Introduction to Luke S Gospel (2Nd Draft)

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Introduction to Luke’s Gospel (2nd draft)

Luke’s Gospel – a different structure to Matthew’s, based not on genre but geography.

Although Luke’s gospel is considerably shorter than Matthew’s, you made find that it feels longer to read. This is because it does not have as clear a structure as Matthew. When looking at Matthew we noticed that the divisions in the material were marked by genre, or particular kinds of writing – specifically we noticed how the author moved from narrative or story telling to discourse, long passages of sayings, and back. In Luke’s gospel Jesus’ teaching is intertwined with his activity. With Luke it is geography that gives a sense of order and structure to the narrative. So we will discover that the gospel begins with a prologue containing similar material to Matthew but different content. Geographically the action begins in Jerusalem, at the Temple, not in Joseph’s home, which Matthew presumed was in Bethlehem. All the major stories associated with Jesus’s infancy will take place in the temple in Jerusalem, apart from his birth in Bethlehem. Then the action moves to the river Jordan and the Judaean desert, where Jesus is baptised and tempted by the devil. The public ministry of Jesus begins in Galilee, but then a significant part of the gospel is set around the journey of Jesus from Galilee to Jerusalem, and it is in Jerusalem that Jesus suffers and dies. Whereas in Matthew the resurrection appearances are centred on Galilee, in Luke they all take place in Jerusalem.

Similarities and differences in the prologue (LK 1:4:13) – The genealogies in Matthew and Luke compared.

As in Matthew so Luke too has a genealogy, but Luke’s genealogy appears in ch 3, not at the very beginning, beween Jesus’ baptism and his temptations.. His genealogy works not forwards, from Abraham to Jesus, but backwards from Jesus to Adam. What is most interesting perhaps are the names. The kings of Judah, so prominent in Matthew, are missing and Abraham appears as just one of a line, rather than at the beginning. Taken together this would suggest that Luke is less interested in Jesus’ relation to Judaism than to his relationship with humanity as a whole. And the reason the genealogy appears here, not at the beginning, is so that Luke can emphasise Jesus’ baptism is the beginning of a story that will contrast Jesus, the son of God, with Adam, the flawed son of God who was seduced by Satan’s temptation, unlike Jesus. Jesus then is truly a new beginning to the story of humanity.

The geographical structure of Luke’s gospel contd.

After the temptation story at the beginning of ch. 4, the geographical markers continue to determine the structure of the story. The next part of the story begins in Galilee, specifically in Nazareth where Jesus had been brought up (in Luke’s story it was Roman administration and their requirement of a census that accounted for Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem). In Galilee he preaches in the synagogue at Capernaum before departing for a more wide ranging ministry where herecruits disciples, heals people who approach him or are brought to him, forgives a paralysed man, and even heals on the Sabbath, thus enraging the local Pharisees, though not to the extent that people want to kill Jesus, as happens early in the gospel of Mark. Why this should be I will explain later.

At 9:51 there is a change of gear. When the days of his being taken up were fulfilled, Jesus set his face to journey in the direction of Jerusalem. What that means is that we are entering into a new stage of Jesus ministry, which takes the form of a journey Jesus makes with his disciples. In the Greek ‘the setting of the face’ marks a firm resolution, not to be derailed by any obstacles. The journey is to end in Jerusalem, the home of the Temple and the most important symbol of the presence of God among His people, the place of pilgrimage ‘par excellence’, but for Jesus it is to be the place of his death and resurrection, the threshold for his departure from earth to heaven. A few verses before (19: 31) in the Transfiguration scene, Luke in his version had Moses and Elijah speak about Jesus’ Exodos, his going out, with its evocation of the story of the Exodus of the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt in order that they might journey to the promised land.

The ‘Journey narrative’ or ‘Travel narrative’, as it is known, goes from 9:51 to 19:27. Luke was not the first to speak of a journey by Jesus to Jerusalem. Mark had already done so in ch. 10:1-52 but he did not give it as near the prominence as Luke did. Luke uses the setting of the journey not to repeat Mark’s material (in fact he only uses a few verses of Mark, but to bring together much of his own material that was not to be found in either Matthew or Mark and present it as sayings, teachings and examples of good practice that Jesus used to prepare his disciples for the time after his Exodus when they would have to go out from Jerusalem and be his witnesses.

At 19:28 Jesus reaches the villages of Bethany and Bethphage on the Mount of Olives, which are just outside of Jerusalem, on the final stage of his earthly journey. Entering the city, His first act is to cleanse the Temple, and in response to this prophetic gesture a new group come on the scene, the chief priests, scribes and leaders of the people, who unlike the Pharisees are not content to debate with Jesus, but wish to kill him. Jesus’ speeches become more and more provocative until eventually the leaders conspire with Judas to find an opportunity to hand Jesus over to them so that he can be put to death. His arrest, trial and execution quickly follow. After his death the women come to the tomb and find it empty, as in the other gospels, but in the stories that follow, the resurrection narratives, what distinguishes Luke from Matthew, is that all the stories take place in Jerusalem or in the vicinity of Jerusalem. There is no mention of going to Galilee. Peter also is mentioned as running to the tomb, a tradition that will be developed in John.

