Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, even as they delivered them unto us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; it seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus, that thou mightest know the certainty of those things, wherein thou hast been instructed.— St. Luke i. 1-5.
Two years ago, on St. Luke’s day, I began a series of Lectures on the Acts of the Apostles. This year I commence a series on the Gospel of St. Luke. Am I not reversing the order of these writings? Does not the Evangelist call that ‘the former treatise’ which I am considering last?
Let me remind you that St. Luke was the preacher of a Gospel before he was the writer of one. The book which we call the Acts of the Apostles tells us what he preached, and to what kind of men he preached. It tells us what message St. Peter delivered to those who were assembled, from all parts of the Roman and Parthian empires, on the day of Pentecost. It tells us what message St. Paul delivered to Jews and Gentiles, both in different cities of Greece and Asia Minor. The word Gospel, or good tidings, is a word especially dear to St. Paul, whose companion St. Luke was. We are not left to gather from his writings what sense he attached to it. He has defined it carefully in the opening passage of the Epistle to the Romans:—’ Paul, a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of God (which he had promised afore by his prophets in the holy scriptures), concerning his Son Jesus Christ our Lord, which was made of the seed of David, according to the flesh; and declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead: by whom we have received grace and apostleship, for obedience to the faith among all nations, for his name: among whom are ye also the called of Jesus Christ.
These, then, were the tidings which St. Panl and St. Luke delivered. In answer to these tidings Churches arose. Those who were received into them, Jews and Gentiles, confessed One who was made of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power, to be their common Lord, the bond of their fellowship. They said that they were held together by that Spirit of Holiness which dwelt in Him. They spoke of themselves as citizens of the kingdom of God.
Those who had received this Gospel and been baptised into this fellowship, had been told by the Apostles of certain acts by which Jesus, while He was upon earth, had shewn Himself to be the Son of David and the Son of God. There must have been a multitude of reports concerning these acts floating about, some coming from friends, some from enemies. Could they not be collected? could not the chaff be separated from the wheat, the fancies of men from the Divine discovery? The answer to this demand is in the written Gospel. How a Gospel should be written, who should write it, those who longed for one could not tell, But they believed the longing to be given them from above; they could not doubt that He who inspired it would in some way gratify it.
As I read the Gospels, I find how this need has been supplied. From the place which they now occupy in our Bibles, it has been supposed that they contain ‘lives of Jesus,’ originally simple, probably derived from a common source, increased and interpolated by degrees as notions of His character and office, which had not been previously entertained, were developed in the Church. Such a notion, it seems to me, is dispelled, if we take any one of them and consider it carefully and regularly. I propose to do this with St. Luke’s, not from any preference for it, but specially on account of its connection with that other treatise of which I have spoken to you already. When we have gone through it, you may reconsider that treatise in what appears its natural order.
(1.) The introduction to this Gospel is the highest authority for that account of the purpose of its composition which I have given you. Theophilus, whoever he was, was already a disciple. He had been instructed in the things which were most surely believed in the Church. He desired to know the certainty of those things. St. Luke believed that it was his vocation to give him what he wanted. If Theophilus was an individual, he represented the need of the Church generally. That which was good for him, might, if God pleased, be good for ages to come.
(2.) Many, St. Luke says, had attempted this task before him. They had taken in hand, our translators say, to set forth a DECLARATION of the things which are most surely believed in the Churches. The declaration, I conceive, had been made already. That had been contained in the preaching of the Apostles and their helpers. What was wanted was a continuous Narrative of the things which made the substance of the declaration; for it was a declaration of things, not of opinions; of events that had happened, of acts that had been done. The preaching concerned a person, the narrative must exhibit a person.
Who had taken this great enterprise in hand St. Luke does not say. He may or may not have read the narrative of St. Matthew or St. Mark. Those narratives may or may not have been written. At all events, his phrase ‘many’ will not be satisfied by these two. Nor does St. Luke pronounce on the merits or demerits of his predecessors. That was not his calling. There was a better judge than he of the genuine and the spurious. We may safely affirm that he was not afraid if the experiments to produce a record of our Lord’s acts were ever so numerous; if some of them were ever so confused and erroneous. He could not believe the word which he preached unless he had confidence that what was true would live, that what was false would be, sooner or later, divided from it. If God had conferred the highest blessing on the human race, He would take care that the human race should not miss the blessing through any want of means to be acquainted with it.
