LIVING WITH LUKE (1) Luke 1:1-4 - Introduction
a figure of sacrifice, service and
strength.
The ox signifies that
Christians should be prepared to sacrifice themselves in following Christ.
LIVING WITH LUKE
(1)
Luke 1:1-4 -
Introduction
1 Many people have already applied
themselves to the task of compiling an account of the events that have been
fulfilled among us. 2 They used what the original
eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed down to us. 3 Now, after having investigated
everything carefully from the beginning, I have also decided to write a
carefully ordered account for you, most honorable Theophilus. 4 I want you to have confidence in the
soundness of the instruction you have received.
This
is Year C in the lectionary and the gospel for this year is Luke. I will produce a weekly series throughout
Year C on this gospel. My conversation
partner for this series is Luke Timothy Johnson’s excellent recent book on
Luke-Acts, Prophetic Jesus, Prophetic
Church.
We
don’t really know where or when the gospel was written and for our purposes
it’s not necessary to make a decision about either.
“Luke”
(whoever he was) is the author of the third gospel as well as the book of Acts
in the Christian Bible. He was a
Gentile, writing to a Gentile Christian (“Theophilus,” v.3) doubtless with an
eye on the larger Gentile Christian community.
Luke
is a self-confessed “Johnny-Come-Lately” to the task of writing up Jesus’ story
for others to read (v.1). He had
numerous predecessors and access to their work.
That work was based on first-hand testimony (v.2). Luke writes to “Theophilus” that he has
assessed his sources with care and integrity that he may have “confidence in the soundness of the
instruction you have received” (v.4).
Frequently
interpreters read Luke’s prologue as a claim to its historical veracity. And indeed, in terms of first century
Greco-Roman history writing, Luke comes off pretty well on this score.
It’s only when we require him to meet the standards of modern history
writing that he comes off deficient (along with the rest of ancient
history). So Luke tended to be assessed
historically (whether positively or negatively) and we thought we had done
justice to his reasons for writing.
Luke
Timothy Johnson argues otherwise. He
claims that Luke is a work of ancient “apologetic history.” It aims to write history to highlight moral
exemplars or commend certain of it characters (16). Its concern for sequence, which Luke exhibits
as well, serves this larger concern of promoting or defending these exemplars
and characters. I will say more about
what this means for reading Luke after we look the content of his
prologue.
They key word is “confidence”
(v.4) not “truth” (as in the NRSV). What
did Theophilus (and the Gentile Christian community along with him) need to
gain confidence in about what had happened in and through Jesus of Nazareth? Or another way to ask this is to ask who is
the subject of Luke’s apologetic history?
Johnson answers God. Theophilus
needed “confidence” about and in God, in Luke’s mind, and he wrote to defend
God’s ways and provide that confidence for Theophilus.
Why?
Well, the Gentiles had come into the
people of God (as Luke is at pains to stress with his use and imitation of Old
Testament language from the Septuagint) through faith even though many Jews
rejected Jesus as God’s authorized agent of redemption (Messiah). God, so it could be plausibly argued, had
failed in his promise to his own people.
Has he now turned to the Gentiles with the same promises and hope? How can he then be trusted? Johnson puts it this way:
“Such a turn of events (the Jewish rejection
of Jesus) was bound to cause a certain amount of uncertainty among Gentile
believers, for this reason: the God of
Israel made his promises to the people of Israel, the Jews. The promise (of the land, of progeny, of
success and security) was for them and their children. If the Jews have missed out on the promise
revealed through Jesus the Messiah, and if by the rejection of Jesus they have
been replaced by the Gentiles, then the most serious sort of question arises
concerning the truthfulness and fidelity of God. It will not do to say that someone else now
has the promise. A promise is
meaningless if it can be so arbitrarily shifted. The question of God’s truthfulness is a
question of theodicy. It matters not
only to Jews but especially to Gentiles:
if they are now the clients of the God of Israel, what confidence can
they have in that God, if he has proven capable of such fickleness?” (19)
So, Luke is writing about God has done
in Jesus and the early church to fulfill his promises to his people. This is more than simply a mental assessment
of the past. The participle Luke uses “have
been fulfilled” is in the perfect tense.
