Chapter I
This Evangelist is St. Luke. No one doubts that the two New Testament books attributed to him are closely connected. He addresses both to the same person, and calls the first “the treatise of that which Jesus began to do and to teach until the day he was taken up.”
The introduction to his Gospel has prompted much discussion; I doubt we have grasped its full importance. “The things in which Theophilus had been catechised,” “the things most surely believed among us,” must all have related to the person of Christ. The theology of the Apostolic Church had a living centre—Christ himself. Only through knowing what he did and what he was could that theology’s meaning be drawn out. So an Evangelist, in any sense of the word, must be one who sets forth Christ’s life. This introduction also assumes that someone who had not seen our Lord could be just as competent an Evangelist as an eyewitness. There might be many unrecorded facts about him, but the Evangelist’s task was not chiefly to hunt for these, but to follow up the facts already accepted as common ground of the Church’s faith, so that their full meaning could be brought to light. St. Luke promises not something new, but an orderly narrative—one that presents the facts so coherently that the character disclosed by them, and their relation to past, present, and future, would be more clearly grasped. He mentions that many others had attempted the same task; he does not disparage them, only asserts his own contribution. All such works would be tested; whatever served to expound the Divine Mind would endure as a lasting possession.
If you have followed what was said of St. Matthew, the contrast between his Gospel and St. Luke’s shows plainly in their accounts of Christ’s conception and birth. In Matthew, the birth of a Son of God through a woman married to an heir of David’s house, yet without his part, fulfilled the line of births from Isaac onward, each attesting God as author and preserver of the race. In Luke, the difference between the Old Dispensation and the new is shown by the parallel stories of Zachariah and Mary. John is born to a father well advanced in age and a barren mother, as Isaac was—showing, as with Samuel before him, that birth is of divine power, not human will. But John remains the child of a man; whereas the holy child born of Mary is to be called the Son of God.
Whatever one thinks of the genuineness of these chapters, this contrast was clearly in the writer’s mind. Modern critics find the very obviousness of the intention suspicious: “This is not history but artificial theology,” they say. Whether it is an artificial theory, or the revelation of a Divine principle without which the facts of Jesus’s life would mean and account for nothing, is exactly the question at issue—one I cannot argue point by point without repeating myself or anticipating the whole inquiry. My present concern is the connection of these chapters with the rest of Luke’s Gospel, and what they show of his intent.
Notice the surrounding details in both stories. Both Gospels mention Angels. We might expect this to be most definite in Matthew, the essentially Hebrew Gospel. Instead, Matthew simply says “the Angel of the Lord” appeared to Joseph in a dream, while Luke gives a name: “I am Gabriel, that stand in the presence of God.” All the Old Testament assumes communication between the visible and invisible worlds, but not until Daniel are these visitants named or given specific offices. The change in Jewish feeling after the Captivity is often attributed to Chaldean influence—an explanation I find vague, though I do not dismiss the fact it tries to account for.
If the Captivity was, as Jewish Scripture treats it, as pivotal an epoch as Abraham’s call or David’s reign (so Matthew implies), it must be a step in divine revelation like those. Daniel suggests, and later history confirms, that this was when prophecy was sealed and the old records gathered into a complete volume. Daniel also teaches that the age of Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus began a great period for all nations, each with its appointed place under divine government—and it is in this connection that Angels are introduced, each nation under one. This belief is clearly close to the heathen notion of tutelary divinities. Yet a Jew could hardly hold the Lord’s absolute rule over every nation alongside his special rule over Israel without some such faith: “We are under the everlasting I AM; other nations he has committed to angels.” This may have developed as Jewish and Gentile history began to flow together—not a graft of Gentile notions onto a Jewish stem, but an application of an old Jewish truth to interpret new facts of Gentile history and mythology.
Whether Christ’s coming should be announced by a messenger from the invisible world is reasonable or incredible depending entirely on what we believe of his office and character. If he were King of Men, Lord of both worlds, the bond between them, the absence of such an announcement would be the more puzzling fact. If he were not this, I admit the story, however simply told, must be abandoned. But granting an annunciation at all, that it should come as Luke reports it, and that Luke should be its reporter, seems natural—for Luke is, on the common view I adopt, the Gentile Evangelist, meant to prepare us to see Christ as the Desire of Nations, and to explain the merging of Jewish and Gentile history and feeling that had been underway since the Captivity.
But the angelic visitations are secondary to the messages they bring: “Thy wife Elizabeth shall conceive and bear a son,” “The Holy Ghost shall come on thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee.” Here Luke shows the central opposition between old age and new. The Holy Ghost working distinctly and personally as Life-giver in human spirits and bodies is, most of us hold, the very mark of the Gospel kingdom. We often lose ourselves in vague metaphors about it, yet we should not think we speak merely in metaphor when we speak of the Holy Ghost’s operations—nor would orthodox believers accept that a power true of the members could not be true, in transcendent measure, of the Head first. I only ask that readers follow this thread of thought carefully and literally, and be ready to set aside habitual notions if the book they call divine requires it. Those who do not accept the document, I ask only to determine carefully what it actually says, rather than charging it with inconsistencies we ourselves have put there.
One more opposition deserves attention; its importance is great. Zacharias is a priest performing an office in the Jewish commonwealth, representing Israel; the message to him concerns that office. Mary is simply a woman, a maiden of Galilee, her link to David’s house mentioned only through her husband Joseph. She represents humanity in its lowliest form, and shows what constitutes its excellence: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” Here is the sancta sanctissima—the only sanctity she claims, the only one it would not have been blasphemy for her to claim. All goodness lies in trust and obedience, all evil in distrust and disobedience: this is the lesson Luke opens his Gospel with, and it runs through his mind as it did through his Master’s.
Luke has often been called the Hymn-writer of the New Testament. The Songs of Mary and Zacharias set forth the character of the New Dispensation, with the old as its witness and herald. Both celebrate that a spring of life and joy has opened for humanity, that a kingdom of the Spirit is beginning—a kingdom now revealed but always existing, the subject of prophecy because prophecy speaks of the eternal mystery made known in its appointed time.
Chapter II
Luke’s second chapter says nothing of the wise men from the East, the flight into Egypt, or the massacre at Bethlehem. Instead it tells of Caesar Augustus’s decree taxing all the world; of the message to the shepherds that “to them was born in the city of David a Saviour, who was Christ the Lord”; of the song “Glory be to God in the highest, on earth peace, goodwill toward men”; of Simeon’s blessing on him who would be “a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of the people Israel”; of the widow who spoke of the child to all who awaited redemption in Jerusalem. The scenery is all Jewish—the royal city, the purification offerings, the holy doctor, the woman serving God in the Temple with fasting and prayer. Yet this only makes the essentially human character of the rejoicing and prophecy more striking. We hear not of kings or priests but of shepherds and devout ordinary people, finding consolation in the belief of a blessing for the Gentiles and redemption for mankind.
The other event in this chapter is the Child staying behind in the Temple among the doctors, to hear them and ask questions. There is no hint yet of his later ministry—the Boy is a questioner, not a teacher, perfectly fulfilling the obedience of a child even while about his Father’s business. Yet there is a clear sign of spiritual power able to bring men’s hidden thoughts to light and make the learned scribe know himself and God as never before. Matthew showed us a kingship over nature and over men’s minds and bodies; Luke, more than either of the other Evangelists, compels us to recognize a life-giving sympathy, an intercourse with the inner man, a human fellowship grounded in, not contradicting, divine condescension.
