Luke 6:22

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

EXPOSITORY (ENGLISH BIBLE)

Ellicott's Commentary for English Readers

(22) Blessed are ye.—See Notes on Matthew 5:10-12. The clause “when they shall separate you from their company” is peculiar to St. Luke, and refers to the excommunication or exclusion from the synagogue, and therefore from social fellowship, of which we read in John 16:2.

Matthew Henry's Concise Commentary

6:20-26 Here begins a discourse of Christ, most of which is also found in Mt 5; 7. But some think that this was preached at another time and place. All believers that take the precepts of the gospel to themselves, and live by them, may take the promises of the gospel to themselves, and live upon them. Woes are denounced against prosperous sinners as miserable people, though the world envies them. Those are blessed indeed whom Christ blesses, but those must be dreadfully miserable who fall under his woe and curse! What a vast advantage will the saint have over the sinner in the other world! and what a wide difference will there be in their rewards, how much soever the sinner may prosper, and the saint be afflicted here!

Barnes' Notes on the Bible

That hunger now - Matthew has it, "that hunger and thirst after righteousness." Matthew has expressed more fully what Luke has briefly, but there is no contradiction.

Jamieson-Fausset-Brown Bible Commentary

22. separate you—whether from their Church, by excommunication, or from their society; both hard to flesh and blood.

for the Son of man's sake—Compare Mt 5:11, "for My sake"; and immediately before, "for righteousness' sake" (Lu 6:10). Christ thus binds up the cause of righteousness in the world with the reception of Himself.

Matthew Poole's Commentary

See Poole on "Luke 6:21"

Gill's Exposition of the Entire Bible

Blessed are ye when men shall hate you,.... For the sake of Christ, and his Gospel:

and when they shall separate you from their company; either from civil conversation with them, as if they were Gentiles and uncircumcised persons; or from their religious assemblies, and so may have respect to that sort of excommunication in use, among the Jews, called or "separation": by which persons were not only excluded from the congregation, but from all civil society and commerce: such a person might not sit nearer to another than four cubits, and this continued for thirty days; and if not discharged then, he continued thirty more (t):

and shall reproach you: as heretics, apostates, and enemies to the law of Moses, as the Jews did reproach the Christians;

and cast out your name as evil; or "as of evil men": as the Syriac and Arabic versions render it: this may have respect to the greater sorts of excommunication, used among them, called "Shammatha" and "Cherem", by which a person was accursed, and devoted to destruction; so that our Lord's meaning is, that the should be esteemed and treated as the worst of men, and stigmatized in the vilest manner they were capable of:

for the son of man's sake; not for any immorality committed by them, but only for professing and, preaching that the Messiah was come in the flesh, and that Jesus of Nazareth was he; and that he who was the son of man, according to his human nature, was, the Son of God according to his divine nature.

(t) Vid. Maimon. Talmud Tora, c. 7. sect. 4, 5, 6.

Geneva Study Bible

Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall {d} separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake.

(d) Cast you out of their synagogues, as John expounds in Joh 16:2, which is the severest punishment the Church has, if the elders judge rightfully, and by the word of God.

EXEGETICAL (ORIGINAL LANGUAGES)

Meyer's NT Commentary

Luke 6:22. Comp. Matthew 5:11 f.

ἀφορίσωσιν] from the congregation of the synagogue and the intercourse of common life. This is the excommunication נִדּוּי (Buxtorf, Lex. Talm. s.v.). Comp. John 9:22. But that at that time there were already beside this simple excommunication one (חֵרֶם) or two (חרם and שַׁלַּתָא) still higher degrees (see, in general, Grotius on this passage; Winer, Realw.) is improbable (Gildemeister, Blendwerke d. vulgär. Ration. p. 10 ff.), and, moreover, is not to be inferred from what follows, wherein is depicted the hostility which is associated with the excommunication.

