The chapter
Simply People bring Jesus a piece of news about a massacre, and he refuses to read it the way they expect. He tells a story about a fig tree given one more year. He straightens a woman who has been bent double for eighteen years, on a Sabbath, and the man in charge of the synagogue objects. He compares the Kingdom to a mustard seed and to yeast, warns that the door is narrow, is told Herod wants him dead, and ends by speaking to the city he is walking towards as if it were a person.
Context One number holds the first half of the chapter together, and it can be counted: EIGHTEEN appears three times, at verse 4 for the people the tower killed, and at verses 11 and 16 for the years the woman was bent. The chapter opens with eighteen deaths that Jesus refuses to explain as punishment, and then unbends someone who had eighteen years of what the man in charge treats as normal. The tower at verse 4 is also the only tower of Siloam in this app: the name is at John 9:7 and 9:11, where it is a pool, and nowhere else in Matthew, Mark or Acts.
Verses 1-9
Simply Some people tell him about Galileans killed by Pilate while they were sacrificing. He asks whether they think those men were worse sinners than other Galileans, and says no, but that everyone must change or die the same way. He does the same with a different disaster, the eighteen crushed by a falling tower. Then he tells a story: a fig tree has produced nothing for three years and the owner wants it cut down, and the gardener asks for one more year to dig round it and feed it.
Context Two of the flattest answers in the Gospels are here, and both are refusals. The people who bring the news are looking for a reading of it, and the answer at verse 2 is that the dead were not worse than anyone else. He does not say why it happened; he says twice, at verses 3 and 5, that the question is the wrong way round. Neither event appears anywhere else in this app, so nothing outside this chapter can be checked against them, which is why this file describes what is said rather than what occurred. The fig tree that follows is the only place in this Gospel where a delay is asked for and granted, and it is granted for one year and no more.
Verses 10-21
Simply In a synagogue on a Sabbath there is a woman who has been bent over for eighteen years and cannot straighten up. Jesus calls her over, tells her she is free of it, puts his hands on her, and she stands up straight. The ruler of the synagogue tells the crowd that there are six working days for that sort of thing. Jesus answers that every one of them unties an ox on the Sabbath to take it to water, and asks whether this woman, a daughter of Abraham, should not be untied too. Then two small pictures: a mustard seed that becomes a tree, and yeast worked into flour.
Context The argument at verses 15 and 16 works by one word used twice. The animal is UNTIED and led to water, and the woman has been BOUND, and both are the same act. It is an argument from what the objectors already do without thinking, not from an exception to the Sabbath. Verse 16 also gives her a title, DAUGHTER OF ABRAHAM, which places her inside the covenant the ruler is defending, so the sentence does not ask for mercy, it asks for consistency. Nobody in the scene asks for anything: verse 12 has Jesus see her and call her, which is the same shape as the widow at 7:13.
Verses 22-35
Simply Someone asks whether only a few will be saved. Jesus does not give a number: he says to work at getting through the narrow door, because a time comes when the owner shuts it and the people outside knocking will be told he does not know them, even though they ate with him. People will come from every direction and sit down inside. Then Pharisees warn him that Herod wants to kill him, and he calls Herod a fox and says he is going on anyway, because a prophet cannot die outside Jerusalem. He ends speaking to Jerusalem itself, saying he wanted to gather it like a hen gathering her chicks.
Context The same words are spoken over Jerusalem at Matthew 23:37 to 39, which can be opened here, and the two books put them in different places. There it is the end of a public argument in the temple, in the city, days before the arrest. Here it is said on the road at verse 22, by someone still walking towards the city he is addressing, which is why the last line at verse 35 is a prediction rather than a farewell. The warning at verse 31 is also worth noticing for who gives it: Pharisees, who in this chapter are the ones trying to keep him alive. The book has just had him call six woes down on them at 11:42 to 52, and it does not smooth either passage to fit the other.