, 3 and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.
Let’s pray.
One of the main reasons that I preach book by book, chapter by chapter, and verse by verse is so that we don’t skip over little portions of Scripture like this.
It would be very easy to gloss over these verses as a mere introduction to the next few verses that contain a wonderful and powerful parable from Jesus but God’s Word, the Bible, is God’s words recorded for us and as Paul wrote, in 2 Timothy 3:16-17,
16 All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, 17 that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work…
So these three little verses have meaning and they are profitable for us to consider.
First we must consider the work of Jesus on earth.
Though Jesus death on the cross and resurrection from the grave are the culmination of His work it was preceded by His work of proclaiming the Good News of the kingdom of God. Verse 1 says:
Soon afterward he went on through cities and villages, proclaiming and bringing the good news of the kingdom of God.
Jesus spent three and a half years preaching about the kingdom of God, a kingdom of grace and a kingdom of righteousness by faith in Him. He spent three years teaching people how to be citizens of that kingdom and them when the time came, He gave His life on the cross that we could all enter it through faith in Him alone. No amount of good works or right living can gain us access to His eternal kingdom and save us from the destruction that we deserve, only faith in Jesus Christ.
And during those Three years of ministry He called the twelve whom He called Apostles, and trained them, not only about the kingdom itself but He trained them to preach the Good News after His death and resurrection and return to the Father.
These twelve were unschooled, ordinary men, fishermen, tax collectors, regular guys that Jesus called into an extraordinary work. After His return to the Father Jesus sent the Holy Spirit and filled these men, with the exception of Judas of course. He filled these men with the Holy Spirit and empowered them to do the work of proclaiming the kingdom of God just as He had trained them to do, and they did, and it changed the world! You can read about that event in Acts 2.
But the Twelve were not the only ones with Jesus.
And the twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, 3 and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.
There are three women named here, Mary Magdalene, or Mary from Magdala in the region of Dalmatia, and Joanna, who, along with Mary Magdalene and one other Mary were among the first to see the resurrected Christ. There is also Susanna who is not mentioned again by name in Scripture, as well many other faithful women.
So imagine this, what does this group look like?
What we see here is a circle of men and women, of brothers and sisters, with the Lord Jesus in the center. This is the seed and the design of the church.
Men and women united in faith around the Lord Jesus.
Paul wrote in Galatians 3:26-29,
26 for in Christ Jesus you are all sons of God, through faith. 27 For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ. 28 There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. 29 And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.
Though men and women are called to different roles within the church, and, sometimes unfortunately, the roles for men are much more clearly defined than that of women, we are all one in Christ. That means that our standing before God is the same through faith in Jesus, there are no classes of citizens in His kingdom just His children.
So what were these women doing, Mary, and Joanna, and Susanna, as well as all the other unnamed women that were with Jesus?
And the twelve were with him, 2 and also some women who had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities: Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out, 3 and Joanna, the wife of Chuza, Herod’s household manager, and Susanna, and many others, who provided for them out of their means.
Remember what Jesus said about the woman who anointed His feet and wiped them with her hair?
She was forgiven much and so she loved much. Like that woman, these women had been given and forgiven much and so they loved much. That woman humbly gave what she had to Jesus as a blessing to Him. In her case it was her tears and a flask of costly ointment, and in the case of these women in our text they provided for the needs of Jesus and the Apostles out of their financial means.
These women stand as monuments of Christ’s power and mercy. Jesus is the Great Physician of both body and soul. What these women were doing was responding positively to His healing and the message about Jesus’ kingdom. They were bound by gratitude to serve Him and His gospel.
They stand as a great example for all of us.
These women willingly sacrificed what they had to provide for the needs of our Savior and His Apostles, and this has been the pattern for the church ever since.
Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 9:7-11,
7 Who serves as a soldier at his own expense? Who plants a vineyard without eating any of its fruit? Or who tends a flock without getting some of the milk? 8 Do I say these things on human authority? Does not the Law say the same? 9 For it is written in the Law of Moses, “You shall not muzzle an ox when it treads out the grain.” Is it for oxen that God is concerned? 10 Does he not certainly speak for our sake? It was written for our sake, because the plowman should plow in hope and the thresher thresh in hope of sharing in the crop. 11 If we have sown spiritual things among you, is it too much if we reap material things from you?
What’s amazing to me is the humility of our Lord to allow Himself to become so poor that He depended on the generosity of others. He truly did make Himself nothing and took on the form of a servant.
But what a blessing it is to bless the Lord in this way, what a blessing it must have been for these women to give of themselves to feed the Lord and His church.
And as humbling as it was for the Lord to live in such a way as to depend on the benevolence of others it took still another measure of humility to accept their gifts. The One who said that it is more blessed to give than receive allowed these dear saints to experience that blessing by receiving their offering.
The One who multiplied the loaves and fishes for five thousand plus other people allowed somebody else the blessing of providing the bread.
I see in that a picture of the gospel. We come to Jesus in faith, from all different places and backgrounds, and through faith in Jesus He fills us with His Holy Spirit and makes us into things and puts us into places we could never have imagined before we knew Him.
These faithful women, in their gratitude for what Jesus did for them, gave of themselves to bless the Lord and were forever immortalized on the pages of Scripture.
We certainly will never be added to the pages of Scripture by name but we can still give of ourselves out of gratitude to the Savior for what He has done for us, whether that is our time, our talents, or our treasure.
Amen.