(3.) The next clause of this introduction has perplexed many, perhaps has given pain to some. As they delivered these things to us, which from the beginning were eyewitnesses. What then, are we not about to read the story of an eyewitness? St. Luke does not claim that character; he does not desire that we should invest him with it. He has received these records from those who were. He has examined their reports carefully. He does not say that he ever saw Christ whilst he was walking in Galilee or Judea. He seems to imply the contrary. Now here is a difference between him and some of the other Evangelists, perhaps between him and all the other three. Is it a difference which puts him below them, which makes his testimony inferior to theirs? According to their own judgment and confession, assuredly it is not. They tell us that they did not understand the words and acts of Jesus whilst they were walking with Him, whilst they were eyewitnesses of what He did. They misapprehended the particular words and acts. They misapprehended their relation to each other. They misapprehended the Person who was the speaker of the words and the doer of the acts. They tell us this again and again, in various forms of expression, all natural, all simple. ‘Their eyes were holden,’ ‘Their hearts were hardened,’
No doubt they would, sometimes, have ventured to reproduce His parables, or His explanation of the parables, to those about them. They must have been conscious that their lips were stammering, that they misrepresented Him when they most wished to be faithful in their reports; that they degraded Him whom they most wished that others should exalt. By degrees, they will have learnt the wisdom of obeying Him simply, by only preaching ‘Repent, for the kingdom of Heaven is at hand,’ as He bade them, and using the powers of that kingdom as He imparted them, What they all say—what no one says so frequently as the beloved disciple—is, that the things which they could not understand at first came to them with full power and revelation when they saw Him no more; that His Spirit brought back to them acts which had been hidden in the cells of their memory, quickened words that had been mere dead sounds, harmonised precepts which had seemed fragmentary or contradictory, discovered to them the divine source from which they had issued. No doubt to be eyewitnesses of a fact or a person is an honourable distinction: but an eyewitness may glorify himself on that distinction, and attribute a worth to it which no careful student of evidence will concede. There are qualities necessary in an eyewitness besides his eyes, if he would teach us anything, if he would impart truth to us; one who possesses these qualities, and who faithfully sifts the testimonies of eyewitnesses, may tell us what they do not tell, may open to us the very sense and purpose of what they do tell. It is so in all cases: if we believe the Evangelists—those of them who were eyewitnesses—it is pre-eminently so in this case.
(4.) In connection with this subject, I would direct your attention to an expression of St. Luke which is sometimes overlooked. He speaks of those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word. What does he mean by the Word? He does not surely mean that a man could be an eyewitness of sounds, or a minister of sounds. If the expression occurred in St. John’s Gospel, it would cause no perplexity. We should assume at once that he was speaking of the Word which was in the beginning; whose life was the light of men; who was made flesh and dwelt among men.
But it has been customary to assume that no other of the Evangelists ever fell into this kind of language. I cannot doubt that the Apostle who survived to the end of the age, was specially appointed to remove confusions which had haunted the readers of the earlier Gospels and which were giving occasion to various partial theories, by declaring broadly that He who healed the sick and cast out demons whilst He walked below, was the eternal Source of all good and deliverance to the sons of men, one with the Father before the worlds were. But every Jew could read, as well as St. John, that the Word of God had come to Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezekiel. Every Jew who read their prophecies as they were written, believed they had conversed with this Word as with a living person. The thought, ‘He with whom we have conversed is that same Person—He has in human flesh revealed Himself to us,’ was not a strange speculation, the refinement of a later age. It was the simplest way of connecting the old world with their day. It was the great escape from the rabbinical traditions which buried the divine Person under the mere letter of the books. That this thought should express itself naturally—unconsciously, as it were—at the outset of a Gospel concerning a Person, who was an impostor if He were not the messenger of God, the utterer of His mind, cannot, I think, cause us any surprise. Formally to assert the force of the prophetical phrase—to make it prominent before all others—was not St. Luke’s calling. The King, the Christ, is his subject. If we admit any direction of the minds of those who wrote these books—indeed, any special callings of men in this world at all—we can perceive why the tasks of the different Evangelists should be different. We can perceive also why each should inevitably at times adopt forms of speech which appear more characteristic of another.
