St Luke 2022

Not only a physician, but one of those doctors who connects with his patients in such a way as to merit the epithet ‘beloved’. …So loyal a member of St Paul’s travelling ministerium that the Apostle remarks touchingly from his condemned cell, ‘only Luke is with me.’ …One of the great historians of the ancient world, the author of a quarter of the New Testament. …And a skilled navigator between cross-cultural sensitivities as a Gentile Christian barred from the restricted sections of the Jerusalem Temple but admitted to the presence of the Mother of God to discover what he wrote down in the first two chapters of his Gospel; an uncircumcised believer on intimate spiritual terms with the pillars of Jewish Christianity. Luke was indeed a major figure in the Church of the New Testament, and as the painter of a verbal picture of Jesus and the reporter of major chapters in the ministries of Peter and Paul, he remains a major player in the life of the Church of today.

But a Divine Service to commemorate St Luke calls for more than you would rightly expect to find in the obituary columns of a quality newspaper; at all events, the focus should shift from his undoubted human achievements to what the Lord gives us through him. A man blessed with an active, searching mind, he had ‘followed closely for some time past’ the unique events fulfilled in and through Jesus of Nazareth; and when he set pen to paper to draw up an ‘orderly narrative’ of these happenings, he drew richly from two living sources, first, the evidence of eyewitnesses and, secondly, the proclamation and teaching of authorised servants of the Word. Luke practised what we now call the discipline of oral history by hearing, digesting, and recording personal testimony; and he reverently scrutinised and employed already written accounts, Mark certainly, Matthew possibly, ‘Q’ improbably. Luke was himself a servant of the Word, both with his mouth and with his pen, but he only became an eyewitness of the deeds he narrates when he joined Paul just as the Gospel mission crossed over from Asia to Europe. Luke knew well before Wilhelm Löhe that ‘mission is the one Church of God on the move,’ which is perhaps why the sending out of the Seventy is the historic Gospel reading for this day.

You may be familiar with Rudolf Bultmann’s contention that Paul had zero interest in the earthly Jesus but focussed all his attention on the risen and glorified Lord. According to this learned twit, the Apostle’s resolve ‘not to know Jesus after the flesh’ allegedly entailed the total irrelevance of everything the Son of God born of a woman said or did in the decades that passed before Easter. This thesis crumbles to dust when you consider Paul’s habit of paraphrasing words of the earthly Jesus and when you note how he is the only witness to Christ’s teaching that ‘It is more blessed to give than to receive,’ and how he insists that the prohibition of women exercising authoritative speaking roles in worship is a ‘command of the Lord,’ that is, something stipulated by the Lord in His days on earth. The truth of the matter is that Luke’s record of the life of Jesus fleshes out to the full the Gospel Paul preached, just as the Acts of the Apostles, especially its later chapters, document the apologia, the defence pleaded by Paul before the court of the emperor. In addition to being beloved physician, loyal ministerial companion, meticulous historian, and delicate handler of cross-cultural sensitivities, was not Luke the first of the Apologists?

Luke doesn’t hide or cover up the tensions within the apostolic Church; he honestly sets forth how hard it was for Jewish believers and how much it went against their grain to embrace their oneness in Christ with Gentile believers in Him, nor does he tone down James of Jerusalem’s ongoing attachment to the old ways. But he triumphantly proclaims how the Church in her essence is communion, a truth perceived by Peter as he welcomes Cornelius, a truth dogmatised in the council at Jerusalem recorded in Ac 15, a truth enacted when Paul completes his third missionary journey by going in to James to enjoy fellowship with him. The Church as communion is a reality for us to grasp, to practise, and to pursue, a reality that exists only abstractly till we partake of Holy Communion together.

At this morning’s Eucharist, Luke joins us in the Sanctus and the Benedictus as our older brother and father in Christ. The Holy Spirit urges us to take regular doses of the spiritual medicine Luke has provided in his Gospel and Acts. How better can we keep the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace than by emulating Luke’s loyalty to Paul as the head of the ministerium and by aiming towards the kind of sharing in earthly goods that marked the life of the infant Church in Jerusalem? Luke’s patient diligence in tracking down historical data translates into throwing your whole self into the task at hand, however small or insignificant it might appear to be. Along with Paul and Luke, we have a calling to transcend cultural barriers by being all things to all men. And above all, by our steadfast clinging to the truth Luke would have us join him in defending both Jesus the Sign that is spoken against and the apostles and other apostolic ministers who continue this saving testimony in the world.