Chapter III
John the Baptist’s preaching in chapter three differs from earlier accounts in the answers he gives to the various groups who ask, “What shall we do then?” The simplicity of these answers—ordinary duties suited to each questioner’s station, and warnings against their particular temptations—might seem at odds with the spiritual character claimed for Luke. Would a disciple of St. Paul be expected to preserve such plain moral instruction as preparation for faith? Or, if it belongs naturally to John’s lower dispensation, would John himself have remembered and kept it? I think John is exactly the one to have done so. People of every kind came to be baptized. If their confession of sin was sincere, they had received power from above to act rightly, and were to prove their faith by doing so. Higher blessings would follow. They would come to know the one who unites publicans, soldiers, all people in one; they would receive his baptism of Spirit and fire, fitting them for higher ministries and preserving them through the coming trial.
Chapter IV
I have nothing new to add on the genealogy. That it traces back to Adam shows Luke is not chiefly concerned with a Son of David and Son of Abraham, though none could fully be those without also being Son of Man and Son of God. Luke must bring this fact out directly, not as a side point: the second Adam must be seen, more completely than the first yet just as actually and formally, as representative of the race.
All the Evangelists say Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. Luke says Jesus, “being full of the Holy Ghost, returned from Jordan, and was led into the wilderness”; that he “returned in the power of the Spirit into Galilee”; and describes him opening the book in the Nazareth synagogue to read, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me.” These are not trivial details—any book would be recognized by such phrases as revealing the writer’s habitual cast of mind, and the more we consider them in their context, the more force they carry.
The Temptation, in all the Gospels, is the pivotal event on which the following ministry depends. I have already noted a difference in the order of the temptations in Luke compared to Matthew, and agreed this reflects Luke’s Gentile, human emphasis against Matthew’s. I did not press the point hard, because the Temptation is so much a meeting point of both Gospels—the Son’s obedience to the Father being the ground of the dominion over the world’s kingdoms which the devil cannot give—that I am wary of distinctions that might obscure the common truth beneath them. There are minor contrasts, such as between “he fasted forty days, and then the Tempter came to him” and “being forty days tempted of the devil,” which are instructive once we grasp the ground of the Evangelists’ differences and resemblances—but more valuable traced out for oneself than received secondhand. I offer hints, not my own interpretations imposed on the reader.
Chapter V
Everyone notices the difference in order of events between Luke and Matthew, and most preachers have tried at some point to trace the course of each narrative. I believe such efforts mostly disappoint—the theories we trust most turn out to leak once we are at sea in them. Still, the effort has its reward even without a firm conclusion. I claim no new light, but reading Luke’s story in light of what I take to be his leading thought, I find an inward coherence in his record—one that has justified itself to me, though I might blunder trying to explain why particular narratives sit where they do rather than elsewhere. If these Gospels are works of divine art, they should show the kind of arrangement of parts we recognize in human art and still more in nature—an arrangement we could not lose without losing the sense of the whole, one that critics may help us consider but which mostly comes to us slowly, and which we may never fully explain to others, though it shapes our own minds and makes what we say clearer. With this I leave the chapter, in which nothing is, strictly, new—though its context gives every passage in it a force different from what it had with other surroundings.
Chapter VI
This applies still more to chapter six. There has been endless debate over whether the discourse here is an abridgement of the Sermon on the Mount. The facts: many sentiments from Matthew 5–7 appear here in nearly the same words; a number are wholly omitted, though some reappear elsewhere in modified form. Matthew has Jesus going up a mountain and sitting to teach after seeing the multitudes; Luke has him coming down to stand “in the plain.” In Matthew the sermon follows the calling of James and John; in Luke it follows the naming of the twelve apostles.
Some have explained these differences by supposing the Evangelists merely gathered scattered sayings of Christ into one general sermon. But surely the scenery of the discourse is part of its substance—strip it away and you turn a living utterance into a set of school maxims, destroying its very nature. That the same words were repeated in different places and circumstances, gaining new meaning each time, is only to be expected: no true human teacher fails to repeat himself, since he applies the same principles to many cases and so keeps them ever fresh. But when specific persons and places are named, it is because they belong essentially to the words spoken, and cannot be torn away without dislocating their sense. Comparing Matthew 4:23–25 with Luke 6:17–19 shows the same kind of persons, places, and scenery in both. The difference—that Matthew says he went up a mountain and opened his mouth, while Luke says he went up to pray and then came down to the plain to speak—is too slight to matter; no one imagines he preached from some high, remote peak. Matthew’s language is general but accurate enough for his purpose; Luke’s is more specific because he has another fact to record—Christ’s prior solitary prayer and private choosing of the Apostles. As for timing, each Evangelist plainly sacrifices strict chronology to the order that best reveals his purpose. Within the fixed landmarks all four observe—Temptation, Transfiguration, Entry into Jerusalem—each follows his own guided thread, grouping events by another than a time order, and it appears a simple, natural one. Matthew links the calling and naming of the Apostles to their commissioning; Luke links their naming to a discourse delivered, he implies, right after their appointment, setting forth the nature of the kingdom they were to proclaim.
So what matters is the nature and intent of the discourse as each Evangelist reports it. I have touched on this already. Luke has not merely trimmed a few minor passages from Matthew’s sermon—he has omitted some of its most important and characteristic parts, the very ones that shape how we read all of Matthew’s version. This cannot be accidental. Luke has no more abridged this discourse than Mark abridged Matthew’s whole Gospel. He has left out precisely what conveys Matthew’s purpose, because it would obscure his own. What Luke keeps thus gains a force it would otherwise lack: it sets forth not the fulfillment of the old dispensation but the distinct character of the new. The precious Hebrew element was fully brought out elsewhere; Luke’s task was to let it recede, so the purely human element of the teaching could stand out.
Chapters VII. VIII
Two narratives in chapter seven belong only to Luke: the raising of the Widow of Nain’s son, and the encounter with the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house. It must strike most readers that the first three Gospels place less emphasis on raising the dead than we might expect. The few such acts mentioned are not singled out from Christ’s other acts, nor is the impression they made much dwelt upon—only words like “There came a fear on all; and they glorified God, saying, A great Prophet is risen up among us, and God hath visited his people.” These Evangelists are so deeply convinced that Christ came to confront death in every form that they make no special note of any one instance over another. I find nothing remarkable, then, in Luke recording one more such event than Matthew or Mark.
But ordinary readers’ instincts—often better guides to inner meaning than critics’ arguments—have always fixed on “son of a widow” as the vital heart of this story. I believe this reflects Luke’s mind. If the New Dispensation is marked, as against the Old, by giving more direct honor to women—or rather bringing out honor already latent in them—Luke, true to his character as we’ve traced it, would naturally show this mark of the new age in connection with the Son of God’s life. We saw this already in chapters one and two, not through sentimentality or loss of the manliness proper to Jewish and every great nation’s history, but by linking the glory of woman to the glory of humanity, showing her passive, receptive faith as the channel of real divine power. I would fear being thought fanciful in linking this to the Nain miracle, if honest popular feeling did not support it, and if similar instances did not recur throughout this Gospel.