καὶ ἐκβάλωσι τ. ὄν. ὑμ. ὡς πονηρ.] ἐκβάλλειν is just the German wegwerfen, in the sense of contemptuous rejection, Plato, Pol. ii. p. 377 C, Crit. p. 46 B; Soph. O. C. 637, 642; Ael. H. A. xi. 10; Kypke, I. p. 236; but τὸ ὄνομα is not auctoritas (Kypke), nor a designation of the character or the faith (de Wette), nor the name of Christian (Ewald), which idea (comp. Matthew 10:42; Mark 9:41) occurs in this place for the first time by means of the following ἕνεκα τοῦ υἱοῦ τ. ἀνθρ.; but the actual personal name, which designates the individual in question. Hence: when they shall have rejected your name (e.g. John, Peter, etc.) as evil, i.e. as being of evil meaning, because it represents an evil man in your person,—on account of the Son of man,—ye know yourselves as His disciples. The singular ὄνομα is distributive. Comp. Ael. H. A. 5. 4; Polyb. xviii. 28. 4; Krüger, § 44. 1. 7; Winer, p. 157 [E. T. 218], Others interpret wrongly: When they shall have exiled you (Kuinoel), to express which would have required ὑμᾶς ὡς πονηρούς; or: when they shall have struck out your names from the register of names (Beza and others quoted by Wolf, Michaelis also), which even in form would amount to an unusual tautology with ἀφορίσ.; or: when they shall have spread your name abroad as evil (defamed you) (Grotius, Bengel, Rosenmüller, Schegg), which is ungrammatical, and not to be established by Deuteronomy 22:19; or: when they declare it as evil (Bleek), which, nevertheless, would be very different from the classical ἔπη ἐκβάλλειν, to cast up words, verba proferre (Hom. Il. vi. 324; Pind. Pyth. ii. 148); and, withal, how feeble and inexpressive!

Expositor's Greek Testament

Luke 6:22-23. In the corresponding passage in Mt. there is first an objective didactic statement about the persecuted. then an expansion in the second person. Here all is in the second person, and the terms employed are such as suited the experience of the early Christians, especially those belonging to the Jewish Church, suffering, at the hands of their unbelieving countrymen, wrong in the various forms indicated—hatred, separation, calumny, ejection.—ἀφορίσωσιν may point either to separation in daily life (Keil, Hahn) or to excommunication from the synagogue (so most commentaries) = the Talmudic נִדָּה. In the former case one naturally finds the culminating evil of excommunication in the last clause—ἐκβάλωσιν τὸ ὄ. ὑ. = erasing the name from the membership of the synagogue. In the latter case this clause will rather point to the vile calumnies afterwards heaped upon the excommunicated. “Absentium nomen, ut improborum hominum, differre rumoribus,” Grotius.

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges

22. hate you...separate you...reproach...cast out your name as evil] We have here four steps of persecution increasing in virulence:

(1) General hatred, (2) Exclusion from the synagogue, a lesser excommunication, viz. the Neziphah or exclusion for 30 days, or Niddoui for 90 days (Gfrorer, Jahrh. d. Heils, 1. 183; John 9:34. Hence aphorismos means ‘excommunication’), (3) Violent slander, (4) The Cherem, Shammata, or greater excommunication,—permanent expulsion from the Synagogue and Temple (John 16:2). The Jews pretended that our Lord was thus excommunicated to the blast of 400 ram’s horns by Joshua Ben Perachiah (Wagenseil, Sota, p. 1057), and was only crucified forty days after because no witness came forward in His favour.

as evil] ‘Malefic’ or ‘execrable superstition’ was the favourite description of Christianity among Pagans (Tac. Ann. xv. 44; Suet. Nero, 16), and Christians were charged with incendiarism, cannibalism, and every infamy. (The student will find such heathen views of Christianity collected in my Life of St Paul, Exc. 15: Vol. 1.)

for the Son of man’s sake] The hatred of men is not in itself a beatitude, because there is a general conscience which condemns certain forms of wickedness, and a man may justly incur universal execration. But the world also hates those who run counter to its pleasures and prejudices, and in that case hatred may be the tribute which vice pays to holiness; 1 Peter 2:19; 1 Peter 3:14. “The world hath hated them, because they are not of the world, even as I am not of the world;” John 17:14. Still a man may well tremble when he is enjoying throughout life a beatitude of benediction. And ‘the world’ by no means excludes the so-called ‘religious world,’ which has hated with a still fiercer hatred, and exposed to a yet deadlier martyrdom, some of its greatest prophets and teachers. Not a few of the great and holy men enumerated in the next note fell a victim to the fury of priests. Our Lord was handed over to crucifixion by the unanimous hatred of the highest religious authorities of His day.

