The Good News According to Luke: Spiritual Reflections

by Richard Rohr

Overview

Richard Rohr shares his understanding of Luke's message for today's reader. Grounded in scholarship but accessible to a general audience, this commentary sheds light on the main themes of Luke's Gospel. He works through each theme in a twofold way. He first addresses individual concerns, duties, and possibilities, and then connects them to the larger picture of cultural and ecclesial values. Fr. Rohr has a fascinating perspective, enhanced by his travels to Africa and Latin America, that can nourish and inspire both individual readers and the church at large.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780824501532
Publisher:	PublishDrive
Publication date:	03/01/2017
Sold by:	PUBLISHDRIVE KFT
Format:	eBook
Pages:	192
File size:	527 KB

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

A Perspective on Luke's Gospel

All religions have tried to discover something about God's nature and purpose. They have used their own common sense, their own logic, their own experience and their own images to come up with a description of God. What is unique about the Judeo-Christian tradition is that we believe God is the one who has revealed to us who God is. It is much more the story of God trying to get to us. This revelation came through the faith experience of the Jewish people, of which Christianity is a development. We believe God has chosen the path of divine self-revelation. God is the one who told us about God. God has shared with us what goes on in the divine heart. In addition, Christians believe that God has even shared with us the "divine flesh" in Jesus. The bottom line is: God has revealed Godself to us through self-disclosure.

People, especially in Western civilization, are uncomfortable with personal and intimate self-revelation coming from God — or from anyone else, for that matter. We're more comfortable thinking about God conceptually than standing in the powerful presence of God's self-revelation. A cartoon made this point well. There were pictured two doorways, one marked "Heaven" and the other marked "Lecture on Heaven." Waiting to enter the lecture room was a long line of people, but almost no one stood before the door leading to the direct experience of God.

Since we are more comfortable in our heads than in our hearts, we tend to avoid facing God's self-disclosure in Scripture. Instead of viewing the Bible as a personal and intimate dialogue between God and humans — characterized by divine revelation and our human faith response to it — we have turned Scripture largely into conceptual and informational content: a set of facts, figures, data, and phenomena which we are supposed to learn. As long as we learn these facts and ideas, we believe that somehow they will save us, liberate us, and bring us to God. We have squeezed the biblical story of God's self-revelation into an intellectual package — a document of conceptual material.

Thus, we have transformed the Bible into an abstraction. Once such a transformation happens and people agree to it, we begin to argue about the interpretations of that abstraction. We prefer to argue about the Bible and how it is to be interpreted, because the content has become the all-important thing.

We seem to believe that God could create human unity, bring about the divine purposes, and reveal God's heart through words and doctrinal formulations. But the most precise formulation of words and their most accurate translations into other languages can never communicate the heart of God and the mind of Christ. Still, we are more comfortable with words, formulations, translations, and arguments. We prefer the lecture on heaven to heaven itself.

I won't say that biblical information isn't important; however, during the past four or five hundred years, scriptural facts and figures have been so emphasized that the Bible has become a tool for dividing people rather than uniting them. Throughout history, we see groups taking sides because of the Bible.

The Bible is not a lecture or treatise on God; it is a story of the experience of God. It is the story of God revealing Godself to a people and what happens after that encounter: some run away from it, some avoid it, some dismiss it, some actively oppose it, some waver, and some fall to their knees in recognition. It is always a text in travail, never just easy answers like "the seven secrets of success."

It's been said that Protestantism has usually depended on scriptural authority, while Catholicism depended on both Scripture and tradition. "Tradition" is an ambiguous word. For many people it just means "the way we used to do things." Most who call themselves traditionalists are simply conservatives by temperament. It scares many Protestant brothers and sisters when Catholics claim that any way we used to do things is always good to draw upon.

When I use the word "tradition," I'm talking about one continuous four-thousand-year tradition — that is, two thousand years of Judaism and two thousand years of Christianity — not about traditions, plural. Traditions, as endearing as they might be, can also become clannish, violent, xenophobic, and resistant to true transcendence.

Tradition is what gives breadth to a Catholic theology; it draws not only from the chronicled accounts we find in the biblical books, but also from the ongoing events of the believing community. Tradition says, in effect, that God is continuously revealing the divinity. God's self-revelation may be found not only in the sacred books, but also in the people who live in the spirit of God in every age — and in the history of our planet and all creation.

I think the importance of tradition in this sense is justified in terms of what we see Luke doing in his gospel. Luke himself is creating his gospel by using Scripture and tradition, and he's doing it within a believing community. In putting together his gospel, he's not only drawing on past Scriptures, such as the Hebrew Bible and Mark's Gospel, but he's also weaving in contemporary spirituality, knowledge of the theological schools of Judaism, experience of the times, insights of the believing community (the living Body of Christ), and putting it all together.

