Luke's Legacy

Luke may be the most gifted gospel writer. Sure, people love John and for good reason, but John's gospel account is in a category by itself. There's far less of an attempt by John to recapitulate the same gospel tradition that Mark, Matthew, and Luke all share. Luke, on the other hand, takes what is familiar in Mark and Matthew and still gives us breakthrough passages that can't be found anywhere else: the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Rich Man and Lazarus, the rivalry between Mary and Martha, Zachaeus, Emmaus, Bethlehem and the Birth Narrative! Like Matthew and Mark, Luke is a synoptic account, but it's so, so different. There's an artistic flair and a social sympathy that Luke has that comes through in his text.

On Luke's feast day, we read the encounter of Jesus' teaching at the synagogue in his hometown, Luke 4:14-21. In the place where he was brought up, Luke tells us, Jesus stood up to read and was handed the scroll of Isaiah and read, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor." Then Jesus sat down, but the eyes of everyone in the synagogue were upon him. Luke tells us that Jesus began to proclaim, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing."

We know that passage. It's familiar to us. It's familiar enough to have been included in the other synoptic accounts (Matthew 13:53-58; Mark 6:1-6). But Luke is the only one who tells us what Jesus taught. Matthew and Mark recall for us that Jesus taught in the synagogue and that the people were astounded at his teaching because he was Mary and Joseph's son, just a carpenter's boy. Neither mentions Isaiah or the scroll or the message. Neither recalls the fulfillment of God's promise to Israel being completed in the words, life, or ministry of Jesus. But Luke does. Luke wants us to see it. He gives specific content to Jesus' teaching, and he fills out for us a Jesus whose teaching is the upside-down reversal of power in this world.

On St. Luke's day, we could have read the Good Samaritan or the Prodigal Son. We could have heard some of the birth or infancy narrative. But we start here. It's as if the lectionary authors want us to know this particularity of Luke's account. What does that tell us about how the Holy Spirit used Luke to proclaim the good news?

I wonder about us and how the Holy Spirit uses each of us to proclaim the good news. You may not write or preach or teach, so what you proclaim may not be as easy to quote as a blogger or a preacher, but you tell a story of good news. You are a participant in the saving, death-to-life, dark-to-light, despair-to-hope work that God is doing in the world. How is God using you to proclaim that good news in your own particular way? On your feast day, when the community of faith celebrates your life and witness to God's love in Jesus Christ, what passage will we remember? The fundamental story of good news is the same for all of us, but each of us is used by God to tell it in a peculiar way. What's yours? Is yours a story of lost and found? Of rags to riches? Of confusion to clarity? How have you seen what God is doing in your own life, and how does your life tell the story of God's work?