St. Luke and the Righteous Judge

+ In the Name of God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

This morning we celebrate the feast of St. Luke the evangelist. As is so often the case with the early saints, we don’t actually know much of anything about Luke. In the Letter to Philemon, written probably around the year 60, St. Paul names a fellow-worker called Luke, and mentions that he is a Gentile, a non-Jew. That’s pretty much it for the information everyone would agree on: Luke is a Gentile fellow-worker with Paul.

Later on, this one reference to Luke grew quite a bit, and grew in two different directions, if I can put it that way. One direction involved the part of the New Testament dedicated to letters. Some followers of Saint Paul who wrote letters in his name twice included references to Luke to make their writings sound more realistic—one of those is the reference we just heard, from the Second Letter to Timothy, and another reference, in the Letter to the Colossians, refers to Luke as a physician. We don’t know whether there was a tradition about Luke being a physician which had come down separately to the author of Colossians, or whether he just thought it sounded good, but in any case, St. Luke is traditionally the patron saint of doctors, and hospitals are often dedicated to him, as well.

The other direction in which the one original reference to Luke grew has to do with the other major part of the New Testament, the non-letters part. The third gospel, the one with most of our favorite Christmas stories, was written by the same person who wrote the book of Acts. And the person who wrote the book of Acts talks sometimes about travelling with Saint Paul. So early Christians decided that both Acts and the Third Gospel were written by Luke, since they knew he was one of Luke’s fellow workers. Again, maybe they knew something from another source, or maybe they were just guessing: but today when we say “Saint Luke,” we mean the author of the Third Gospel and of the Book of Acts.

Luke was a pretty good writer, actually. Most of the New Testament is written by people who weren’t very good at Greek, but Luke knew what he was doing. Not only was his grammar better than that of the rest of the New Testament writers, but he also had a better idea of what sort of things belonged in a history book. For Greek historians, it wasn’t enough to say that a famous general gave his army an inspiring pep-talk before a battle, or that a prominent politician made an important speech to his legislature. It was the historian’s job to provide the sort of pep-talk that the general would have given, or the sort of speech the politician would have made. As a historian myself, I can tell you that we don’t do things that way today, but it was the literary standard in Luke’s day. And the result of Luke’s following that standard is that we got four of the most beloved parts of the New Testament—the Song of Mary, “My Soul Magnifies the Lord,” the Song of Zechariah, “Blessed be the God of Israel,” the Song of Simeon, “Now, Lord, Let Your Servant Depart in Peace,” and even the song of the angels at Christmas, “Glory to God in the Highest.” These are songs that Christians have used in worship day in and day out for twenty centuries, and if St. Luke had never done anything but write them he would still have had more influence on us than almost anyone else you can name.

But Luke wasn’t writing songs just for the sake of giving us something to sing. The songs are there to make the story Luke has to tell more appealing to his readers, and that story has a purpose. Luke is writing like a Greek historian, because he thinks that’s a good way to get Greek readers to pick up his book: but he’s not really doing the work of a historian. What he is doing, as this morning’s lesson puts it, is the work of an evangelist. The difference is that he’s not just telling a story, he’s telling good news—good news about Jesus of Nazareth, good news that’s so important that Luke will use all the writing tools he knows in order to pass it on. That good news begins in Jerusalem, with a Jewish priest offering the sacrifices at the Temple of the God of Israel—and for Luke’s Greek readers, that’s about like saying the story starts in the capital of Outer Mongolia. Jerusalem was nowhere, the kind of place most Greeks had never even heard of, and its Temple, if they had heard of it at all, was the home of some bizarre new age cult. At the center of Luke’s story, where the Gospel ends and the Book of Acts starts, we are back in Jerusalem—but now it’s not the Temple we are seeing, not an empty building where people offer sacrifices to a God they can’t see. We’re back in Jerusalem, and now it’s not the empty temple, but the empty tomb that we are reminded of. And it’s not some priest and his sacrifice we hearing about: now Jesus himself is both the priest and the sacrifice. And God is no longer someone that people can’t see: God is a teacher who sits down to dinner with his friends and is made known to them in the breaking of bread.

That’s the middle of Luke’s story: our second view of Jerusalem. And then at the end of Luke’s story, at the end of Acts, we might expect to be back in Jerusalem a third time: things often come in threes, and the pattern would be all neat and tidy if we ended up back in the city of God. But Luke breaks the pattern, he ends the story someplace else. He ends it in Rome—we started from this city no one has ever heard of, and we end up in the capital of the world, the home of the Emperor himself. And Luke’s good news is that it’s really the Emperor who’s a nobody—the Emperor is unimportant, and that baby that the angels sang for all the way back at the beginning of the story, that teacher who rose from the dead, that God of a silly new age cult, that person is the real king, the one whose empire reaches from Jerusalem to Rome and beyond. Luke’s work, not the work of a historian but the work of an evangelist, is to spread the Good News that Jesus of Nazareth is the real Emperor, the King of the Universe, “the righteous judge, who will give the crown of righteousness to all who have longed for his appearing.” We sing Luke’s songs, but we sing them because we have also heard his good news: and like him, like all creation, we long for the appearing of that righteous judge.

--John Wm. Houghton