(5.) Many having written, ‘it seemed good to me also,’ says Luke, to write. ‘It seemed good to him!’ Some may cry, ‘Was he not then taught to write by the Spirit of God?’ I imagine, my friends, that he who described the day of Pentecost, and referred the whole existence and work of the Church to the Spirit of God, had quite as awful a feeling of His government over himself as any of us can have. The freedom of his language shews me how strong his feeling was; our sensitiveness and unwillingness to connect the Spirit with the operations of the human intellect, indicate the weakness of ours. The habitual conviction that he could not have undertaken such a task as he was now entering upon, if he had not been moved to it by the Holy Spirit—that he could not pursue it faithfully, laboriously, effectually, unless the Spirit were at every moment leading his mind out of its own fantasies to the apprehension of that which is—preserved the Evangelist from a number of subtleties into which we fall, because we have lost that conviction, and rather suppose that we are to protect the lessons of the Spirit, than that He is to protect us. We ask for distinctions about the degrees and measures in which the Spirit has been, or will be, vouchsafed. The Evangelists make no such distinctions. I think they dared not. Could they doubt, that if the Spirit called them to the greatest of all works—to that which would most concern the name of God, and the good of their fellowmen for generations—they should have the help and light which they required, that which the Source of all light and help knew what they required? Would they have wished us to doubt that, in all our works, even the humblest, He will grant us what we require?
(6.) The next clause teaches us much on this subject, and would teach us more, if it had not been unhappily perverted in our version. We represent St. Luke as saying, that he had perfect understanding of all things from the very first. I do not know exactly what meaning our translators wish us to attach to that statement; but if any readers have attached this meaning to it, that St. Luke arrived at once, without effort—without any process of sifting or inquiry—at an understanding of the facts which he records, they have directly inverted his words. What he says is, that it seemed good to him to write, having followed out all things with careful diligence from the source, just as a man traces the source of a river from its mountain bed through all its windings. Instead of being absolved from this diligence by the presence of the divine Spirit, he felt himself obliged by that Spirit to spare no labour, not to omit the most earnest and solicitous examination of what he heard from those who were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word; not to give himself credit for understanding it at the first, but to wait for that clear penetrating light which could distinguish between his own impressions and the truth of things. And I apprehend, that the difference between those reports which many had undertaken to write, and those which have really stamped themselves on the heart and conscience and faith of mankind, may be traced mainly to this cause—that the first were the fruits of immature thoughts and feelings which had a strong hold on the writers’ minds, but which had never been submitted to any severe process whereby the gold might be severed from the dross; that the others came from men who remembered the promise, ‘He shall baptise with the Spirit and with fire,’ and who believed that whatever passed through their intellects must undergo this divine fire, if it was to last through the ages, and to testify, in them all, of Him who does not change.