One appears immediately after. Our Lord is eating in the Pharisee’s house; a sinful woman enters with an alabaster box of ointment, stands weeping at his feet, washes them with her tears, dries them with her hair, kisses and anoints them. It would badly distort this story to read it as concerning one sex only. The common understanding—that it shows Christ’s treatment of the sinner as such, and the difference between one conscious of owing five hundred pence and one who barely admits to fifty—is surely right, and I would never weaken it, for it displays one of this Gospel’s greatest traits as the Gentile Gospel: its eagerness to show that the outcast and lost are constant objects of divine care. But the person embodying this principle must not be forgotten. Every one of her acts, as all have noticed, is the act of a woman—the whole female character shows through them. This is a side of humanity that must never be absent from a man, or he hardens into a Pharisee or Sadducee. In one sense it is humanity itself, ashamed yet dependent, trusting, hiding its evil in a love above it until lost and buried there. But it is specifically the female side of humanity—not the commanding, kingly side, but the side of submission, self-surrender, hope, prone to weakness and ruin, yet capable of being raised from the depths by a voice of love acknowledged also as a voice of authority: “Thy faith hath saved thee; go in peace.” The belief in a Magdalen has always gone hand in hand in Christendom with belief in a Virgin. Both have been badly degraded, dragging down with them the ideas of penitence and faith—degrading the female character itself, which then makes its own religion, idolizes its fancies, cuts itself off from manly thought, and provokes a defiant, atheistic reaction. But both ideas can and must be redeemed, and no one could help that work more than the Evangelist appointed to bring them vividly before us.
Chapter eight opens with another such indication: “And it came to pass afterward, that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings of the kingdom of God: and the twelve were with him. And certain women, which had been healed of evil spirits and infirmities, Mary called Magdalene, out of whom went seven devils, and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward, and Susanna, and many others, which ministered unto him of their substance.” This important passage belongs only to Luke. On its strength, the Magdalen has reasonably been identified with the woman of the alabaster box. Whether she is also the sister of Lazarus is harder to say, and this passage, or the rest of Luke’s Gospel, sheds no light on it.
Chapter IX
This chapter contains the Transfiguration, and so, as noted earlier, should be critical for chronology—as all commentators agree. Verse 51, “when the time was come that he should be received up, he steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem,” can only mean he set out on the final journey ending in his royal entry and crucifixion. Everything between that verse and Luke 19:28 belongs to that journey, however short its actual duration. This section contains the most distinctive material in Luke’s Gospel—proof, if any were needed, of how little value harmonist chronology has for grasping the real meaning or relation of passages to one another.
Between verses 49 and 57 are two narratives found only in Luke. The first turns on John’s remark when Jesus set a child beside him: “Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name; and we forbad him, because he followeth not with us”—a passage revealing how Christ’s words could stir a response in conscience seemingly unrelated to them, and warning powerfully against our interfering with God’s own assignment of offices to men. This connects closely to Luke’s purpose: Paul’s disciple would naturally recall words showing that calling the twelve did not exclude another, more secret calling—that the Apostles’ order, holy as it was, drew its holiness entirely from the one who might choose others differently to cast out devils in his name.
Still more characteristic is the next passage. On the road to Jerusalem, Christ and his disciples enter a Samaritan village that refuses to receive them; James and John ask, “Shall we call down fire upon them, as Elias did?” This must have been shortly after Peter’s confession and the Transfiguration, when the Apostles felt more strongly than ever that their Master was the divine King, Son of the living God. What could be more natural than to vindicate his authority by a method Old Testament history had sanctioned? It has rightly been said that the answer, “Ye know not what manner of spirit ye are of,” was not a condemnation of Elias but an assertion of the new economy’s principle. Yet I cannot accept that these words carried no censure at all, or merely rebuked an understandable ignorance—they are too strong for that. They must mean, “You do not know whether you act under a righteous or an unrighteous spirit.” What Elias did in a righteous spirit to assert the Lord God of Israel’s dominion, they would have done merely to assert their own Master’s authority over them personally. The Apostles’ persecuting temper showed they still did not grasp that they served a Son of Man, head of a universal dispensation gathering Samaritans and Jews into one fold—which is why Luke would carefully record the story and its warning. But since this Son of Man was also Son of God, fulfilling what Moses and Elijah had spoken, James and John’s words showed they were only beginning to understand the acts of lawgivers and prophets, not yet entering into their true mind and spirit.
Chapter X
The mission of the Seventy is recorded only by Luke. Old commentators have guessed he was among them—an unnecessary assumption, since we know he was an Evangelist, and we’ve just seen his care to report words checking an apostle’s wish to make his own order a basis for exclusion. It was natural for him to dwell on an event that justified a distinct class of teachers, showing that the New Dispensation, though rooted in the Old and honoring the twelve Apostles, would need and have an organization suited to work among the Gentiles. Notably, neither here nor in the charge to the twelve in chapter twelve does Luke limit the mission to the tribes of Israel, as Matthew does—suggesting Luke had in view the ultimate, universal scope of both offices rather than any temporary restriction. Strictly, Matthew’s instructions apply to the Apostles’ immediate mission to towns Christ himself had visited or would visit. But the words “Ye shall not have gone over the cities of Judah till the Son of Man come” surely mean more than merely the span of Christ’s earthly life. What force they carried for their original hearers, and how they were understood, may come up in my second lecture. Here I only wish to note Luke’s consistency in pursuing the theme that distinguishes his Gospel from the Hebrew one.
The exquisite passage comparing the Seventy’s joy that devils are subject to them, with Jesus’s own rejoicing—“I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent”—deserves deep study, and sheds light on our theme. Spiritual life and joy, in its pure form and its temptations, should especially concern the Evangelist of the coming age. What an incalculable loss it would be without this glimpse of gladness at the very heart of the Man of Sorrows.
The private words to the disciples, “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that ye see: for I tell you, that many prophets and kings have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them,” immediately suggest the comparison this whole Gospel draws between what had been and what was to come. They flow naturally from what precedes: Christ’s own gladness could not stay confined to himself but overflowed onto those around him—his blessedness lay in their blessedness, and theirs in knowing the Father and the Son.
I believe the Church (see the Gospel for the 13th Sunday after Trinity) teaches much by linking these words to what follows—the lawyer’s question and the parable of the Good Samaritan. The representative of the old world, the Law, asks, “What shall I do to inherit eternal life?” The Pharisaic schools, understanding “eternal” life merely as future life and its rewards, endlessly debated whose rules were best. As with the young ruler’s similar question elsewhere, keeping the commandments was not thought sufficient even by those who valued the commandments most—something more must be done. What did this new prophet propose? Christ’s reply is an argumentum ad hominem: he sends the lawyer back to the Law itself. He does not endorse the idea that more is required than what is written—but what is written? The lawyer recalls words some enlightened teacher had likely set forth as God’s highest demand: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and mind, and thy neighbor as thyself.” He could not have answered better; the secret was there in Deuteronomy. But never before, under Truth’s own gaze, commended for knowing the right way, had he felt so keenly that these grand words did not settle his case. Loving God with all one’s heart was conceivable; so was loving one’s neighbor as oneself. But who is one’s neighbor? The text never says. What a discovery for a lawyer—that the sublimest command, however precise, could not even define its own object! A whole field was left open to interpreters’ subtlety, practically to ordinary fancy, in fixing the limits of “neighbor.” Where was the definition to come from? The parable answered it: it reveals a Law of Love acting directly on the heart, itself determining who counts as neighbor where outward geography, tradition, and religious maxims denied the connection—and it reveals the powerlessness of a mere rule to compel that recognition where all such lines proclaimed it should exist. The priest and Levite saw the man who had gone down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and passed by.
There is a depth to this parable, taken even in its simplest sense, that familiarity has blinded us to. I do not doubt it describes a real incident. The Samaritans are consistently shown as open to feelings of affection and gratitude that the formality-bound Jew did not entertain. Where did these feelings come from? From evil nature? Did the Samaritan have less of that nature because he rejected part of Scripture and did not worship at the Jerusalem Temple? Or was there some secret spring of good from which all love, in Jew or Samaritan, actually flowed—some real Person in whom the Law of Love dwelt perfectly, the source of men’s power to fulfill it? Should not Jews, aware they could not fulfill that law despite possessing its letters carved in stone, cry out for such a one to appear and declare himself Lord of their lives, author of their obedience? And if he did, might not Samaritans, might not Gentiles, recognize him as the common brother of all, the one claiming every wounded, half-dead creature as an object of his love, whose Spirit helps us all to go and do likewise? Blessed are your eyes, fishermen of Galilee, to see that universal brother whom kings and prophets longed to see!