On the title Son of Man, which occurs in all the four Gospels, see p. 119. In using it Christ “chooses for Himself that title which definitely presents His work in relation to humanity in itself, and not primarily in relation to God or to the chosen people, or even to humanity as fallen.” Canon Westcott (on John 1:51) considers that it was not distinctively a Messianic title, and doubts its having been derived from Daniel 7:13. “The Son of God was made a Son of Man that you who were sons of men might be made sons of God.” Aug. Serm. 121. As the “Second Adam” Christ is the representative of the race (1 Corinthians 15:45) in its highest ideal; as “the Lord from Heaven” He is the Promise of its future exaltation.

Bengel's Gnomen

Luke 6:22. Ἐκβάλωσι, cast out) defaming you in the way of contumelies in public and private. This is more than ὀνειδίζειν. The same phrase occurs, Deuteronomy 22:19.—[τὸ ὄνομα ὑμῶν, your name) viz. the designation whereby they were called, the DISCIPLES OF JESUS CHRIST.—V. g.]—ἕνεκα, for the sake) viz. for this reason, because ye believe in the Christ, whom ye see.

Pulpit Commentary

Verse 22. - Blessed are ye, when men shall hate you, and when they shall separate you from their company, and shall reproach you, and cast out your name as evil, for the Son of man's sake. An onlook into the yet distant future. These words would be repeated by many a brave confessor in the days when persecution, at the hands of a far stronger and more far-reaching government than that of Jerusalem, should be the general lot of his followers. We find from pagan writers of the next age that Christians were charged with plotting every vile and detestable crime that could be conceived against man-. kind (see, for instance, the historian Tacitus, 'Annal.,' 15:44; Suetonius, 'Nero.,' 16). Luke 6:22

Vincent's Word Studies

Compare Matthew 5:11.

Son of Man

The phrase is employed in the Old Testament as a circumlocution for man, with special reference to his frailty as contrasted with God (Numbers 23:19; Psalm 8:4; Job 25:6; Job 35:8; and eighty-nine times in Ezekiel). It had also a Messianic meaning (Daniel 7:13 sq.), to which our Lord referred in Matthew 24:30; Matthew 26:64. It was the title which Christ most frequently applied to himself; and there are but two instances in which it is applied to him by another, viz., by Stephen (Acts 7:56) and by John (Revelation 1:13; Revelation 14:14 :); and when acquiescing in the title "Son of God," addressed to himself, he sometimes immediately after substitutes "Son of Man" (John 1:50, John 1:51; Matthew 26:63, Matthew 26:64).

The title asserts Christ's humanity - his absolute identification with our race: "his having a genuine humanity which could deem nothing human strange, and could be touched with a feeling of the infirmities of the race which he was to judge" (Liddon, "Our Lord's Divinity"). It also exalts him as the representative ideal man. "All human history tends to him and radiates from him; he is the point in which humanity finds its unity; as St. Irenaeus says, ' He recapitulates it.' He closes the earlier history of our race; he inaugurates its future. Nothing local, transient, individualizing, national, sectarian dwarfs the proportions of his world-embracing character. He rises above the parentage, the blood, the narrow horizon which bounded, as it seemed, his human life. He is the archetypal man, in whose presence distinction of race, intervals of ages, types of civilization, degrees of mental culture are as nothing" (Liddon).

But the title means more. As Son of Man he asserts the authority of judgment over all flesh. By virtue of what he is as Son of Man, he must be more. "The absolute relation to the world which he attributes to himself demands an absolute relation to God....He is the Son of Man, the Lord of the world, the Judge, only because he is the Son of God" (Luthardt). Christ's humanity can be explained only by his divinity. A humanity so unique demands a solution. Divested of all that is popularly called miraculous, viewed simply as a man, under the historical conditions of his life, he is a greater miracle than all his miracles combined. The solution is expressed in Hebrews 1:1-14.