The Men of This Generation

The context of Lk 7:31-35 is found in v.19-30.  In the first part of the context, Jesus performed many miracles to assure the messengers of John that he was the Messiah.  In the second part of the context, Jesus commended John as the greatest prophet of all those born of women.

Following these two events, the people and publicans that heard him were baptized with the baptism of John.  But there were also Pharisees and doctors of the law there who rejected the counsel of God and refused to be baptized.

So, Jesus commented on these Pharisees and lawyers in the passage we’re studying today.  He asked, “Whereunto then shall I liken the men of this generation”?  Remember that Jesus came to a “generation of vipers” (Lk 3:7), a “faithless and perverse generation” (Lk 9:41), and an “evil generation” (Lk 11:29).

He compared them to children.  In essence, “You’re acting like a bunch of kids”.  In the scene Jesus ‘painted’, the children are “sitting in the marketplace”.  This already is a scathing rebuke of these men, who sat around and didn’t do much, Matt 23:3-7.  They liked “greetings in the markets, and to be called of men, Rabbi, Rabbi”.

In this illustration, some children were piping, on the one hand, and then mourning, on the other.  Like children, they were imitating what they had seen the “grown-ups” doing.  See Mk 5:38-40, where mourners were wailing one minute and laughing Jesus to scorn the next.  It was just a show.

The children performing were complaining that the other kids were not playing along with them.  They didn’t dance to the music or weep to the mourning.

Jesus used this childish behavior to illustrate how the Pharisees and lawyers, the men of this generation, had reacted to John the Baptist and the Son of man.

John the Baptist came preaching the baptism of repentance for the remission of sins.  And these guys refused to be baptized.  Their excuse was that John had a devil.  He neither ate bread nor drank wine, so something was wrong with him in their judgment.  In other words, they reasoned that he should have been more like them.  And because he wasn’t, they weren’t going to follow him.

Jesus, by contrast to John, came eating and drinking.  He came preaching the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God.  These guys refused to believe him and his miracles, and they continued to refuse to be baptized.  Their excuse was that Jesus was a gluttonous man and a winebibber.  These were outrageous lies to justify themselves.  In reality, what irked them is that he was “a friend of publicans and sinners”.  And they were not.

Jesus concludes his rebuke of these men of this generation by saying, “But wisdom is justified of all her children”.

We’ll define a couple of words so that we can be certain what he said.  Justified means “shown to have a just, right, or reasonable basis”.  “Of” here means “on the part of”.  In other words, all of wisdom’s children (the people, publicans, and sinners) justified wisdom by believing John and Jesus, just like the people and the publicans justified God by being baptized in Lk 7:29.

When Paul wrote the Corinthians, he taught them about how the world views God’s wisdom and how God views their wisdom.  It’s a great commentary on Lk 7:35.  See 1 Cor 1:18-25, 2:6-8, 3:19.

To study the prior lesson, see My Messenger John the Baptist.