If I am right, this parable is the pattern for those found only in Luke: each has its own distinct purpose and truth about the divine Kingdom, yet each carries a sense of the contrast between Law and Gospel, the human and the merely national, the mind of God shown in a Person versus that same mind shown in decrees—and yet also of the underlying oneness of old and new principles. It can be hard to separate this idea from Matthew’s idea of fulfillment, since each so implies the other. Yet presenting either alone would leave something narrow that should be universal and perfect; presenting both together left room for partisans to seize one and call it a contradiction rather than a completion of the other. But I am getting ahead of this inquiry.
I have described Luke’s Gospel as displaying contrasts. This is long recognized in the story ending this chapter. The active and contemplative types of character are brought together, with a clear preference expressed for Mary’s type. This opposition surely exists in every age. But I question whether we grasp our Lord’s full meaning by reducing two actual women to mere representatives of qualities that should unite in every character formed in the image of him whose delight was doing his Father’s will, and who went about doing good. Martha is rebuked for complaining, not for her diligence. The deeper lesson seems to be that restlessness and bustle are not real activity, and that a still, inward current of life is essential to steady, patient work. I suspect our eagerness to stress “one thing is needful” comes less from reverence for the speaker than from its convenience as a short sermon motto, and from the mistaken idea that religion is one selfish pursuit to be separated from everything else rather than a great many things. Adopt that notion, and we will certainly not sit at Jesus’s feet—we may be less active than Martha, but just as troubled and restless. This might suggest I want to weaken the passage’s popular force; in fact I want to strengthen it by stripping away accompaniments that have nothing to do with it. The genuine common feeling about Mary and Martha agrees with what I’ve said of Luke’s general aim, illustrating his special tendency to show the female character in relation to Christ and his Gospel—seizing one point that has remarkably distinguished the history of the modern world from the ancient.
Chapter XI
In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Christ tells his disciples not to pray showily like the Pharisees but to their Father who sees in secret, then says, “After this manner therefore pray ye.” Here in Luke, the disciples ask, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples,” and he repeats, with slight variation, the same form of words. This form, it’s often noted, was already known to the Jews in its separate petitions. It became the Lord’s Prayer not because Jesus told his disciples to discard what existed before, but because he enabled them to grasp its true sense—to feel that God was, and would be, answering it, that their Father himself meant to accomplish what he taught them to ask. The Pharisee might say “Our Father” while praying showily in the streets, but he did not believe in a Father—only in a Being whose name he dreaded, whose kingdom he feared, whose will he merely wished matched on earth as in heaven. So Matthew rightly shows Christ fulfilling the very letter and spirit of the Old Dispensation by teaching the confession of a Father and desire for his triumph that the Pharisees, in their self-righteousness, continually betrayed. But the disciples would naturally think a prayer spoken before a great crowd was not meant specially for them, his chosen band. They had seen him praying alone on a mountain; they recalled John giving his disciples what seemed special wisdom; would Christ not share some esoteric secret of prayer, of moving the divine mind? Instead he taught them the same “Our Father”—the prayer for the New Dispensation, belonging as much to the poorest beggar in the crowd as to them, the future ministers and judges of the new kingdom.
Then follows, found nowhere else, a parable urging importunity—that a friend may obtain by persistent asking what mere friendship alone would not secure. Compare this to Matthew: “Do not think ye shall be heard for your much speaking; for your Father in heaven knows what things ye have need of before you ask him.” The two lessons seem opposed. Curiously, the sentiment modern liberal readers favor comes from the narrow Hebrew Matthew, while the one they call fanatical comes from Paul’s disciple. It is worth noting that the importunity Luke urges, here and in a later parable, is importunity that God’s will be done and his kingdom come. What that kingdom and will are, and how each is to be accomplished, God must know before we ask him. But the eagerness of our asking depends first on believing his is a good will and kingdom; second, on experiencing a real evil will and kingdom resisting it; third, on trusting that we are meant to be fellow-workers with our Father, contributing our own energies to the victory of true over false—in short, on the degree to which the Spirit of our Father works in us. So it is fitting that the Gospel most concerned with the Spirit’s communication to man as the source of his energies should dwell on this side of the truth. This is illustrated by the parallel passages, Matthew 7:11 and Luke 11:13: Luke gives up the antithesis “how much more shall your heavenly Father give good gifts” in favor of “Give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him.” No doubt Christ used both expressions at different times, but how much light the latter casts on the former!
From here Luke moves, quite naturally, to Christ’s argument with the Pharisees over the power by which he cast out devils. It was by a Spirit that he cast them out. If an evil spirit, then Satan is divided against himself; if a good spirit, then the strong man guarding his goods in peace has been overpowered by one stronger.
Then, by another characteristic transition, Luke sets the spiritual kingdom against the seeking of signs—the spiritual power that cleanses the inward man first, thereby purifying the outward, against the Pharisees’ materialism, cleaning the outside of cup and platter while inwardly full of greed and wickedness. I have discussed these passages before, but note how their placement here gives them new force.
Chapter XII
Some English Bibles head this chapter “Christ’s charge to the Apostles.” Yet nothing in the discourse addresses the Apostles as such until Peter asks (verse 41), “Lord, speakest thou this parable unto us, or even to all?”—and receives the answer, “Who then is that faithful and wise steward, whom his lord shall make ruler over his household?” Many of this chapter’s sentences belong, in Matthew, to the charge to the Apostles, part of an earlier stage of the ministry. Their new force in Luke comes from being addressed to disciples or individuals in the crowd generally, not the twelve specifically; and from being tied to the final journey to Jerusalem, after the Transfiguration—hence the stronger denunciations of the habits corrupting the Jewish heart and blinding it to its King. Many minor differences will strike the careful reader, making this discourse feel as fresh as if its words appeared nowhere else.
Chapter XIII
Every passage in this chapter plainly bears on Jerusalem and the approach to it. Several incidents appear only here. The force of Christ’s answer about the Galilaeans and those killed by the falling tower of Siloam—correcting the persistent tendency to judge people’s worth by what happens to them—has always been recognized, though perhaps not enough weight has been given to “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” He does not dismiss such events, which the Jews rightly saw as divine signs; but they were signs not about the victims, but to the whole nation and each hearer—warnings of like punishment that Roman governors or the forces of nature might bring on covetous, self-righteous, hypocritical stewards of God’s mercies. When we draw a lesson from this passage, we usually turn it into a warning about punishment in the next world, missing how directly Christ denounced judgment in this world on a people proud of its privileges and using them only to judge and despise others.
In this light, the parable of the fig-tree follows naturally: every warning of coming judgment was a voice saying of the barren tree, “Cut it down; why cumbereth it the ground?”—and at the same time a plea, “Let it alone this year also.”
I have already noted that the Pharisaic doctrine about the Sabbath is shown in the Gospels not as excessive good but as radically evil, hateful to God—not to be tolerated for fear of weakening the commandment, but to be met with anger as subversive of it. Nowhere should we expect one of Christ’s solemn protests against this temper more than here, for nothing proved the fig-tree rotten at the core more than this incapacity to bear wholesome fruit.
I have already commented on the two parables that follow. The Mustard-seed, common to the Evangelists, explains the expansion of the universal kingdom out of the national one, as a process of development. If I am right to follow the common judgment about the word “leaven,” it was almost necessary that the working of the true principle be shown alongside an allusion to the false principle that works with and beside it in every age.