So there we have the bare outline of the gospel. The first question we might ask could be, ‘Why the emphasis on geography, and the journey to Jerusalem’? To begin to understand this we have to be aware is that the final words of the risen Jesus in this gospel leave us with a feeling of expectation. The resurrection of Jesus is only the end of the beginning, there is more to come. And Luke gives us more, in the form of the Acts of the Apostles. The gospel might be called the first volume of a two volume work. Acts is the story of how the gospel of Jesus, which at one point seemed confined to the tomb for ever, broke forth and made its way from Jerusalem, out through Samaria to the very ends of the earth, or at least the edge of the Roman empire, carried by the preaching of Peter and his fellow Apostles, and Paul. When Actsends Paul is in prison in Rome, but he is still preaching. Through the Holy Spirit who came upon Jesus at his baptism the word of God continues to go forth and spread throughout the world. This is a story, in other words, which will keep on running.

So Why did Luke write this gospel?

In the opening 4 verses of the gospel Luke gives us his explanation.. Luke makes it clear in v2 that he was neither an eyewitness of Jesus during his earthly life nor was he one of the original witnesses of the resurrection. He received what had been handed down to him. Nor was he the first to compose a narrative – many others, he said, had done that already. We must presume that at least Mark was among that number. But note too that he does not speak only about the life of Jesus, but rather about the events that have been fulfilled among us. In other words, he is writing a life of Jesus but in the light of the experience of the Christian community he is writing for, and his own experience too, as the writer of Acts. Implied in that statementis the idea that all of the Old Testament pointed towards the fulfilment of God’s plan for the salvation of the world through Jesus, and that fulfilment has now been experienced by Luke and his community. Just as the temple in Jerusalem turned out to be the final goal of the great journey of the people of God to the promised land, so now Jerusalem becomes the starting place for the great journey of the gospel to the ends of the earth.

So what Luke is doing, essentially, is to continue the Biblical story, and show how the emergence of the Church was an essential aspect of that story - the Church which had emerged from a faithful Israel. By shaping the story the way he did (cf the reference to an orderly sequence in v 3), readers like Theophilus (the name = lover of God) could be sure that the story lay on good foundations.

Why might he have had to stress that need for certainty of teaching? The clue is to be found in the gospel and in the story that lies behind the book of Acts. When the story of Acts begins Christianity in Jerusalem is indistinguishable from Judaism. The earliest followers of Christ are faithful to Jewish prayers and traditions, and they visited the temple as they always did. What changed the situation radically, and caused great trauma for the young church, was the success of the mission beyond Judaism to the gentiles, in particular as a result of the preaching of Paul. For centuries the Jews, living among the pagans of the Greco-Roman world, had kept their identity through symbols such as circumcision and the food laws, indeed by a comprehensive keeping of the commands of the Law. These symbols and rituals served to keep them apart from their pagan neighbours, and pure for the service of God.

When the gentiles came to hear the gospel and were baptised, it was assumed that these new converts would adopt all the traditions and customs of Judaism, but that was not the case, and Paul in particular was concerned that that should not be so. To see Paul in action in the full heat of conflict one needs to read Paul’s letter to the Galatians, and for Paul’s more nuanced position, the letter to the Romans. Now this would not have been a problem everywhere in the beginning. Paul’s communities were largely composed of Gentile converts, and the communities in Jerusalem were by and large those who came from a Jewish heritage. As long as they stayed apart there would have been no problem. But what happened if some Gentiles wished to join a formerly Jewish community?. Jews did not normally eat with gentiles for fear they would break their kosher laws. So how could they share the eucharist together. And it wasn’t long before gentile communities began to appear near Jewish ones – One can imagine both sides saying, ‘Are the others the same as us?