If you insist that it's not "biblical" to integrate Scripture and tradition in the context of the believing community, logically you must also assert that the New Testament writers were not biblical. If the only way to be biblical is to quote the Scriptures and nothing else, then the evangelists themselves were not biblical, because they didn't just quote the Scriptures. The early Christians used the Scriptures as part of an entire way of thinking, relating, and communicating within their faith community. As communicators of a message and a meaning, the evangelists called upon the best they could gather from their tradition as a faith community to communicate God's power and presence.

This approach seems to me to be so self-evident it is amazing that certain people who claim to be biblical don't see it. By their definition of biblical, the very biblical people they quote are not biblical. This is important because, even today, to hold such a narrow definition of biblical — "If it isn't in the Bible, it isn't true" — is to severely limit reality.

Thus, Catholicism has for its authority the book, tradition, and the believing community (the Body of Christ). For me, these three sources are all summed up in the word "church."

The Bible as a Faith Community's Story

Christian Scripture remains a point of contention and division because it is interpreted apart from the living church to which it was first given, apart from the various early Christian communities each telling its story of their experience of the risen Christ. The New Testament indeed contains divine words about Christ, but mostly it contains words spoken by the early faith community as it stood in relation to Christ. The Bible's words reflect the way Christ was understood by the men and women who made up the church when Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, and the others were writing.

The sacred text, then, is one step removed from a direct experience of Christ. It is now generally accepted by Scripture scholars that most of the evangelists — certainly Mark and Luke — never physically encountered Jesus. Matthew and John, as gospel authors, were traditionally seen as apostles, but Mark and Luke weren't. They, like us, knew him in the context of a believing community. Luke perhaps knew Jesus through Paul, but Paul never knew Jesus in the flesh either. Paul learned about Jesus through the early faith communities, those living bodies of Christ whom he visited and lived with. It was the same for Luke; he learned to know Jesus by living as part of a first-century Christian faith community.

When scholars refer to a Christian community in the early church they are not talking about anything comparable to today's big-city parishes. Very likely we're talking about gatherings of thirty or forty people, very small, but amazingly influential groups of people. They were able to touch significant numbers of people and change the course of history because of their conviction and commitment to each other.

As a group of believers grows larger and larger, a kind of anonymity and noncommitment emerges. We all know that experience in our large American parishes. The contemporary church is trying, especially in the Third World, to allow base communities to reemerge, but it will be many years before they really take hold in America. As long as we have the priesthood running everything in big parishes, we won't feel the need for smaller core groups (or cells) in Christianity.

We know that in the beginnings of the church, Christians experienced the faith in cells, or small communities, out of which came a great deal of conviction and commitment to each other. Luke reflects this high degree of commitment. The questions he deals with in his gospel are very pastoral and interpersonal, nonacademic. They are questions about their relationship with Jesus and with his Body, that is, each other.

Scholars suggest Luke's is the third written gospel, following Mark and Matthew, but before John. There is a tendency to place Luke's Gospel later than Mark and Matthew — around the year 85 — because of the amount of theological development it contains. Many well-developed theological themes are found in Luke, certainly many more than in Mark, where the message is still simple and direct, probably because it was written perhaps twenty years previously.

To get Luke's chronological perspective, imagine that it is 1980. Most people in 1980 do not remember 1933 very clearly. I don't. I wasn't born then. (I suspect Luke was like me, not even born when the key events happened.) Let's say there was an outstanding itinerant preacher who traveled around Canada between 1930 and 1933 but his story hasn't been written. In 1980, his story is still waiting to be written, and I have been asked to write it.

That's the perspective Luke faced, that almost fifty-year stretch between the death and resurrection of Jesus until the year 80, including all those intervening decades — the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s — while the tradition of the Jesus experience was being mulled over, shared, and passed on by his followers. Certain stories are being selected for telling over and over; others are being forgotten. This almost fifty-year period shaped what we call the "oral tradition." Finally, after a generation or more of believers had come and gone, sometime around the year 80, Luke started putting together the elements of his gospel story.

From this perspective, the resurrection is not the end of Luke's Gospel but its beginning. If the gospel is a recording of the faith experience being shared among groups of Christian people during the first century, then Jesus' resurrection marks the start of their faith journey. Sometime around the year 33 C.E., their experience of the risen Jesus finally gave birth to the church. From within that faith community trying to continue to live their belief in the risen Jesus, the gospels were created.

