Homily for Pentecost 2, 2007
The Very Rev’d Michael J. Pitts
Christ Church Cathedral, Montreal
1 Kings 17:8-24
Galatians 1:11-24
Luke 7:11-17
As Professor Aitken mentioned in her homily last week, Trinity Sunday marks the transition point between the period in the Christian year when we recall the story of the great events of the life of Jesus, and the coming period, when we tell of his teaching and acts of healing. For the next twenty-four weeks this year, between now and Advent Sunday at the beginning of December, we shall, in the Gospels of the Eucharist, be reading from the Gospel of Luke, from chapter seven through chapter twenty one.
So I thought this morning it might be useful, rather than give a homily on today’s texts, to give a general introduction to Luke’s gospel. What I am about to say may not be especially new to some members of our congregation, but a refresher course can always be helpful.
Luke’s work is in two parts. The first is the Gospel and the second is the book known as the Acts of the Apostles. In the final chapter of the first and the first chapter of the second there is some overlap, but the division between the two is a matter of subject. The Gospel contains the story of Jesus. The Acts contains the story of Paul, prefaced by the story of the very early church. The division may also have been caused by the constraints of the typical length of a scroll. In later generations the two parts became separated in the lists of approved writings (called, eventually, the canon), with the Gospel of John placed in between. That is how it is printed in our Bibles today.
We do not know who Luke was. There is no necessity to assume that he is the same person mentioned in three of the letters, in Philemon, written by Paul, and in 1Timothy and Colossians, written later in the name of Paul. In the Acts, there are interesting passages, probably reported by an eye witness, concerning some of the journeys of Paul. From writing in the third person, Luke suddenly changes to the first person. They are therefore called the “we” passages. But they look more like passages inserted from someone else’s notes or oral account, rather than the writer’s own experience. Most scholars now believe that Luke was writing at the end of the first century of the Common Era.
In what I am saying, I am using the assumption used by scholars for several generations, that we should come to the Bible with an open mind about its nature, and allow the texts themselves to tell us what they are, what was their origin and purpose. There are no contemporary cross references to the New Testament texts. They do not begin to get quoted until into the second century, and by then information about their authorship had been lost. So the texts themselves are all we have to with. This way of reading our texts has been broadly accepted in academia and in mainline churches around the world since the mid nineteenth century. It is very different, however, from the approach espoused by the so called evangelical Christians who take the Bible as the inerrant dictation of God. If you are of that persuasion, then I am sorry: we shall just have to differ.
In writing the Gospel, Luke had two sources. One was the Gospel of Mark, of which he incorporates the greater part into his own Gospel. However, as he copies it, he also makes corrections both to Greek grammar and to facts. He changes the order, and more importantly morphs Mark’s theological overview into his own. Two aspects of the similarities of Luke and Mark are now universally accepted. Luke was using Mark and not vice versa, and Luke was working with a written text, not with a common oral tradition. [1]
Unlike Mark, which exists as a separate Gospel, Luke’s other source has left us with no written document that has yet been discovered. Scholars usually refer to this source as “Q” standing for the German word Quelle, meaning source. We know that it was a source, because the same passages occur also with great verbal similarity in Matthew’s gospel. Scholars, however, have always been divided over whether this was a written source or a common oral tradition. Part of the answer to that puzzle lies in our incomplete understanding of the nature of oral tradition in the social environment of the time and places of the early church. I tend these days to side with those who argue that, despite differences in Matthew and Luke’s use of “Q”, the verbal similarity is so great that we must posit a written document. The nature of that source or document, as far as we can reconstruct it from Matthew and Luke, is interesting. It consists largely of sayings of Jesus, with no account of the events of the final week and little about any healings or other activities. In both content and flavor it has many similarities to the documents found last century at Oxyrhyncus and Nag Hamadi in Egypt. They and “Q” are probably to be situated in an alternative tradition of Christianity, later called Gnosticism. This alternative version of the faith was eventually suppressed by the church, and much of it lost, other than these texts. While much scholarly work has been done on the newly found texts (and it is of great interest), others with wild imaginations, combined with sloppy historical research have conned a gullible public, and made a great deal of money from certain novels and films.
But back to Luke. As well as the sources we have discussed there are important passages of Luke which are derived neither from Mark nor “Q”. These include the birth narratives, parts of the passion narratives and several stories in the body of the Gospels. These are important passages to study, because they enshrine Luke’s particular view of the whole story he is telling.
If we were to approach Luke’s writing with a mindset formed by our modern understanding of historiography, but naively, we might think of him as a careful historian, accurately presenting the facts about the story of Jesus and Paul. After all that is what he tells us he is doing. [2] But we must beware of that mindset. We should rather approach Luke through the mindset of ancient historiography, where there was no internet, not easy availability of libraries, no contemporary newspapers and where remembered facts mingled with myth and legend, pure inventiveness and literary skill to produce a work of persuasive power. In the case of contemporary secular histories the function of writing was to produce political propaganda. In the case of the Gospels it was to tell the story of the risen Jesus, and perhaps, if John Dominic Crossan is right, to produce political counter-propaganda.
Some of the assertions I have been discussing can be seen at work in today’s Biblical readings. The letter to the Galatians is universally accepted as the work of the Apostle Paul himself. It was written probably around 54 CE, predating Luke’s writing by nearly half a century. The picture we get from it about the very early church is profoundly different from that given by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul is in the middle of a battle royal with the church community in Jerusalem which was opposed to his mission to the Gentiles. In the passage we read he is laying out the time line and facts about what happened. Luke has a different presentation. The timeline is different, the facts are different, but above all the purpose was different. Paul is saying, “I am right and they are wrong”. Luke is saying that after a little disagreement they all shook hands and lived happily together. If we are looking for facts, then I have to take Paul’s version as contemporary and first hand, and therefore more accurate. But for me the more important is to see beauty, power and persuasive strength of the story of each story within its contemporary context.
The gospel reading today is a passage which belongs with Luke’s unique material. As such it first points us to a special feature of Luke’s writing, a concern with and a compassion for women in his world, particularly those who suffered. We shall see this in some of the other passages we shall read in the coming weeks. We should not however, as some do, jump to the conclusion that Luke was a feminist supporter before his time. If we analyze the Luke stories carefully we shall find that Luke was concerned and compassionate for women as long as they knew their place. He was much less the proto-feminist than was the historical Jesus as far as we can reconstruct that. What we see in the Gospel is part of a shift as the young and revolutionary church began to settle down and accept the norms of the society of the Roman Empire.
Secondly and lastly, in providing us with the Old Testament story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, the compilers of our lectionary have allowed us to glimpse at one of the ways in which Luke comes to his unique material. The Gospel story of the Widow of Nain looks very much like a re-telling of the older story. In the Jewish tradition this is a process called Midrash. An old story is retold, as it were with new clothes, in a contemporary context.
That I believe is fundamentally the purpose of both liturgy and preaching. We are here not to talk about fixed doctrines and supposedly inerrant facts, but to tell the story of our faith in a way which engages with the knowledge, outlook and problems of our contemporary world.
[1] All of these assertions have been demonstrated persuasively by many writers offering much evidence. In one sermon I can only hope to summarize their conclusions.
[2] Luke 1:1-4