The terrible warnings just given were likely to provoke the anxious question, “Lord, are there few that be saved?” This much-repeated question is usually criticized as seeking definite knowledge God withholds. But is its real error not rather its vagueness—the willingness of those who ask it to remain unclear about what, exactly, they or anyone need saving from? Christ seems to answer this way: “Strive to enter in at the strait gate: for many, I say unto you, will seek to enter in, and shall not be able.” The strait gate of sacrifice, of deliverance from self, is what the self-seeking would never find. Since self-seeking was exactly the Jewish tendency he had been denouncing throughout, how fittingly this personal warning matched everything he had said about the nation’s excision! How necessary that each disciple should always be seeking to know him, since a time was coming when the Master of the House would expose every heart’s secrets, and it would count for nothing to have eaten, drunk, or been taught in his presence. We need not weaken this warning’s force for every age by recognizing that it also applied directly to that time, when the Son of Man was about to test every man. The words that follow—already given in Matthew regarding the centurion’s servant, about weeping and gnashing of teeth, and people coming from east and west—would make no sense here unless the disciples connected their own personal fate with their nation’s history and destiny.
That same day, with the same thoughts filling his heart, messengers came saying, “Get thee out; for Herod will kill thee.” His answer: “Go and tell that fox, I must walk to-day and to-morrow, and the day following.” The men of Galilee cannot kill him. “A prophet cannot perish out of Jerusalem.” The deep, solemn words that follow have moved countless hearts, rightly received as testimony to Christ’s love even for the most unworthy, and as declaring that those not gathered under his wings choose their own separation. But we do the history and its spirit wrong if we forget these words concern an actual city, and that its curse was to be left to its own self-will, party spirit, and hypocrisy.
Chapter XIV
Another Sabbath healing shows us still occupied with Pharisaical corruptions; Christ is laying his axe to their root. What follows is called a parable, yet seems only a plain comment on men’s eagerness at a feast to seize the chief places. This use of the word “parable” is instructive: a parable never excludes a plain direct meaning, and is not worthless for the particular case it addresses; but it takes that case as the manifestation of a law reaching to far higher cases, inward as well as outward. The self-seeking shown in the struggle for the best seats was the very thing undermining the Jewish nation, because it is the canker at the root of humanity itself, the great anti-christian principle. So it was no mere accident of the feast that led our Lord from this parable to his admonition about whom to invite to a supper. I do not undervalue the fact that our Lord always used passing occurrences as texts for his teaching — this is a key to much in the Gospels and shows their value to the teacher. But the outward occurrence is only an index to the deeper meaning. If he came to destroy the competitive spirit that makes each man crave to stand above his neighbor, he came also to destroy another fruit of that same spirit: the calculating kindness that expects to be repaid. We should not imagine that our Lord is simply redirecting that same selfishness to a higher object when he says, “Thou shalt be recompensed at the resurrection of the just.” Throughout his teaching he had been showing that this recompense is nothing but being like God, who sends rain on the just and the unjust alike. He does not do away with the idea of recompense — the word is woven into our very language, because the reality belongs to the very constitution of man and the universe; to imagine rewards done away with is absurd. But rewards may rest on a principle exactly opposite to selfishness, on the divine order which selfishness overturns. I will say boldly that in every one of our Lord’s discourses, the recompense he offers consists mainly in deliverance from the selfishness that torments and oppresses us — though Christ’s own followers and ministers have too often built their whole notion of his kingdom, here and hereafter, on selfishness instead.
The subject of the feast is not finished. A man in the crowd sensed that a society which invited the poor, the blind, and the lame must be the kingdom of heaven our Lord had proclaimed at hand, and cried, “Blessed are those who shall eat bread in it.” From this the transition to the spiritual feast of the kingdom was natural. Common opinion, then as now, would suppose that spiritual blessings, being deeper and less bound to the senses, must be reserved for a rarer, more select company — ordinary food for ordinary people, but celestial fare for a special band set apart from the vulgar. Such notions are natural, and hold some latent truth, but also an intense falsehood — the very falsehood that undermined the Jewish nation and has at all times undermined the Christian Church. The spiritual feast is no less universal than the material one; the inward principle of the kingdom is revealed precisely in the summons of the poor, halt, and blind to the material supper. This is the great doctrine of the parable, though it appears here in a different light than in Matthew, partly from its surroundings, partly from differences of structure. Matthew’s central image of a king making a marriage for his son is absent here — it would have drawn attention away from the point Luke wants to make. Matthew’s excuses are general; here they are distinct and dramatic, showing the different reasons men refuse blessings meant for all in order to grasp private, excludable goods. Matthew’s account of the murder of the messengers and destruction of the city is also omitted, since that belongs to the marriage-of-the-son idea and would add nothing to the point about the feast’s universality. Nor is the detail of the man without a wedding garment — illustrating “many are called, but few are chosen” — needed here; the point is simply that men lose the feast because they prefer their own private enjoyments to those shared with people from the streets and highways. Comparing the two forms of this parable is one of the best exercises for grasping both the distinct aims of the Evangelists and the nature of parables generally.
I have already discussed the passage that follows. Everyone notices it is stronger in Luke than elsewhere: not “whoever loves father or mother more than me,” but “whoever does not hate father and mother, and his own life also, cannot be my disciple.” This variation matters. The milder wording would justify those in Rome and elsewhere who claim that “religious” duties are often at odds with human ones and must override them — leaving it to a scrupulous conscience or a priest to decide, in each conflict, how the sacrifice should be made. But no confessor has the nerve to actually say, “You must hate father and mother to save your soul” — only, “avoid the excess of love that would betray you.” Christ, however, does say it. If his words must not be explained away, then do not explain them away; find a meaning for them that also fits “yea, and his own soul also.” I take it we are commanded to hate ourselves, our souls and bodies, everything we prize as merely our own, so that we may have the love that is in Christ — a love that embraces father, mother, wife, children, and our own souls too, but as bound up with him. This fits exactly with what has gone before. The Jew grounded his religion, politics, morality, and domestic affections on self, and they were therefore doomed to ruin, as they were. Christ came as the true root of humanity, the real foundation of all these things and their only reconciler and security. Whoever would be his disciple must set that other principle aside entirely and banish it from his life — or else find himself waging war with too mighty an enemy, or building a tower he cannot finish; he would in effect be sending to make peace with the great spiritual enemy of Christ and men, unwilling to strip himself of all he has, his own righteousness, everything that exalts him above another. Men are the salt of the earth, keeping it from decay only while they hold the divine, life-giving principle. Selfishness has not been allowed to destroy this, because there has been a seed proclaiming God, not self, as the ground and purpose of its institutions. But if that divine seed becomes itself infected with the world’s selfishness — if the religion of God’s elect becomes the most concentrated selfishness of all — how are they the salt of the earth, and how can they ever become so? “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.”
Chapter XV
I could rest my whole case about St. Luke’s distinctive character on this chapter alone, probably the most influential in his Gospel on the mind of Christendom. But I would not want to gain that advantage by cutting this passage off from what precedes, or suggesting any break in the writer’s train of thought. The exclusiveness of the Pharisee, and of the Jewish nation embodied in him, has run through all we have lately read, shown as the anti-christian principle that must keep the Jew from believing in the King and Shepherd who had come. St. Luke, I think, presents this sin in that character, where Matthew makes us feel it as an outrage on the law and the prophets, the culmination of every evil they denounced.
