Luke as Preaching Text and "City"

From Advent 1 with its hopeful message: “Your redemption is drawing near” to Christ the King with its fervent, forward-looking plea: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom,” we will all this year be preaching, reading, and being transformed by the Gospel of Luke. In this issue five leading ELCA scholars—two are parish pastors, two are seminary professors, and one is a former seminary president—provide retooling, midstream, on Luke’s unique “take” on the Christian adventure.

Erik M. Heen observes that Luke-Acts’ engagement with the severe disparity between the “haves” and the “have-nots” in antiquity cannot be reduced to a simple dualism. It is not “the rich” per se that are critiqued in these volumes but rather the abuses inherent in the ancient patronal system as well as the values into which both patrons and clients are socialized. This article is an exercise in social-scientific criticism and therefore defines terms like patron, client, honor, shame, purity, impurity, holy, profane, righteous and sinner, and the inherent unequal relationships they presuppose. Patronage was a system of reciprocal relationships of mutual benefit between unequals. Many of the central Greek terms of the New Testament point to semantic domains that range over various aspects of patronage. Luke’s Christian form of patronage supports the expressed values and mission of the church, including its unique focus in antiquity on the poor and the disadvantaged. Luke-Acts advocates a model of leadership lived out in voluntary abdication of privilege and in service of those who were destitute. God’s grace has the power to redeem human relations just as sin has the power to corrupt them.

Ronald W. Roschke explores the focused interest on issues of health and healing in Luke. These reflections are informed by the healing ministry of the Malagasy Lutheran Church, which helps to reveal the cultural filters we employ when reading stories of healing in the Bible. Scholars today are exploring ancient medical texts in order to understand how older cultures thought about health and healing. The pregnancy of Elizabeth and the muteness of Zechariah in Luke 1, for example, would have been seen as parallel issues. Luke seems to share the medical presuppositions attested in the Talmud and the Corpus Hippocraticum. In the third gospel healings and exorcisms are also co-expressions of a divine-earthly showdown between God and Evil. In places such as Madagascar today, a scientific practice of medicine coexists with belief in demonic possession. Our Western individualistic approach to medicine closes the door to social realities that affect our wellbeing. How might the church more powerfully support those who have committed themselves to say “No” to the powers of darkness which work against God and life because we have said “Yes” to grace? Do we want to observe Luke’s worldview as an outsider, or are we willing to enter into this Word, allow it to claim us and to cast out from us that which is death-dealing?

David L. Tiede follows the readings from Luke from Advent through Transfiguration, underlining the evangelist’s specific themes in these seasons. He notes that many of Luke’s stories are embedded in Israel’s social, political, and religious world and in the constant presence of the Roman order. Luke’s advent lessons call the faithful to extricate themselves from the commercial enslavement of the “holiday season.” Luke’s Gospel disrupts the paganism of privilege and its hijacking of the Christmas story to legitimate the affluence of the powerful. Luke’s narrative tells the prophetic truth, identifying where God was decisively at work in the events of human history, even events that seemed inconsequential to the ruling powers. The epiphany of Luke 4 is the public disclosure of Jesus as the Messiah and protagonist of God’s mission. The Lord proclaimed by Luke knows that the poor, the hungry, and the sorrowful have an advantage because the Sermon on the Plain is pure balm for those who know their need for God. At the Transfiguration we learn that the fulfillment of the exodus of Jesus will be through his death and resurrection. God’s reign of mercy and mission of love on earth will not be stopped.

Sarah Henrich reviews a number of recent approaches to the Gospel of Luke. The New Testament was written in a world with assumptions much different from our own and interpreters are faced with the daunting task of how to move from that era to our own day. Scholars have recently turned to ancient fiction for a renewed picture of the social world of the first century and the ways in which it was described for readers. These novels present plausible pictures of that world, its religious life, household and civic arrangements, and the kinds of speech conventions that were common. Attention to the ancient novels leads one to see that the Samaritan’s behavior in the parable of the Good Samaritan is a conventional manifestation of philanthropia, whose value does not require the degree of enmity between Jews and Samaritans posited by some scholars. The parable of the prodigal son is about the joyful response of God, rather than about the character of God in comparison to the character of sinful humans. The article also touches on the similarity between the purposes of Luke and those of the Jewish philosopher Philo and on how ancient art can help us understand how ancient audiences would have understood the theological importance of Jesus.

John Roth discusses the prayer life of Jesus himself in the Gospel of Luke. Jesus prayed at unexceptional times and at pivotal moments of his ministry. Jesus is someone for whom conversation with God is integral to who he is, but also as someone whose praying does not conform to any fixed pattern. Jesus is a pray-er from beginning to end, from his baptism to his death, and it is with a prayerful word that he ascends. Jesus’s prayers are not confined to any one purpose and do not serve any one function. When it comes to prayer and character traits associated with prayer, Jesus is the believer’s model. Was one of the motivations for Luke writing one more Gospel the need to convey the character of Jesus as a pray-er?

In the opening verses of the gospel, Luke acknowledged that he was not the first to write a gospel, but, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, he decided to write his own orderly account for Theophilus and all other God-lovers who want to know the truth. The last word of Jesus recorded in Luke is stirring: “Stay here in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high.” Wherever your “city” is—I would imagine that the twenty-four chapters of the third gospel could be the city limits within which you will “stay” more or less every Sunday—I can only hope and pray that God’s power dresses you up properly for the occasion of preaching repentance and forgiveness of sins in the Messiah’s name to all nations.

Stay in this city for good.

Ralph W. Klein
Editor

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