St. Luke

 

Sunday 18^th October – St. Luke

 

Isaiah 35: 3-6. If it is true that “without a vision the people perish” (proverbs 29:18) it is essential that God’s messengers make God’s certain salvation the centre of their message. Isaiah writes about a wonderful inspiring vision of salvation, the kind of inspiring vision that Luke emulates centuries later in his gospel.

2 Timothy 4: 5-7. A forlorn Paul sounds beleaguered. The one bright spot – humanly speaking – is that Luke has remained faithful and is with him, giving him support. Loyalty is a devotion or faithfulness to a person or concept or entity.  Luke here is showing loyalty to Paul but both Paul and Luke are together loyal to the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.

Luke 10: 1-9. Luke writes of Jesus sending out evangelists to preach that “The Kingdom of God has come near”. In Christian theology the content of the kingdom is co-terminus with Jesus Christ himself. Jesus instructs the missionaries to travel light, accept hospitality when it is offered and demonstrate the difference that the healing power of God can have when his reality is introduced to any situation. Some scholars believe that Luke himself was one of the seventy sent out.

 

St. Luke has a very distinctive contribution to Christianity. He was a friend and pupil of St. Paul and in the material he selected for his gospel he showed that the truths that Paul proclaimed were not novel ideas but rooted in the life and teaching of Jesus himself.

His gospel is good news – not biography. It should be read as a message of what God has done for us in Jesus. So what are the distinguishing characteristics of his gospel that shine through his text.

Perhaps the most marked characteristic of Luke is his emphasis on the universality of the Christian faith. From Simeon’s song about Christ being a light to the gentiles to the end where repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached to all nations, the central theme is that Jesus is the saviour of the whole world.

Rather than trace Jesus’ ancestry back to Abraham, the ancestor of the Jewish people as Matthew does in his gospel Luke traces his ancestry back to Adam in chapter 3 stressing that he is of significance to anyone ever born. For the same reason Luke gives such a prominent place to the Samaritans in the gospel

Jesus is good news for the whole world.

In that light we see the special emphasis Luke gives to the outcasts of society. in the parable of the female sinner who anoints his feet with ointment, the lost sheep, the lost coin, the pharisee and the publican, the thief on the cross all work together to emphasise that we are not saved by works but by the grace of God.

His gospel gives more emphasis than the other gospels about Jesus’ special compassion for the poor and the danger of riches. It is Luke who puts these words into Mary’s mouth “he has filled the hungry with good things and the rich he has sent empty away”.

So Luke relates Jesus’ teaching to the problem of materialism because  it pushed God from the centre of life.

Another special characteristic of Luke’s gospel is the prominence he gives to women. While the birth narratives in Matthew centre on Joseph, in Luke Mary is at the centre and women feature prominently in the stories, including those about Mary and Martha. We can trace back to Jesus here Paul’s doctrine that in Christ there is neither male nor female.

Finally Luke gives more stress to the Holy Spirit and prayer both in the life of Jesus and in the continuing witness of the church. The Spirit is present with the people who are prophesying both John the Baptist and Jesus and Jesus’ career is started “in the power of the spirit” and he interprets his mission in Isaiah’s words “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me” and of course Pentecost is the important emphasis of the book of Acts but they are prepared for that event in his gospel with the words “stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high”.

Luke connects prayer with Jesus baptism, his calling of the twelve, the great confession, the transfiguration. This links Jesus to Paul’s injunction to “pray at all times” (Ephesians 6)

 Luke never claims to be an actual eyewitness to the risen Christ but his writings became instrumental in binding the young movement of people together who witnessed to the effect that his Spirit had on them.

In modern parlance we might call Luke an influencer and a theological educator.

He helped change hearts and minds, and even if he was one of the seventy sent out in the gospel story, or helped Paul on his missionary journeys, like Paul, he changed many millions more hearts and minds through the written word – many more than anyone could have done in person.

So by emphasising the universality of the gospel, the compassion for the poor and lost, the special emphasis he gave to women and the centrality of the Holy Spirit and prayer, Luke has helped mould the character of Christianity and provides the letters and theology of Paul with the grounding these principles had in the life of Jesus.

Luke’s gospel is good news and is a message of what God has done for us all in Christ. It is a testimony of faith to be interpreted by faith. The good news will only have the power of good news when it becomes good news for us.