Text: Luke 1:1-4
Theme: communicate the truth
Introduction: the Lord is good and his love endures forever.
The great theme of this gospel of Luke is Jesus Christ is the divine saviour. This is the supreme fact focused on. According to Luke, Jesus means “the Lord saves”(Luke 1:31). The good tidings of great joy has come to shepherds as the saviour is born in the city of David, his name is ‘Christ the Lord’ ( Luke 2:10). Jesus is the divine saviour of the Old Testament appeared on the earth according to the plan of God (Luke 4:17-21).
Today, I would like to leave with you all the following three notes: Communicate the truth with confirmation, confidence and personal conviction.
1. Communicate the truth without corruption
Many at Work refers to the professional writing, literary writing and writing from government perspective. History is twisted, added imaginary stories and given glories to the authorities and to baby Jesus. There were 46 books of apocryphal which were not considered as books of the Bible. Twenty are of the Old Testament and twenty six are of the New Testament. They were not inspired books, they are religious books, historical books, religious novels and uninspired writings.
There were hundreds of gospels written, they were merely heresies created by Jews and heathens to spoil the church believers. These gospels has numerous stories of boy Jesus performing miracles, cursing children who dashed against him while playing on the streets, changing humans into animals and vice versa. Holding water on the cloak. But these are against John 2:11. Because Jesus performed his first miracle in the wedding hall of Cana. So, they were rejected by the church council.
He was not happy the way the gospels were written, the history of Jesus was spoken on those days. They couldn’t prove the salvation history with proper presentation. Therefore he wrote this history of Jesus and the church with true meaning. He write to counter the heretics more than that to bring the purpose of god for the salvation of humanity in Christ. He calls the readers to respond to this Kerygma.
The introduction to Luke has protasis and apodosis. Luke’s introduction is of the traditional historian’s pattern of writing, such as Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius, and Josephus. He expresses that “I too” want to give an account of, or writing the truth, or do the research. Luke is the only gospel writer prefaced the gospel with a prologue, according to the literary custom of the time, in which he mentioned his sources, and predecessors and the basic reason for his writing. He took the pain to give full, accurate information from the beginning of this event related to Jesus to the present stage of the persecution of the church. Theophilus is the representative of a readers community .
Luke has done the homework of investigation of the story of Jesus and it’s sequel events. Luke wrote with very conventional vocabulary with conversation method. His orderly works was not a cut nod paste of the other writers and researchers but very systematic building of the conviction he had on Jesus as Lord and saviour. Luke has his reference to most of his writings from Mark. Luke has 7036 words of Mark out of 8485.
Luke never intended to write a mere human history of human Jesus but he brought the clarity to the fulfilment of the prophecy by God on human salvation. He brings the chronological, logical and spatial understanding of the human salvation through Christ. Luke’s ideas were to present the gospel in good order, according to the sequence. Luke presents the history of Jesus with more emphatically than mark and Matthew. Luke expresses that Jesus has shown his love for the despised both by his behaviour and by his message, such as to sinners, to women, to Samaritans.
Luke presents history of Jesus with a clear link of the personalities of his time, and his era. He mentioned three important references such as:
* connection between the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem and the census decree of Caesar Augustus under Quirinius and the appearance of John the Baptist based on the dates from Roman and Jewish history. So the history of Jesus belongs to the world history.
* Luke places the history of Jesus as the beginning of the ongoing church history, yet never Jesus became the person of the past history. He continues as presenting in church history. The history of Jesus has reached finally Rome through Paul.
* Luke proves the political innocence of Jesus in the eyes of the Romans, especially the Pilate. Luke proves that Jesus was not. Political restrictionist. A political apologetic made Romans to feel guilty for the crucifixion of Jesus.
2. Communicate the truth with confidence
The relationship between ideas, salvation-history and eschatology are mixed up to communicate the truth through the history. The first phase of the salvation history begins with Genesis and runs with the law and the prophets up to John the Baptist he was the last and greatest of the prophets, which was the period of history of Isreal (Luke 7:26-28). The second phase of the salvation history embraced with Ministry of Jesus on the earth. The third phase is the church under stress.
Luke 16:16 has the demarcation of two periods of Isreal and Jesus. Luke gives elaborate discussions on the salvation history from the history of Isreal to Jesus. There is a shift from the Idea of the world kingdoms to the kingdom of God. The primitive Christian eschatology is replaced by salvation history.
