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When I first began as the pastor here at Grace, a bit over six years ago, one of the first meetings I went to was with the Worship Committee. We talked about a bunch of things, about music, about liturgy, and about how I like to run things (I am actually pretty flexible when it comes to the details of how we run the service). One of the things I mentioned is that what I really like to do is preach through entire books, passage by passage. I have a bunch of reasons for that. It helps me have a plan instead of having to make a fresh decision every week. I feel like it gives our time together some direction, where each week builds off the week before. I find it extremely helpful to allow the Biblical authors to develop the key themes over time.
It also deals with one of the more annoying problems that preachers face. The Bible has some difficult things to say. Sometimes, the Bible will pinch us, will challenge us, will say things that condemn our choices and our lives in various ways. If a preacher is going to be faithful to bearing witness to all the things the Bible says, they are going to have to take up those passages. The thing is, if you pick each week’s passage fresh each week, it is possible that one of two things will happen. I could see myself either avoiding those passages altogether because, honestly, I don’t like to give tough messages. The other thing I might end up doing is finding myself angry or frustrated in any given week and pick the tough passages because I am worked up and I want to let loose. Both of those are a problem, in my view. If we work through a text, bit by bit, we will deal with those passages and everyone would know if I skipped over one of them. Also, it takes the timing out of my hands. If you hear me give a message on a really tough passage of scripture, you will know that I, at least, am not targeting you, because it was just the next passage. No promises that God isn’t coming after you, though.
At that worship committee meeting, I shared this and everyone thought that was a good idea, they were happy to go along with it. I realized they might not have quite understood everything they were agreeing to, so I told them that I really wanted to start with a gospel, and that it would likely take two years or more to work through one of those. That length of time startled them a bit and they said, “Maybe don’t start with a gospel, then.” I agreed to choose a smaller book to introduce the idea, so we worked through Paul’s letter to the Philippians before launching into a journey through the Gospel of Matthew, a process that took us two years and four months.
I think that it was a positive experience. When we finished it, we went through the much shorter letter of James and then spent a year going through the book of Hebrews. Since then we have worked through, in order, Second Corinthians, 1 Timothy, 1 John, 2 John, 3 John, Galatians, and 2 Timothy. I have been itching to go through a gospel again. I kind of wanted to do it a year ago, but waited for a few reasons. For those who went through all of Matthew with me, you might be thinking to yourself, “Already? Didn’t we just finish a gospel?” The answer to that is, no, not really. It has been over three and a half years since we finished Matthew. To be honest, it is really about time to get back into that kind of thing again.
Looking at the letters and other documents in the New Testament is hugely important. We have heard some of the greatest teachers in the first generation of Christians give guidance on many topics. The letter of James was extremely practical. The book of Hebrews was less practical, but it helped us understand what God has done in a deeper way than before. Paul’s letters to various churches challenge us in our own context. His guidance to Timothy also shapes our understanding of our own leadership.
That all being said, it is crucial that we always go back to the gospels. The very most central conviction in all of Christian faith is that, at one specific moment in space and time, the God of the universe stepped into his creation in and as the man, Jesus. The gospel narratives are not just fun stories to reflect on, they are not just teachable moments where we try to apply the wisdom of some sage to our own lives. They are written accounts of the words and actions of the one who is, at the very same time, God and human. There is nowhere else in all of history where we can point to a human being and say, “That one, he is God.”
Every word that Jesus speaks is both a human word, which is good because that means we can understand it, and it is also the very word of God. Every action of Jesus is both the act of a human being and it is also the very act of God. What Jesus says, how Jesus behaves, both what he does and what he does not do, are all hugely important and worthy of our study.
One of the most important reasons why it would be good to get back into the gospels is because there is actually a fair amount of our congregation who weren’t here when we went through Matthew. That is a wonderful testimony to what God has been doing in our midst. We also have a bunch of young people who were probably too young to follow along with our time in Matthew who are now old enough to get more out of it. The more I prayed about it, the more it felt like the time was right.
