Discerning God’s Purposes: Approaches to Preaching and Living Luke - Acts

Currents in Theology & Mission
December 2009, Volume 36, Number 6

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus tells the crowds: “I tell you, among those born of women no one is greater than John; yet the least in the kingdom of God is greater than he.” The narrator then remarks:

And all the people who heard this, including the tax collectors, acknowledged the justice of God, because they had been baptized with John’s baptism. But by refusing to be baptized by him, the Pharisees and the lawyers rejected God’s purpose for themselves (7:28-30).

This is one of several passages in Luke-Acts which signal that God is doing something new through the prophet from Nazareth, and yet it is emphasized throughout that his ministry of proclaiming and enacting the kingdom of God was foretold by and in continuity with Israel’s Scriptures. Characters in Luke-Acts wittingly and unwittingly either align themselves with or reject the “purpose of God” disclosed in Scripture and in this narrative about Jesus and his earliest followers. Those who read or hear it are invited to discern for themselves how God is at work both in these “people who have been turning the world upside down,” (Acts 17:6) and in the context of their own lives and world. This two-volume account of the mission of Jesus and the church prompts its audiences to look for the divine presence and purpose not at the periphery of society, but rather among the marginalized where the Spirit is always ever restoring life.

The contributions to this volume of Currents in Theology and Mission explore different ways of approaching Luke-Acts and, indeed, other biblical texts with a view to ascertaining how and where God is at work in the world, and how the Spirit might involve us. However, the articles are more interested in equipping and empowering others to interpret and discern for themselves than in providing definitive readings.

In the first article Audrey West provides guidance about how to preach the parables in Luke. After surveying different approaches to the parables, she proposes a way of reading that considers the socio-cultural contexts of Jesus and the evangelists, and focuses on how Luke’s narrative and theological emphases are reflected in and carried out by the parables. West takes a closer look at the parable of the leaven in Luke 13:20-21 and the parable of the widow and the judge in Luke 18:1-8. She provocatively suggests that leaven represents a “contaminating” element fundamental to the reign of God in which outcasts are welcomed and the world’s assumptions about who and what has
value are challenged.

David Balch begins his article by noting the ELCA’s approval of the Social Statement on “Human Sexuality: Gift and Trust” this past summer and explores the theme of acceptance and boundary crossing in Luke-Acts. He makes a connection between Jesus’ proclamation of “the year of the Lord’s acceptance (dekton)” in Luke 4:19 and Peter’s words to Cornelius in Acts 10:35 that “in every nation anyone who fears [God] and does what is right is acceptable (dektos) to [God].” Both passages invoke Isaiah 61:1, and Balch shows that God’s crossing ethnic boundaries announced by Isaiah is a recurring theme in Luke-Acts and a practice exemplified by Jesus and Philip with Samaritans and institutionalized by Peter who baptizes the pagan Cornelius. Balch
reads Luke-Acts against the backdrop of Greco-Roman historiography and suggests that Luke is selectively Romanizing the people of God, changing God’s people from ethnocentric (as in Athens, Sparta, and Jerusalem) to multiethnic (as in Rome). In this respect Luke’s account of history is oriented not just to the past, but also to the eschatological present in which God is doing something new.

Ray Pickett reads the Gospel of Luke as a counter-narrative that sets the divine beneficence and healing mediated through Jesus in contrast to an experience of imperial society. He emphasizes the depiction of Jesus as a prophet who challenges the way Greco-Roman society works and who teaches and exemplifies an alternative way of life. The key themes of salvation and the restoration of Israel and the nations introduced in the first two chapters of Luke are developed in terms of an ongoing process of transformation that involves characters in the story as well as auditors in new patterns of living and relating. In addition to the programmatic Nazareth sermon in Luke 4, Pickett emphasizes Jesus’ challenge to the reciprocity ethic that kept people beholden and submissive. In its place, Jesus teaches his followers to release one another from debt and obligation so as to embody the beneficence and mercy of God in their dealings with one another. Many of the scenes in the Gospel of Luke serve to depict
an economy of the kingdom of God.

In “Turning the World Upside Down,” Edgar Krentz highlights a number of structural, literary, and theological features of Luke-Acts that can be investigated by preachers as they live and work with Luke throughout year C. He underlines the importance of the prologue in Luke 1:1-4 as an introduction to both the Gospel and Acts. According to Krentz, Luke-Acts stresses the mission to the Roman world. He observes that Peter and Paul, the protagonists of Acts, were both taken out of their normal environment and traveled to places that challenged their culture and mores. That is an insight worth pondering as the church and its leaders read and proclaim Luke with an eye and a heart toward mission. He shows how Luke 4:16-30 anticipates many of the motifs in Luke-Acts, and emphasizes that any use of Luke-Acts should stress Luke’s missionary interest. This missionary interest is, in Luke’s perspective, inextricably bound to a corresponding interest in the marginalized. Krentz makes an interesting suggestion at the end of his article that takes seriously the tradition that Luke was a physician. In antiquity that was not such an honored position as it is today, and many doctors were slaves. It might be an interesting thought experiment to read and preach through Luke-Acts mindful of the possibility that the author was a slave.

In his article on the Sermon on the Mount, Jack Lundbom reviews a history of interpretations, including Luther, that emphasize the difficulty of fulfilling its ethical demands. He then asks the question, “how lofty is the sermon, and is there any hope at all of living by the teachings it contains?” Lundbom highlights Jesus’ teaching at the end of the sermon in 7:21-27 that underlines the connection between hearing and doing, and assumes that people are expected to put his teachings into practice. He then sets some of the antitheses in the sermon in their cultural context that renders them more doable. In concluding he acknowledges the tension between what Jesus expects and what we actually do and suggests that the Sermon on the Mount is meant to stretch us.

In the final article, Mark Bartusch reads the story of Jeremiah and Hananiah in Jeremiah 28 in the light of social-science models as a story of prophetic conflict. He suggests that what is at stake between Hananiah and Jeremiah is not some abstract theological principle, but honor. The context for the exchange between Jeremiah and Hananiah is a crisis of prophetic leadership in Judah and Jerusalem in the sixth century that needs to be resolved in order to restore order to the threatened community. Bartusch sees the book of Jeremiah as a stage along the way toward the development of the notion of “false prophesy.” What was at issue is the impact of truth-telling and lying on the social order and solidarity. The biblical writer wrote to defend the honor and integrity of Jeremiah.

Raymond Pickett

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