Luke was not interested to write the history of the church rather he writes and communicates the salvation history through his writing and teachings of the apostles and early Christians. The imminent parousia of Jesus was shifted because of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples.
It is interesting to note that the Hellenistic Luke was the author of the salvation history and brought the connectivity of the gospel of Christ to the world population. The divine plan of salvation enumerated in the Old Testament as a divine plan was unfolded, continued through the birth of Christ was clearly spelt out by Luke as salvation history. The whole tradition of the Israelites were brought and presented beautifully through the salvation history of Luke.
Luke presents Jesus as soter, the saviour. Soter was a title used frequently by the contemporary Greco-Roman world. It was often applied to gods, philosophers, physicians, statesmen, kings and emperors. Julius Caesar was known as ‘the god manifest and saviour of human life’ in the Ephesians inscriptions. The word saviour was not a surprising word in Palestine world. But the name Jesus was presented as the saviour of the sins as per the plan of God.
And the sons of god concept was found in the ancient near east culture reference to their kings and princes. They used this title for the mythical heroes and famous historical persons. The real meaning is that the divine power, divine favour and divine adoption is conferred on the day of enthronement. But it was strange concept for the Jews to accept this title for any of their leaders. Jesus was referred to son of god because of his obedience to God than any other reason.
Jesus is presented as leader, holy one, religious one, judge, teacher, and God. Luke did not write a history of Jesus. It’s not an anthropologist approach or ecclesiology approach. Neither he intended to write the history of a man called Jesus nor an institution called church. But his clear intention was to present Jesus as the only saviour of the world. His name is the only name on the earth to be adorned, respected, confessed for salvation.
In Acts 4:12, Luke writes, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among human beings by which we are to be saved”. Luke has given a definite Christological and soteriological intention in his gospel. So communicate the truth with confidence and with personal conviction.
3. Communicate the truth with convictions
Salvation can’t exist without personal testimony. God always uses the weak vessels of his creation to communicate his valuable truths. Always he used the vulnerable persons to carry out his truth throughout the history of Christianity. From the beginning, prophets, servants of God were humiliated, threatened, beaten, stoned, tortured and killed. Yet the personal testimonials never came to an end. Hebrews 11 has the series of testimonials as serials to red and read on.
Luke seems to be a fellow worker of Paul (Philemon 24), he was a beloved physician of Paul (Colossians 4:14), and he was Paul’s sole companion (2 Timothy 4:11), he was also a preacher (2 Corinthians 8:18). The we sections of acts identified Luke as the author of Luke and Acts (16:10-17, 20:5-15, 21:1-18, 27:1-28:16).
I am giving careful and an orderly work is the introductory statements of Luke.
Luke acknowledges the work of many writers of the gospel. It seems that Gospel of Luke was written out of the interest of the author about the careful investigation he has done to communicate to us. Yet, it is the work of the Lord, an inspired word of God. He himself testified that it was his most careful historical research.
“God’s inspiration does not come to a person who sits with folded hands and lazy mind and only waits, but to the man who thinks, seeks and searches. True inspiration comes when the seeking mind of man joins with the revealing spirit of God. The word of God is given to the man who seeks for it ”(William Barclay).
Luke presented the gospel with literary, didactic, apologetic, geographical, historical and theological perspectives. Luke stresses the connectivity between Judaism and Christianity. He brings the connection between both traditions and presents the continuation of the Judaism in Christianity. Luke wrote the truth about the salvation history not simply some historical truth. Luke’s report was an ex post facto stance account. However, when it comes to book of Acts, he was part of the “we-sections” reporting.
Lucan work is devoted to the Kerygma. Kerygma is the active sense of the faith-eliciting proclamation of God’s eschatological salvation in the Christ event, or in the content sense of the essential elements of such preaching is present in the Luke-Acts. He emphasised that his accounts were thorough, traced from the beginning, orderly and accurate.
Refer:
1. William Barclay, commentary for Luke, 1992
2. Joseph A Fitzmyer, gospel according to Luke, volume 28, 1978.
3. W.G.Kümmel, introduction to the New Testament, 1992.
4. The new Jerome biblical commentary, 1991.