Most have seen in the parable of the Prodigal Son a hint of the Gentile order, along with an implicit rebuke of the Jew unwilling to see his brother welcomed back with music and dancing. But this has been the reading of commentators more than of ordinary readers, who rightly resist any interpretation that would strip the parable of its direct, personal claim on each one who recognizes himself as the prodigal. The heart’s certainty that this parable expresses God’s inmost mind cannot be set aside for any interpretation, however reasonable or consistent with the Evangelist’s purpose. But if we look to this discourse for a revelation of God’s purpose, we will find that its various readings — which taken alone become either dry and scholastic, or narrow and partial — are held together by a higher light.
First, we should take the story’s details as they stand. This is not a tale of distant figures. Actual publicans and sinners were with our Lord, actual Pharisees were murmuring, “This man receiveth sinners, and eateth with them.” It is surely of these that he speaks when the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine to seek the one lost sheep, and the woman sweeps her house for the lost coin. We badly misread Luke, and worse misread Paul, if we suppose their chief concern is with Gentiles as such. They were born Jews, Jewish in every sympathy — but they had discovered that to be truly Jews they must first be men. It is a gospel to men, a covenant with men, that they proclaim, and therefore one with the Gentiles, with all nations. This may seem obvious enough to state with such emphasis, but I do not think we — commentators, the Christian world, myself, my reader — have kept hold of it, or realize the confusion and loss that forgetting it has caused. Once we are rid of that forgetfulness, Luke’s Gospel and Paul’s Epistles come to us as new books — new, though the same old ones, read even more literally and simply than we read them as children.
Holding this thought, we can come to the story of the two sons without fear of losing its personal force even as it opens to the widest view of God’s purposes for the world. If the prodigal is called a son from the first, and the hard elder brother in the field is told “all that I have is thine,” we must ask ourselves plainly whether these are not the basic facts and laws of the New Dispensation — whether the Gospel is not the claim that men as men are sons of God, that they must be prodigals joining themselves to a foreign country and feeding swine until they discover this, and that once they discover it, the condition of truly enjoying and benefiting from it is that they acknowledge this same right in all, even the most outcast, and rejoice at their childlike return to claim it. This view of God’s purposes is a comfort to the reader of Gentile as well as Jewish history, and it speaks even more pointedly to the modern world: to Christendom’s right to claim sonship to God for all its children, and the impossibility of giving Baptism a merely narrow, formal meaning if it does not proclaim that very truth to each of us. At the same time it carries the strongest encouragement to spread the good news of that sonship far and wide, and a warning against the great guilt of turning Baptism into a plea for exclusiveness, denying the very human privilege it asserts. Alongside this general meaning, the parable also holds the history of each man who “comes to himself” — showing that his return to sanity is nothing but discovering an actual Father, which itself implies acknowledging an influence drawing him, a confession that the Father has sought the lost sheep and swept for the lost coin. Here the lines of Matthew and Luke, starting from different points, meet: one shows Christ revealing a Father, the other Christ bestowing a Spirit — but the Spirit guides the lost child to the Father, and the moment his heart is touched, he knows the source.
Chapter XVI
The Jew’s covetousness has already appeared to us in various forms — it is the sin the New Testament generally, and this Gospel particularly, lays to his charge. We must not, in search of a more spiritual meaning, shy away from the word’s plain, vulgar sense: the mere craving and grasping of money. But neither should we limit the disease to that one form. Its worst expression, striking at the nation’s vitals, was religious; yet those who showed it in religion would often show it in money too, or pass it on to others of different tastes and education. These points are essential to understanding this chapter.
Its two parables should be taken together. The Jew was a steward whose handling of God’s gifts — material or spiritual — was meant to show what God is and what he demands of those given advantages others lack. This steward is accused of wasting his goods — and in the strictest sense he has, for such goods decay unless scattered abroad. Called to account, he feels he has betrayed his trust and knows he is about to be cast out. What can he do? He cannot undo his fault or start fresh. But he can use his position to make friends — by persuading people who felt real obligation to some divine teacher that their debt is smaller than they thought. He can strip nations of the very conscience and moral instinct God gave them. Who doubts this was the effect of the Jew’s presence and false witness among heathen peoples — that his disbelief in their gods helped destroy their flickering faith while his own godlessness gave nothing in its place? This was exactly putting fifty measures where conscience had written a hundred. Yet was the steward wrong to think he was meant to win these people’s love, using the wealth God gave him to do it? No — he was right, though he learned it the roundabout way; had he learned it earlier, he would have been a faithful steward instead of an unfaithful one. Had he used his master’s wealth as intended, rather than supposing it given for his own benefit and possession as the highest good, he would have found the “mammon of unrighteousness” — which instead became a millstone round his neck — a great blessing. So, disciples: use the money God gives you for him, not for yourselves, and it will win friends who will not merely give you temporary refuge, as the cast-off servant sought, but will receive you into their inmost hearts, and carry you with them before their Father.
This important digression links the parable’s meaning to the coming age, explains some puzzling facts of Christian history — not least the place and influence of Jews in the modern world — and applies with special force to any nation drawn into trade or government with others, holding great stores of mammon and a strong urge to worship it. But we must not let our Lord’s passing praise of the steward blind us to what follows at once: “He that is unjust in the least is unjust also in much… who shall commit to you the true riches?” — and then a sentence seemingly disconnected: “The law and the prophets were until John: since that time the kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it by force. It is easier for heaven and earth to pass than one tittle of the law to fail. Whoso putteth away his wife and marrieth another committeth adultery.”
Puzzling as this connection of thought may seem to a critic, I think a hearer’s conscience will not be slow to see it. Mammon-worship was becoming the Jew’s only worship, and his later history was already foreshadowed in the tendencies of that time. Before he could receive the true, inward riches of the heavenly kingdom, he had to feel the responsibility attached to his outward wealth — to know it was not his own. Since John’s time, the message of the kingdom had stirred hearts, and men pressed in to know what it was; those who truly wanted it would take it by force. But many supposed the kingdom of heaven meant a relaxing of the law, licenses beyond what Moses allowed. Far from it — not one tittle of the law could fail. Indeed some permissions granted under the law would have no place in the kingdom of heaven; the law, for instance, would be fulfilled by a stricter enforcement of the marriage bond — a bond both Jews and Gentiles were constantly breaking — than Moses had found it wise or possible to make. So Luke carries out his special task: even while denouncing the sins and judgment of the Old Dispensation, he asserts the principles of the New — a dispensation of inward, universal principle and practice, not of rigid rule with occasional exceptions.
I said the second parable cannot be separated from the first. That the Gentile world is figured in Lazarus, and the Jewish nation in the man in purple and fine linen, is an old reading which any careful student of Luke’s ordered narrative can hardly avoid — but, as with the Prodigal Son, it meets the counter-witness of Christian consciences insisting the story must be about themselves. If I thought it applied less directly to us because it dramatizes the Evangelist’s constant theme — the contrast pressed on the Jews standing round our Lord — I would suspect my own reading and better ones too, whatever evidence supported it. But I think the common way of reading this parable as simply a story about two men — really no parable at all — destroys its bearing on our own lives, giving us an excuse to escape its warning: “after all, it’s only a story.” Having insisted on its literal meaning, we then fear taking it literally, lest it commit us to unsafe opinions about the state of the departed. I do not say those opinions would be unsafe, nor do I endorse shrinking from Scripture’s plain sense for fear of Romish or other conclusions. But since the English public plainly does not take these words as a literal record of fact, they cannot object if others, guided by the context, read it as a parable of races and dispensations — which, I believe, only sharpens its personal truth and moral. “Purple and fine linen” would naturally suggest to a Jew the garments of king and priest; being carried by angels into Abraham’s bosom, adoption into God’s covenant with Abraham. This is the ordinary strict way to read a parable — tracing its symbols carefully according to their source. Doing so, we see the full height and depth of Dives’s covetousness: covetousness of religious privilege valued because others lacked it, covetousness making money the measure of worth and the rule for weighing every blessing. To say this was a nation’s habit is not to deny it could be one man’s habit too — no more than calling the dog that licked the beggar’s sores a symbol of nature’s sympathy for those neglected by God’s witnesses denies that an actual dog may have done it; either way it testifies to God’s care reaching hearts that could learn nothing of him from those sent to reveal his name except that he seemed exclusive, capricious, hard-hearted. Nor does reading the parable as the transfer of privilege to other nations, neglected by the Jews, blunt its edge for those nations either — since five brothers are named who might come to the same torment unless warned by their brother’s fate for his covetousness and cruelty. And if the man’s worst punishment was exclusion from the office he abused, stripped of his priestly and royal robes, left to feel the gulf his covetousness had dug between himself and all that was pure and loving — I cannot see how this lesson bears less on each of us, whatever form our self-idolatry takes, even as it also speaks to the state and destiny of Christendom and every Church within it.