This perspective is not understood by most people who use the Bible; they don't deal with those first fifty years of the church's experience. Rather, they pretend that the Christian Scriptures came straight down from heaven in the form of divine dictation. Some naively think God spoke the gospel's words into the evangelists' ears. That understanding gives the Scriptures an authority unrelated to culture and history and, unfortunately, unrelated to reality as well.

What is written in the biblical text describes the reflection of the believing community — what I call the church — upon the mystery of Jesus. What is written in Luke's Gospel describes a believing community's reflection on the mystery of the risen Lord at the time Luke was writing, reflecting their questions, problems, and needs. I am not denying that this sacred text is the word of the Lord, but it is more accurate to say the Bible contains the messages of God as they are received, understood, prayed upon, and used to lead a community of believers.

Those who passed on the oral tradition and those who put the Christ story into written books were real people, like you and me, walking among a community of fellow believers. When they began writing, they had already been gathering from the tradition what would be helpful for their situation in answering the questions believers had about God's revelation and the problems they faced in relating to the risen Lord and to each other. Luke was writing his version of the good news for his own people in the 80s, who were facing their own particular problems and questions.

For example, one big problem Luke's community seemed to be facing was much the same worry or anxiety that Mark's community felt. Many were still presuming, as Jesus himself seems to have done, that the Second Coming — the Parousia — was imminent. No one denied, including Luke, that Jesus had said, "I tell you truly, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the kingdom of God" (9:27) and "I tell you solemnly, before this generation has passed away all will have taken place" (21:32).

If Luke knew the Parousia was no longer imminent, why would Luke in his gospel text repeat Jesus' inaccurate prediction? In these passages, Luke is perhaps showing us some thoughts and predictions from Jesus' human consciousness which in fact did not work out. Perhaps that's one of the reasons Luke asserts that Jesus' mind grew in wisdom, age, and grace (see 2:40, 52).

To accept that something Jesus said didn't actually happen on schedule is a new way of thinking for most Christians today, but the facts are quite evident. Jesus — at least as Luke presents him — does not always have correct historical and geographical information, and here Luke shows that Jesus does not have a clear understanding of the way history is going to unfold. To Luke, it seems acceptable that Jesus is operating out of a fallible human consciousness. That's in no way to deny his divinity. It really makes more overwhelming the mystery of the incarnation, that the one whom we would later call the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity and the Son of God entered into our humanity so fully. Luke is showing us that Jesus really entered into our clouded human consciousness, taking on all its limitations.

At this point in the last quarter of the first century, Christian communities had become aware that either Christ was delaying his return, or it wasn't going to happen the way they thought it would and the way Jesus said it would. To us, two thousand years later, the fact that the risen Lord didn't come back in glory during the first generation hasn't been a problem. Unlike the early church, we weren't told in catechism classes that Jesus was going to return in our lifetime. But that first generation of Christians were taught that and believed it.

That's why there's such an emphasis on it in Mark's Gospel. He's calling his community to radical total discipleship because, apparently, Mark believed, "All we have is a few short years left, and the game's over." (This is, of course, always true for all of us!) It's interesting that Luke is also an evangelist of radical discipleship, but he's changed the wording and the understanding. He's not making the call softer, but in telling us that we must take up our cross, he adds the word "daily" (9:23). In other words. Luke says it looks like it's going to be conversion, day after day, for the rest of our lives. It won't be just one big dramatic "leave all things and follow me." He's saying, "It's going to be a long haul."

Luke is speaking from a different perspective. People in his community are becoming aware that it looks like Jesus isn't going to return any time soon. Things are not going to happen as earlier Christians had expected. Luke's Gospel is in many ways trying to help his community deal with that traumatic awareness and show them how to experience the presence of the risen Lord and deepen their common faith through "ordinary time."

Until we understand that the gospel writers were each responding to the needs of their generation and their community, we inevitably misuse the Bible for our own purposes (using texts out of context) instead of using it positively as Luke did (using old texts to reveal patterns in a new context). For example, many today misuse the Bible as a private source-text for their own spiritual enrichment or to find their own specific answers to life's problems. That's the way the majority of the world treats the Bible, but I don't think that's what the gospel is about. That's not what God intended nor what Luke intended.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "The Good News According to Luke"
by .
Copyright © 1997 Richard Rohr.
Excerpted by permission of The Crossroad Publishing Company.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Preface,
Acknowledgments,
One — A PERSPECTIVE ON LUKE'S GOSPEL,
Two — FROM JESUS' BIRTH TO THE CLOSE OF HIS GALILEAN MINISTRY,
Three — JESUS' PUBLIC LIFE IN GALILEE,
Four — THE MIDDLE SECTION OF LUKE'S GOSPEL,
Five — JERUSALEM, PASSION, DEATH, RESURRECTION,