The Gospel of Luke Luke
Luke
Some ancient traditions, following a hint in Paul (Colossians 4.14), suppose that Luke was a doctor. Other traditions, not so ancient but still important, claim that he was an artist. For all we know, he may have been both, in which case we have two clues as to the kind of book his gospel might be.
For a start, Luke’s gospel shows signs of a scholarly approach, such as we might expect from someone with a degree of academic training. He speaks of having checked his sources, both oral and written, and of his determination to set out “an orderly account” (1.1) of what had happened. When we put alongside Luke the other similar writings we have, it seems overwhelmingly probable that he used Mark’s gospel as a basis for his own, adding plenty of other material, shaping his Markan material and polishing the style as he went along. Mark’s is a gospel for someone in a hurry; Luke’s is a book to be studied by the wider world.
This wider aim and audience has prompted some to ask whether Luke was a Gentile. We don’t know the answer to that, but he was clearly soaked in the scriptures, probably knowing them best in a Greek version. He highlights the way in which the risen Jesus insists that the events of his crucifixion and resurrection were to be understood in the light of the entire scriptural narrative, and how, balancing that, the scriptures themselves were now to be understood in a fresh way in the light of Jesus and by the leading of the spirit. His book is scriptural through and through, but in a quite different way from Matthew’s, allowing Israel’s scriptures to resonate in the background as he tells the opening stories of the conception and birth of John the Baptist and then of Jesus himself.
What does this mean? This is where Luke-as-an-artist comes into his own. He knows how to tell a story so well that we can see it happening in front of us as if painted by a master. He tells, early on, the story of Mary and Joseph losing the twelve-year-old Jesus in the Passover crowd and spending three days frantically hunting for him before finding him calmly sitting in the Temple, discussing things with the teachers. Luke balances this at the end with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, distraught for a third day after the crucifixion of the one they thought was to redeem Israel, only to discover that their unexpected companion on the road was Jesus himself, making their hearts burn as he opens the scriptures. Luke expects his readers to find themselves in this story as well. That is what artists aim at.
In particular, Luke has structured his book so as to move fairly quickly through the material corresponding to Mark’s first eight chapters, in order then to present most of the gospel in terms of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. This journey begins, in quite a formal way, in 9.51, and though the next ten chapters contain much besides, Luke steadily leads the eye up to chapter 19, where he paints a scene worthy of a Rembrandt or Titian. From the start the scriptural echoes tell us what is going on: Jesus “sent messengers ahead of him” (9.52), echoing the promise in Exodus 23.20 and, more darkly, the warning in Malachi 3.1. Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem is to be seen in terms of the long-delayed promise that one day yhwh would return to his people in person, to judge and to save. This becomes explicit in 19.11–48, when Jesus tells a story about the king who comes back at last, and then rides into Jerusalem in floods of tears at the fate the city now faces “because” he says, “you didn’t know the moment when God was visiting you” (verse 44).
Thus, through the human story of Jesus the storyteller and healer, Luke offers us both a work of art for our contemplation and the medicine for the deepest human disease.
The Gospel of Luke
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a. The New Testament for Everyone, Third Edition. Copyright © 2011, 2018, 2019 by
Nicholas Thomas Wright, The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. All rights reserved. Published by Zondervan, 2023.
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