Chapter XVII
This parable teaches that the sin of the New Dispensation would be the same as that of the Old: the Jew’s covetousness had caused countless offences, and the same cause would always produce the same effects — “It is impossible but that offences will come; but woe unto him through whom they come!” So I connect this chapter’s opening, and its teaching on avoiding offences (already treated at length in Matthew), to the larger subject of our Lord’s discourses on the way to Jerusalem.
Then comes the passage: the Apostles ask for increased faith; the Lord answers that faith like a mustard seed could uproot a tree and plant it in the sea; then speaks of a servant who, having done all that was commanded, deserves no special thanks, and of disciples who, having done all commanded them, should say, “We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do.” This passage is unique to Luke except for the mustard-seed saying, found elsewhere too. I have often noted that the very habit of mind our Lord denounced in the Jews generally also showed itself in the Apostles, and he was rooting it out of them so they could rightly testify against it in their countrymen. Their plausible-sounding prayer for more faith, he seems to tell us, was itself tainted with the covetous desire that is faith’s great enemy: they wanted a great store of faith not to serve God with, but for themselves — something to be proud of, to set them above others. They had to learn that God gives faith for doing his work, not for a feast of self-satisfaction.
We are reminded that the healing of the ten lepers happened on the road to Jerusalem. This fact speaks, better than any discourse, the same lesson already given in the parable of the Good Samaritan: that those outside the nation, excluded from its privileges, showed more openness to God’s kindness than those who possessed them all. Its importance for Luke’s purpose here needs no further comment.
If what follows were not so clearly part of this design, I would be tempted to linger on it for another reason — it strongly confirms the view I drew, from the other three Evangelists’ accounts of the last days, of the coming of the Son of Man and his kingdom. Luke places here several sayings the others attach to the discourse about the temple. He gives them in answer to the Pharisees’ question, “When will the kingdom of God come?” The answer: “The kingdom of God cometh not with observation; for, behold, the kingdom of God is within you.” This saying is often quoted, but always with the qualifier that there is also an outward kingdom, and that all Gospel talk of the Son of Man’s coming refers to that outward kingdom, not this inward one. But how does that fit the context? Luke immediately moves to the very language used elsewhere to describe the Son of Man’s coming, as part of the same answer to the Pharisees, expanding his rebuke of their materialism. What else can this mean but that the great outward events would reveal the very kingdom that does not come with observation — bringing to light the kingdom within, at the root of each man’s being and of society itself, the order God established from the beginning, which would emerge in new power once the outer fabric of Jewish polity broke apart? That the gospel of the Spirit should declare this, that the Evangelist of the new, human dispensation should record its permanent, eternal foundation, and that this announcement of the true and new Jerusalem should come amid warnings preparing the disciples for Christ’s rejection by the old — all this gives the words a fitting consistency and solemnity for him who is said to have spoken them.
Chapter XVIII
It is pointless to ask on what principle the chapter divisions were made; presumably parables were meant to be grouped and separated from other discourses where possible — otherwise why detach the parable urging constant prayer without fainting from the preceding warnings about the Son of Man’s coming, though it ends with “when the Son of Man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” The dividers had reason to think this parable has worth of its own apart from its occasion: it captures the very impulse to pray, the sense of being tormented by an adversary, showing that men will pray so long as they believe in any Judge of the earth at all, even an unfeeling one — and that the deepest encouragement to prayer lies in believing that Judge actually cares to free them from their oppressor. But this timeless meaning is realized far more powerfully if we picture a moment when everything looked dark and terrible, when the Son of Man seemed to have abandoned the earth he had visited, when the disciples searched in vain for any sign of his day, when the adversary seemed unbeatable and judges cared for neither God nor man — and then, exactly then, amid thunder and lightning, came an actual revelation of Christ’s power, presence, and permanent kingship. That would be a lasting consolation, an encouragement to God’s elect to cry day and night in their worst circumstances, certain he was hearing them and about to answer just when he seemed to delay longest.
Luke uses the words “his own elect.” Could words be more genial or encouraging? Without believing himself called by God, what strength has a man to pray? How can he ask deliverance without believing God wills to deliver him, and that his adversary is God’s adversary too? But did this confidence carry no danger — might it not breed contempt for others, self-glorification? And what would that do to his prayer? Our Lord answers in a parable that must be read as the necessary companion to the first. A man who thinks himself unlike other men cannot really pray — he feels no adversary, flies to no judge. Unless he says, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” taking the lowest place among men and seeking deliverance simply as a man, not as better than others, he doesn’t know what he needs deliverance from, or who could give it; he has no faith, no ground for his conscience to stand on. Here is a paradox: the elect man must see himself as one with all other men, or he cannot feel that God hears or justifies him. A man who stands on his own separateness cannot feel God has called him, for his very effort to separate himself from the world proves he belongs to it — for what is “the world,” in its bad sense, but individuals trying to rank themselves above each other, to sever themselves from one another? This is the paradox of Christianity itself, one we will find Paul continually pressing, and one that has confused readers of his epistles who try to resolve it by discarding one or the other of the two facts he actually held together — which I think we will find he reconciled.
I have given full weight to the wish that this parable be read universally, without even mentioning — though almost every reader notices it — that its two figures are a Pharisee and a Publican. This ties it directly to the larger theme of these discourses: the exposure of the falsehood by which the Jew inverted God’s purpose in calling him, bringing on himself the very exclusion he supposed God intended for others. The verses to the 30th have already been treated at length; what I said there applies especially here.
I have also already discussed the passage from verse 31 onward, but note it here as one of several allusions to the journey up to Jerusalem that give these chapters their pathos, and that keep before us the goal to which every warning, encouragement, and event is subordinate. This last incident connects movingly with the disciples’ failure to understand, noted in verse 34. How their Master, the great King, could become the great sufferer — scourged, spat upon, killed — no words, not even Christ’s own, could teach them; only suffering could teach that. The blind man who cried, “Thou Son of David, have mercy upon me,” whom the disciples tried to keep away, discovered for himself, and teaches us, that only one who shares man’s sorrows as a brother can be his Lord and deliverer.
Chapter XIX
I connect the opening story of this chapter with the closing one of the last. The old view of Zacchæus as an extortioner reformed by Christ’s Spirit, though set aside by some modern interpreters, still seems to me most consistent with the facts. The Pharisees were too used to our Lord’s dealings with publicans to be struck by an ordinary case; their remark, “he is gone to be guest with a man that is a sinner,” suggests, absent other evidence, that Zacchæus was worse than his class — that his wealth came by means common in that trade but not universal. His own words support this probability; they sound like a new resolution, not a denial of ever having wronged anyone. So our Lord’s words, “This day has salvation come to this house, forasmuch as he also is a son of Abraham,” both recognize an outcast as included in the covenant and affirm that its great blessing is deliverance from the very sin that kept Abraham’s children from God. That this particular sin was the one our Lord had been exposing throughout, and had foretold as the cause of the nation’s coming ruin, gives this moral miracle special weight, explaining why it should be paired with the physical healing of the blind man as testimony to the kingship Jesus was about to claim on entering the city. Without this purpose, the story would seem too minor to record at such a crucial point in the history.