Something very important was at stake here. The Law had been given by God, so could it be abrogated? If those who had been brought up as Jews continued to observe the food laws absolutely there was no way they could celebrate the eucharist, the foundation of their unity, together with gentiles. By the time Luke came to write Acts somehow the problem had become resolved, at least in principle (see Acts 15 and the Council of Jerusalem), but for many of those who had been brought up in Judaism it would have felt as if they had abandoned God or God had abandoned them, and likewise many Gentiles would have felt uncomfortable too. All needed some form of assurance, and it was the life of Jesus that was to be the foundation for that assurance. That is why the Infancy story in Luke’s gospel begins with characters like Mary, Elizabeth, Zechariah and John the Baptist. In terms of their conception John’s is deliberately portrayed as like Jesus in many ways, but Jesus’s is portrayed as even greater. So Elizabeth, John’s mother is barren, but she becomes pregnant, though advanced in years, through her husband Zechariah. Mary is more than young enough to have a child, but she is a virgin, and she bears Jesus without the co-operation of Joseph. Notice how Joseph barely features in Luke’s narrative whereas he had a very important role in Matthew’s. Mary stands for the believing people of Israel par excellence, those who trusted in God to keep his promises and were prompt to do his will. So does Elizabeth. Zechariah is somewhere in the middle. Initially he cannot believe in the words of the angel Gabriel, but eventually he does. He is a symbol of those who repent, who change their mind and outlook in the face of the word of God.

Now way back in the tradition there was a story telling how Jesus was rejected by the people of his home town of Nazareth. Mark (6:1ff) recounts how they took offence at him because he was one of their own, and recalls the saying of Jesus about prophets being without honour in their own country.

Luke takes this story and expands it.by specifying the content of Jesus’ teaching and the negative reaction to it. He begins with a reading from the Prophet Isaiah, and then declares that the Scripture had been fulfilled that day in their hearing. What has being implied here is that Jesus himself is the fulfilment of Scripture. What God had promised in the past had now been delivered in Jesus. Here Jesus is being subtly associated with the greatest prophets of Israel, Elijah and Elisha, who fought to retain the purity and zeal of Israel’s faith against the kings who wanted to compromise it with the ways of their pagan Canaanite neighbours. The quote also functions as a kind of manifesto for Jesus’ mission. First he declares that he has been sent by God, impelled by the Spirit of God. Then he declared that his mission is directed towards the poor, those in prison, the blind and the oppressed, and in the story that follows it is to these kinds of groups of emarginated people that Jesus offers his friendship and his powers of healing.

When the people first hear the message, they are full of applause and approval. But then Jesus reminds them of some home truths. He reminds them how their heroes Elijah and Elisha did not target all their miraculous resources on their own people, but helped outsiders, and pagan outsiders at that – the enemy. This immediately changes the atmosphere from joyful approval to furious opposition and some of the people try to throw Jesus off a cliff. Thus the expanded story becomes a story for those who remembered or took part in that traumatic period when the Jewish and gentile traditions were trying to come to terms with one another. Luke implies that people should not be surprised that such things happen in the church, because they happened in Jesus’ own home town, and they will happen wherever people are confronted with the full word of God.

The Portrait of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel.

In a previous session I suggested to you that we can see four different portraits of Jesus in each of the gospels. These portraits are not in conflict with one another, but rather complement one another. Now that Jesus is risen from the dead in his glorified body, he is not subject to the same constraints that he was subject to on earth so he can be many different things to the Christian community while remaining essentially himself. I suggested that the particular portrait we see of Jesus in Luke is of Jesus as one who walks beside his friends, preparing them to go out on the mission to which they will be sent. As Jesus was sent by the spirit of the Lord to give good news to the poor, so will his disciples, past and present, be sent.

The clearest example of this portrait is to be found in the Resurrection narrative, specifically in Luke 24. It is a story most of us know well. Two disciples are walking in the direction of Emmaus after the crucifixion of Jesus. They have heard the story of the tomb being found empty, but it has made no impact on them. A stranger joins them – he has no distinguishing marks to help them recognise his identity – and he walks with them as they discuss their sorrow and disillusionment at the crucifixion of Jesus, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word. – We had hoped he would be the one to redeem Israel. The stranger then opens up the Scriptures for them to show them how all the things that happened to Jesus were a necessary part of God’s plan.

Specifically in the gospel itself at 22:37, just after the last Supper, Jesus quotes from the prophet Isaiah 53:11 Through his suffering my servant shall justify many and their guilt he shall bear. Therefore I will give him his portion among the great, and he shall divide the spoils with the might, Because he surrendered himself to death and was counted with the wicked; and he shall take away the sins of many and win pardon for their offenses. What Jesus was teaching the disciples to do was to read the whole of the Old Testament as a prophecy that would be fulfilled in the light of the coming of the Messiah. We already saw, how in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus identified himself with the one of whom Isaiah said, The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me. The prophets, like the great kings of Judah, were the anointed of the Lord. (Messiah is Hebrew for ‘anointed’). Jesus not only carried out a ministry like the prophets, but was greater even than the prophets, and at the Transfiguration it was the two greatest prophets of Israel, Moses and Elijah, who had pointed towards Jesus’ death, his Exodus. In the Book of Acts (ch7) there is a speech by Stephen that will develop this further when he goes through the Old Testament story and shows how throughout the history of Israel there is a consistent pattern of rejecting those whom God had sent, culminating in the rejection of Jesus.