The New Testament writings of St Luke the Evangelist – that’s to say, the Gospel that bears his name, and the Acts of the Apostles, both of which are addressed to the same reader, a certain ‘Theophilus’ – amount to a substantive account, respectively of the life and ministry of Jesus, and of the formation and growth of the early church following his death and resurrection. They’ve been described as ‘the storm centre of New Testament study’ – raising such questions as of what can confidently be asserted about the historical Jesus, of how much the character of the emerging church was shaped by St Paul, and the extent to which either Paul’s, or Luke’s own personal understanding of the Christian faith influenced his account. I’m not going to venture into those debates, but I do have a natural curiosity about the circumstances of all those who first responded to the call of Jesus Christ. We all bring our collected ‘baggage’ of life to our faith and to the God we all meet here to worship, and so it would be quite exceptional if Luke’s writing did not, to some extent, bear the imprint of his personal experience and perception.
Luke had not been one of the original twelve disciples, and it’s tantalising to speculate as to when he encountered Christ’s call. We only know with reasonable certainty that he came to be associated with Paul’s later ministry to the Gentiles, because of Paul’s several references to him in his epistles, and the fact that, during his own account of the missionary journeys in the Acts of the Apostles, from chapter 16 Luke suddenly begins to write in the first person (‘we did this and that…), clearly including himself in the missionary party. It’s tempting to imagine him as one of the ‘seventy apostles’ appointed and sent out ‘two by two’ by Jesus in today’s Gospel, Luke 10: 1-9, but the implication of his opening words to Theophilus in Chapter 1 is that Luke, himself, was not an eyewitness to the events he goes on to describe. In one of Paul’s references to Luke, at the end of his epistle to the Colossians, he passes on from Luke greetings to them – calling him ‘Luke, the beloved physician’. Apart from telling us that Luke was a doctor, this suggests that he was very dear to Paul. Elsewhere, in the epistle to the Philippians, Paul betrays how distressed he had been by the illness and nearness to death of another of his ‘fellow soldiers’, Epaphroditus, and rejoices with the Philippians in his recovery. We might imagine the comfort that Luke’s presence as a physician was to him on their travels.
Of still greater interest, though, it seems to me, is what this Gospel of Salvation through Jesus, the ministry of which Luke came to share in, meant to him. I’ve recently written, for an ecumenical interchurch magazine, some reflections on my being both a Priest and a Musician. But what must it have been like for Luke as a physician to experience the healings, mandated by the Lord himself in our Gospel, and carried out by the apostolic ministry of Paul and many others? Whether or not Luke came to carry out these apostolic healings himself, I find it impossible to imagine that, with his training and natural motivation to alleviate the ills of the human body, the healings that Luke witnessed were not critically transformative to him. They would be of such an order that he would see in them the fulfillment of the prophecy, heard earlier, in Isaiah 35:3-6, of God himself coming to save those with weak hands, feeble knees, and fearful hearts – opening the eyes of the blind, and unstopping the ears of the deaf. Could it be this holistic quality of healing that instilled in Luke – out of all the writers of the New Testament – such an acute sense of the dynamism of the Holy Spirit? This dynamism is manifest right from the beginning of his Gospel, where Angel Gabriel announces the role the Holy Spirit would play, first in the birth of John the Baptist, then of Jesus, and throughout the Acts of the Apostles where the Spirit is described as directly guiding, even sometimes directly ‘forbidding’ church members in their decisions? Perhaps most famously, Luke’s depiction of the quality of the fellowship within the growing Christian community, in which ‘All that believed were together, and had all things in common’ – sharing their possessions, tending to those in need…. ‘praising God, and having favour with all the people’, is astonishing. Admittedly, certain New Testament scholars dismiss this as ‘spin’, and as ‘too good to be true’, but for all we know this very quality of Spirit-filled fellowship may have been the tipping-point in drawing Luke into the church. Today’s passage from his Gospel is very similar to a parallel account of the commissioning of the 70 in Matthew’s, except that Luke seems to link reciprocity, healing and the coming of the Kingdom virtually in the same breath: ‘And into whatsoever city ye enter, and they receive you, eat such things as are set before you: And heal the sick that are therein, and say unto them, The kingdom of God is come nigh unto you’. May this act to us in the church now as both a challenge and a spur to fully avail ourselves of God’s healing and wholeness, that it might spill over into the anxieties and divisions in the world around us, and his kingdom come.