Again, we are told he spoke a parable because he was near Jerusalem and they supposed the kingdom of God would appear at once. This parable of the pounds is often compared to Matthew’s parable of the talents. Their obvious differences: there, varying sums are given; here, one pound each. There, the faithful servants’ reward is entering the Lord’s joy; here, it is ruling over ten or five cities. There, no citizens revolt or are punished; here, as with Matthew’s marriage-feast parable, that is a central, deliberate feature. In fact I think the rest of the parable must be read in light of it. The journey to Jerusalem had led the disciples to expect some grand display, even the actual establishment of Christ’s kingdom. The answer: No. First, a message from the citizens: “we will not have this man to reign over us.” Then an interval in which the king’s servants are given power to use or neglect. Then a reckoning of what each has done. Then judgment on the citizens. All this before the kingdom is established. I believe this maps precisely onto the period up to the Ascension, the apostolic age after the Spirit was given, and the events leading to and culminating in the destruction of Jerusalem. Whether the parable loses force for the later Church depends on our estimate of that Church’s endowments. If every believer, beyond whatever special talent suits his own calling, also receives the higher gift of an indwelling Spirit, his responsibility for that gift is no less than that of Christians in the intermediate age between the passing of the Old Dispensation and the full arrival of the New, who were called to account for their stewardship — rewarded with greater usefulness and authority in proportion to their gain, or stripped of what they had treated as unreal. Only if the Church has for eighteen centuries been barren of what Scripture says is its very essence does this parable, however perfectly suited to apostolic times, stop being a guide for ours.
Here we reach the meeting point of the Evangelists: the descent from the Mount of Olives. Luke gives a more direct and obvious preparation for it than the others, and enlarges it in one important way: “I tell you,” Christ says to the Pharisees complaining of the disciples’ hosannas, “if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” Those words are explained by the tears he sheds moments later, approaching the city: within a few years, the very stones held together by children’s praise would indeed cry out — “For the days shall come upon thee, that thine enemies shall cast a trench about thee… and lay thee even with the ground… because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.”
Chapters XX. XXI. XXII. XXIII
I have already spoken at length on the first two of these chapters. The account of the Last Supper in chapter 22 has three notable peculiarities. First, the new feast is set apart from the old far more sharply than in the other Gospels: the words “I will not eat any more of this passover, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God” and “I will not drink of the fruit of the vine, until the kingdom of God shall come” are spoken with clear distinctness after he had eaten the unleavened bread and passed the paschal lamb, and before he takes bread and says, “This is my body,” and the cup, “This is the new testament in my blood.” I know no clearer proof that Luke was, and knew himself to be, the Evangelist of the New Dispensation in a special sense. Second, and nearly as significant: Luke records a dispute at this very feast over who among them should be counted greatest, and Christ’s answer — that the Gentiles’ kings lord it over their subjects and call themselves benefactors, but “ye shall not be so”; the greatest must be as the youngest, the chief as the servant; for is not the one who serves greater than the one who sits at meat, though Christ himself serves them? Yet he appoints them a kingdom as his Father appointed one to him, that they may eat and drink at his table and sit on thrones judging Israel. That such a dispute should arise at such a moment is among the most humbling, and therefore most instructive, facts in the New Testament: first they ask who will betray him, then who among them ranks highest. That this feast — the institution of a sacrificial meal by one who was himself to be the sacrifice — should be the very occasion for breaking down notions of rivalry and precedence, of “benefactor” meaning only “greater servant,” fits its purpose exactly. And even as their ideas of worldly power are crushed by his words and acts, how confidently he promises them real power, repeating all he had told them of a kingdom and their place in it — a kingdom founded on sacrifice, actually to be proclaimed in the world, in which, if they could give up themselves, they would be kings and judges. Third is the passage about the purse, the bag, and the sword — much debated by interpreters. I am not sure I fully understand it, but it looks to me like a re-consecration of ordinary things, which the disciples had proven they did not strictly need but which Christ would now hallow into his service. They had learned their Master could sustain them without these things; now they must depend on him even while possessing them — for the earth itself was to be redeemed, and the ploughshare, the sword, and the money-bag could all serve God in the new order as in the old. If this reading is right — and it is close to what many have held, and perhaps underlies the medieval fancies about the “two swords” — it fits Luke’s larger design that he should record this conversation, just as he shortly after records the disciples’ mistaken use of the sword and Christ’s correction of it.
In the account of the Arraignment and Passion in chapter 23, Luke has several notable variations: he alone records Christ being sent to Herod; he alone gives the words to the daughters of Jerusalem on the way to Calvary; he alone gives the words from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do”; he alone tells the story of the penitent thief; and he alone gives the last words, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” I merely note these differences for your own reflection. A thoughtful, devout reader needs few words from me on such a subject; he will already have learned, better than I could teach, the power of these passages. I only suggest that far from being breaks or accidental additions in Luke’s narrative, they fit its whole structure and purpose so closely that substituting either other Evangelist’s account here would jar, though we might not say why. I cannot easily prove this without going into refinements I would rather avoid, which might do the reader’s inward perception more harm than his understanding good. But it is worth noting, as most readers probably have noted for themselves, that the Evangelist who recorded the woman weeping at Jesus’ feet and the parable of the Prodigal Son is exactly the one from whom we would expect to hear, “To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise” — words which, I believe, Matthew was, for good reason, not given to know or record.
Chapter XXIV
The whole story of the journey to Emmaus is unique to Luke. Many have found that this story, more than any other, gives them a grasp of the risen Lord and the kind of fellowship that might exist between him and his disciples — different from before the Passion, yet more real, more intimate, mixed with greater awe yet producing greater warmth of heart, sparer in words yet deeper in instruction, making clear what had before been only dimly heard, spreading peace, opening the heart to mysteries it had only vaguely sensed. The sense of a body freed from death’s chains, essentially the same as before, now using naturally powers once hidden or only occasional, is one part — though perhaps not the chief part — of the revelation. Its power to vanish and reappear suggests the possibility of a spiritual presence that might remain continually near, in which men are meant always to dwell.
If this is the impression Luke’s words leave on us, they carry us beyond the forty days after the Resurrection, leaving us certain we stand at the beginning, not the end, of a history. If there was a Resurrection, there must be an Ascension. Men have believed it — why? Because of a great mass of external proof? Where is it? Who has ever found it, or believed such a stupendous fact on its strength? For eighteen hundred years men have accepted the Ascension on the testimony of this one Evangelist, confirmed by a few words in Mark, not because the evidence compelled them but because, believing already in a Son of God and King of men, it was not incredible that it should be so — rather incredible that it should not be so: that he should be bound by chains of space and time, not lead captivity captive, not be as actual and personal as ever, though freed from the fetters that keep us from realizing our own personality; that he should not actually sit at God’s right hand, actually be the bond of union among men. The Evangelist of the New Dispensation casts this belief before the world without demanding special deference to his own authority or piling up crushing evidence, offering it simply as good news which the needs of men and the wisdom of God in ages to come would establish — even if every earthly witness to it failed, even if all the power and wisdom of the world declared that God had not set his Son on the holy hill of Zion, and that the rulers of the earth owed him no homage.