So, as we start our time together in the Gospel of Luke, I want to say a few things. Luke includes a few clarifying remarks, and so I will not only talk about them, but also share some of my own. Luke begins his story of Jesus by addressing his writing to someone he calls “most excellent Theophilus.” Now, we don’t know for sure who this person is. One interpretation is that Theophilus is just someone that Luke knew, whether already in the church or else outside of it, who was interested in Luke’s account of the life of Jesus. If he is inside the church, it might be because there were not many reliable accounts of the life of Christ around. While we have all four gospels in our Bibles, don’t forget that they were not written for a few decades after Jesus was crucified and resurrected. There was a lot of preaching and Christian living where the stories of Jesus were shared, but not necessarily written down. In fact, there is good reason to think that the only written gospel at the time was Mark, with the possible exception that Matthew might have just written his.
Theophilus might just as easily be someone who is outside of the church and is interested in an orderly presentation of the life and ministry of Christ. We have some examples from the book of Acts, also written by Luke, where there were people in positions of high authority who were at least intellectually curious about what the Christians believed. Maybe that meant they were feeling the tug from God to become disciples themselves, or maybe they just wanted to make sense out of the world. Regardless of that, if Theophilus is a specific person outside of the church, we could understand this gospel as being written to help that person understand Christianity. Perhaps Theophilus even paid to support Luke while he did this important work.
The thing is, it is entirely possible that this Theophilus is not even a real person. Now, it is possible that some people might have an instinctive reaction against that. After all, Luke addresses this gospel to Theophilus. Doesn’t that mean that he is a real person? After all, we didn’t suggest that, when Paul wrote to Timothy, there was no such person.
It really isn’t the same. It happens that the name “Theophilus,” like many names, means something. The name means “lover of God.” There is a very real chance that Luke was writing to everyone who loves God and is using that name as a stand in for every such person. If that is the case, than this gospel is addressed to me, and it is addressed to you, and that is an encouraging idea. The truth is that we don’t really know for sure, but it probably doesn’t matter. Whoever this Theophilus is, if anyone, we can all benefit from Luke’s account of the life of Jesus.
Luke specifies something in this introduction. He says that he is not really doing anything new or noteworthy. After all, “Many have undertaken to compile an account of the things accomplished among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” Luke spent time traveling with Paul. He would have had reason to bump into pretty much every significant leader in that first generation of Christians. It is almost certainly the case that this gospel was written after Paul was put to death. Perhaps Luke realized that if that first generation of Apostles were being executed, they couldn’t rely on the eyewitnesses to continue to tell the stories of Jesus but needed to have things written down.
Luke said that many people had been working on this kind of thing. Maybe that is so, but if it really is true, the church did not see fit to preserve every compilation that was made. The only gospel that we have in our Bible that would have been around for any length of time by this point, and only about fifteen years, was the gospel of Mark. If this tells us anything about the relative quality of most of these compilations, the world clearly needed another high quality account.
We in our modern world might wonder why we needed four gospels. Isn’t one just as good as four? Also, having four raises more questions because there are little details where they at least don’t seem to line up with each other. The thing is that this is a very modern attitude. Today, one person could write something and it could be distributed to the whole world in a moment. That was not the case in the ancient world. You needed more than one account just so that we could have enough copies to go around. If we only had one gospel, there would be copies made, to be sure, but it would take longer to get copies out to everyone. If we have two, three, or even four to start with, each of those could be copied and things will spread faster. Also, the ancient Christians knew all about the tensions between the accounts and they were not too troubled by them. They had various ways of dealing with them.
Crucially, there is another reason why we need different gospel accounts. There is so much in Jesus that it cannot be contained in a single telling of the story. The end of John’s Gospel includes a comment that, if everything that Jesus said and did were written down, the whole world could not contain what would be written.
Take someone who has a much simpler life. If you were writing the story of my life, you could write it with several audiences in mind. If you were writing the story of my life for musicians, there are details you would make sure to include and there are others that you might leave out if they seemed less important. If you wrote the story of my life for church people, you might select things differently. None of that is about lying or covering up anything, it is just that you cannot tell every story and so you choose what to say and how to say it based on a pile of considerations.
The most obvious difference between the gospels of Matthew and Luke is who they were written to. Matthew was a Jewish Christian who was clearly writing to other Jewish Christians, or Jewish communities who were being evangelized. Matthew constantly told us about the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, about how Jesus transformed the law, about how Jesus was bringing the promises that God made throughout history to the Jewish people to fulfillment. If you know what you are looking for, it is unmistakable that Matthew is a deeply Jewish telling of the story of Jesus. Those of us who are not Jewish can benefit from it too, of course, but he had a specific group of people he was writing to and it shaped what he said and how he said it.