This tense looks back to past event which has continuing significance into
the present. So Luke is writing about
the present life of his Gentile Christian communities. His concern to defend God’s ways, then, has
considerable existential import.
Questions raised about God’s reliability and faithfulness are finally
about the viability of the Christian faith and the people of God.
The perfect tense of the participle
noted above means that this concern embraces us today as well. The church in North America today is
overwhelmingly Gentile. So Luke is
writing about something that could, and perhaps should, rattle our cages a bit. That how and in what way God has been
faithful to his promises to Israel does not even register on most of our radars
is a serious concern for us to ponder. I
can’t go into all that here, but I at least want to flag the issue for us. Perhaps Luke can stir us up to greater
vigilance about our Jewish forebears in the faith, especially given the
horrendous history the church in the west has had with them!
Luke writes, then, to justify the ways
of God in Jesus Christ and the early church.
This is his chief interest and drives his narrative. He crafts his story of Jesus to this end. This is, as we have seen, history told in a
first century apologetic vein. It won’t
look like history as we know it. And
that raises the question for us of how best to think about and approach the
Bible to read it with insight.
I want to suggest three images of what
the Bible is for your consideration[1]. Two are prevalent among us. They are the Bible as a window and the Bible
as a mirror. The first image promotes a
historical reading of the Bible. We look
through a window to see what is beyond or behind it. We want to learn as much as we can about the
languages, background, culture, philosophy, geography, etc. as we can. However, if we find the course of events
described by the Bible significantly different from what our historical
analysis reveals, we must resist taking our historical reconstruction (see the
various portraits of “the historical Jesus” published in recent years) as the
basis on which we build our understanding of the faith. It is not the historical Jesus, however near
or far he may seem from his biblical portrait, that is Luke’s focal concern or
should be ours. This has been the dominant
image for reading the Bible for last several centuries, especially among the
scholarly community. Only recently have
we begun to really grasp this inherent weakness or limitation for this
image.
The other image is
that of a mirror. In this way of reading
the Bible, the reader focuses primarily on his or her life in front of
the text, and seeks to discover how the Bible provides insight or meaning into
their lives. This way of reading has
both sophisticated and popular forms.
Some claim that the reader actually creates the meaning of a text,
though so do not go that far. But still
the emphasis is on finding relevance for “my” life in the Bible. More popular versions are using the Bible as
a source for inspirational stories and sayings, nuggets that get us going and
guide us as we live through our day.
Now there is, of course, nothing amiss
about desiring to have the Bible “speak to us” in a way that shapes and directs
our lives. But how we seek to find and
hear that word makes all the difference.
If we begin with where and who we are and expect the Bible to speak to
us as those people, we can do little else but read it as a mirror. However, I suspect we can pretty readily see
the limitations of this approach. For
one, how come so much of the Bible – all that historical narrative, those laws,
much of the prophets, many of the epistles or sections of epistles in the New
Testament - seems irrelevant or resists this kind of reading?
Let’s leave that there and move on to
a third image: a piece of stained glass
art. Here the is interest is not in what
lies behind the story (historical) or in what reflects on our lives today from
the story, but rather in the story itself.
We look at the story as we have it in the stained glass. It’s that story, created out of all different
kinds of literature and put together, in Luke’s case, to present a defense of
God’s way with the Jews and Gentiles, that claims our interest. That story, as we have already seen, is also
our story. From that story we derive our
identity and vocation. From it we
receive direction for living our lives in light of that story. From it we learn as well our hope and our
destiny. In these ways the Bible, and
Luke’s gospel, shape and guide us into the people God wants us to be. The Bible is best understood, I suggest, as a
piece of stained glass art which much claim our attention for this is the way
our God has chosen to speak to us!
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