(7.) There is one word more in this preface which I cannot pass by. St. Luke professes to write to Theophilus in order. The narrative is to be an orderly or continuous one. If it does not fulfil this condition, it will not answer its purpose; it will not tell Theophilus the certainty of those things wherein he has been instructed. Can we then discover the order which St. Luke has followed? Clearly, it is very different from that of common biographers, especially different from that which a biographer of Jesus would have adopted, if we may judge from the experience of eighteen centuries. Think how the fancy of painters and of writers of legends has expatiated over the infancy and boyhood of Christ, and then remember how many incidents are recorded by our Evangelist who yet records more than any other—of all the period before He began to be about thirty years of age. Evidently, his conception of the life must be entirely different from theirs. What with them is most substantial is for him a mere introduction. - a most valuable introduction, as I think,—but one which must become false to us if we lose the Evangelist’s perspective, and contemplate it according to some theory of our own. What then is this perspective? What rule does it follow? The answer to this question will come out, I trust, in the course of our readings. I will only anticipate it thus far. I think you will find that what the Evangelist traces are the steps by which a King claimed dominion over His subjects; how they were prepared for Him; how He was prepared for going forth among them; how He manifested the powers of His Kingdom; how He illustrated the nature of it; what kinds of opposition He encountered; what battles He fought; who stood by Him, who deserted Him; how He seemed to be vanquished; how He prevailed at last. The more steadily we keep before ourselves the thought of a Kingdom of Heaven—a kingdom actual in the highest sense, explaining the nature and forces of every kingdom that has existed on the earth, showing what in those kingdoms must abide, what must pass away—the more shall we adhere to the letter of the Gospels, the more shall we enter into their spirit.
This characteristic is common to them all. And it is in the light of that common object we can best examine their specific differences. In general, the hint of a purpose is given very early in the narratives. The title of St. Matthew’s Gospel—The book of the generations of Jesus Christ the Son of David, the Son of Abraham—with the genealogy which follows, marks out his design to associate Jesus with the foregone history of his land. Much as St. Mark resembles him, it is evidently his main object to set forth a Gospel of the Son of God. He exhibits royalty more in act, less as the fulfilment of past anticipations. In this first chapter of St. Luke we have certain signs of his intention, which criticism has often sought to obliterate. The stories of the vision to Zacharias and of the birth of John the Baptist, and of the annunciation to the Virgin, belong exclusively to him. Those who suppose that he was writing the life of a Teacher whom he had preferred to other teachers, to whom he attributed great supernatural powers, of course assume these to be embellishments, introduced for the purpose of magnifying the hero, and of showing that, like other heroes, he had a celestial parentage. On that hypothesis we must at once concede the extravagance and falsity of that which St. Luke sets down as true. Were the hypothesis established, we must abandon the stories of this chapter, and along with them, I conceive, all the rest of the narrative.
If Jesus was not the Son of David or the Son of God, the notion that a preacher of repentance was appointed as the witness of His birth, as well as the notion that a Virgin was chosen to be the instrument of it, fall naturally and without an effort. If He was the Son of God and the King of men, we may feel, we ought to feel, that these records are not those which prove Him to possess His divine royalty—that He must have had it, apart from all circumstances of His birth. The evidence for it may be quite independent of any such circumstances. We may be very thankful to St. John for setting forth His higher generation, to St. Mark for fixing our minds on that evidence of His works on earth which was wholly unconnected with the Virgin. But we shall not feel that such a narrative as we read here is a startling or inconsistent one. Theophilus must have asked, ‘If such a Person as you speak of did come into the world, How did He come? Was His birth like another birth? Was there no preparation for it, no announcement of it?’ An Evangelist who undertook to tell him the certainty of those things wherein he had been instructed, could not evade such inquiries. The answer, it seems to me, which is given is the simplest that we can imagine. What it is, in what manner the two gifts to men, of a Prophet and of a Son, were announced and were received, I propose to consider next Sunday. I would only allude here to the connection of these passages with what we know of the writer. The distinction between the Old and the New Covenant, the covenant with servants and the covenant with sons, the covenant with the nation and the covenant with mankind, must have been always present to the mind of a companion of St. Paul. To show how one passed into the other, how one fulfilled the other, must have been a prominent object in his preaching. When he began to examine all the records of his Lord upon earth, would it have seemed to him a strange anomaly, would it not have struck him as an orderly, reasonable commencement of such a history that there should be a birth like that of the son of Zacharias, the climax of those births on which the Old Testament puts such honour, that there should be one like that of the Son of Mary to inaugurate the new age? May not the evidence of these have come mightily home to him, not being exceptions in the divine method, but as the highest illustrations of it, as a justification of the past, and a preparation for the future? Are not these stories witnesses to us of the glory and blessing of human parentage, of our right to claim a divine parentage?