Luke, by contrast, was a Gentile, or Non-Jewish Christian. This means that he is more like us than Matthew. It isn’t that Luke isn’t concerned with the Old Testament but his audience is less worried about how to connect up what Jesus had done with the history of God’s people than Matthew’s was. We will see Luke include different details, emphasize other aspects of the same stories, and other such things, not because he is telling us about a different Jesus, but because the people he is writing to are different.
The truth is that we aren’t quite like the original audiences of either Matthew or Luke. We are not ancient Christians. This is all the more reason why we need to read both of them, along with Mark and John. There are going to be moments where Luke’s gospel cuts to our hearts more, and times when Matthew’s did. That’s ok. That is why we have both of them.
It is always a bit of a hard thing to preach a sermon on just a few verses that are more of an introduction than a real teaching. Part of that is because we are going to jump forward next week and come back to these early passages as we get closer to Christmas, as they are the classic texts to read during the Advent and Christmas seasons but I didn’t want to ignore them. I am always glad to do it, though, even if it is a challenge because I often pick up on something that I have missed when I haven’t had the burden of having to explain it to other people.
Luke explains why he has taken the time to present this orderly account of the life of Jesus. He writes that it is “so that you might know the exact truth about the things you have been taught.” The relationship between us in the church and the Bible is an interesting one. We talk about the Bible as the foundation of our faith, and it certainly is that in the sense that we have no other reliable source of information about God and that we must not allow any other authority to come in and contradict it.
However, nearly nobody starts by determining that they will live in agreement with whatever they find in the Bible and then, because Jesus is one of the things in the Bible, they put their trust in him. Nearly every Christian starts by encountering Christ, either directly through the Holy Spirit moving in their heart, or else through the love and compassion of the church and then, because they have already come to trust in Christ, they read the Bible to support that faith and equip them for discipleship and ministry. That is how it has always been. Luke is not writing to convince us of the truth of the Gospel, although that might happen. He is trying to give us the historical and theological knowledge we need to live that faith in our world.
He is assuming that his readers will either already be Christians or else are people who will have already had their first encounter with Jesus through the Christians that they have met. Teaching is, and has always been, a secondary ministry of the church. Evangelism and discipleship have always come first.
I didn’t start coming to church because I had already read the Bible and come to believe what it said. I started coming to church because I was invited by friends who showed me the love of Christ. I did not have a conversion experience because I learned how to answer the tough skeptical questions that can lurk in the human heart. I was touched by the Holy Spirit, broken open by the love and persistence of God, and rebuilt on a new foundation. It wasn’t for years later that I took reading the Bible seriously. Now, that also changed my life in a big way, but it had the effect of building that faith up and equipping me to be a Christian in the world.
Reading the Bible helps. You should absolutely be doing it. Start now if you have either never started it or else have fallen out of the practice. However, do not think for a moment that God is not interested in using you for his glory until you have gotten through it. The gospels were written to give depth and detail to what people had already put their trust in through the ministry of the people.
The world is full of people who need Jesus. They are not, as a general rule, going to come to Jesus by picking up the Bible, being convinced by it, and then following him. Nearly everyone in history who has come to Christ has done so through the work of someone they knew. A family member, a friend, a coworker, someone who has shown them what life in Christ is like. After their heart is touched by the Holy Spirit, that work can be encouraged and equipped through the scripture, but that is almost never where people start.
This is good news. It means that they don’t have to be biblical scholars before starting the journey of faith. It also means that you don’t need to be a biblical scholar before sharing Jesus with people. You just need to be someone who is following Jesus yourself. A few weeks ago I encouraged you to think about how you would tell your faith story as an “elevator speech,” just two minutes or less and send a recording of it to me. I haven’t gotten any yet. Maybe the request went in one ear and out the other. Maybe you didn’t think I was serious about it. Maybe you didn’t think you were ready for it. Let me state as clearly as I can, if you have faith in Christ, I was serious about it and if you have faith in Christ, you are ready for it.
I am glad you all are here, but the world doesn’t need people who go to church once a week but then go out and live lives that are fundamentally no different than anyone else’s. The world needs people who are following Christ every day and can share, even just a bit, about what God has done and is doing in their life. Share the good news, with me, with others, with the world, because that is the single most important task that we have in this world. Let us pray.
AMEN