Luke

F. Scott Spencer

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802825636
• eBook ISBN: 9781467452670
• Subtopic: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

The story Luke tells in his gospel, says F. Scott Spencer, is "a compelling, complex narrative confession of faith in God. To what degree anyone joins Luke in that faith journey is up to them, but any responsible interpreter must attend considerately to Luke's theological roadmap."

In this latest addition to the Two Horizons New Testament Commentary series, Spencer integrates close textual analysis of Luke's unfolding narrative with systematic theology, spiritual forma­tion, philosophical inquiry, and psychological research. With section-by-section commentary, Spencer highlights the overriding salvific message that runs through Luke's gospel. Pastors, scholars, and students alike will benefit from Spencer's insight into Luke's theological significance.

INTERPRETATION:
THEOLOGICAL COMMENTARY ON LUKE

Knowing God the Savior with Solid Assurance through the Story of Jesus (1:1–4)

The preface to Luke’s Gospel—consisting of a single, sophisticated sentence chock full of insights into Luke’s composition—aims not primarily to preview what will follow (table of contents) but to promote how readers should engage the story. I focus in particular on the prologue’s final purpose clause, which comes immediately after identifying the first reader (and possible sponsor), Theophilus. Why Luke writes to “most excellent Theophilus,” thus implying how he would like Theophilus and wider audience to experience this narrative, is “to the end that you may come to know the solidity of the matters that you have been taught” (1:3–4 AT).

Luke writes neither a primer for naive novices nor an advanced text for seasoned scholars. He writes for interested parties, like Theophilus, who know a fair bit about gospel “matters” (λόγων [logōn], “words, issues, things”)—and are favorably disposed to what they know—but need further understanding of such matters and deeper assurance of their validity. The last word in Luke’s Greek preface is key: ἀσφάλειαν (asphaleian), denoting “security,” “certainty,” “stability,” “solidity”—particularly “security against stumbling/falling.”¹ Associated with intellectual knowledge, it tilts toward apologetic and polemical concerns: knowing with “certainty” the truthfulness of a claim or concept. But knowledge is scarcely confined to facts and propositions; it also encompasses intuitions, emotions, experiences, relationships (getting to know someone), and behaviors (knowing how to act and live)—in short, the full range of human being and doing.² And with so much of our knowledge filed away in subconscious and semiconscious vaults,³ all of us could use more “certain, secure, solid” understanding of just about everything.

But while Luke’s narrative ranges across the rich landscape of human experience, it coheres around a pivotal, preeminent figure. Instead of providing Theophilus and company with an encyclopedic book of knowledge, Luke offers an encomiastic portrait of one person who set the standard for human flourishing and changed the course of history. It is this person above all whom Luke wants his readers to know with all solid assurance. In a strategic text in Luke’s second volume, Peter identifies this protagonist: “Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly [ἀσφαλῶς, asphalōs] that God has made this Jesus, whom you crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36). Here the ἀσφαλ- (asphal-) term is placed first in Greek for emphasis, stressing the solid-rock position Jesus holds as Lord and Christ at the heart of God’s plan for Israel. The firm foundation of “this Jesus” is confirmed through the story of his birth, life, ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection in Luke’s Gospel—the “first word/matter [λόγον, logon]” Luke crafted for Theophilus concerning “the things Jesus began to do and to teach” (Acts 1:1 AT).

Peter has come to know the solid truth of Jesus’s christological status, which he now commends “all Israel” to affirm with him, not simply as intellectual data or theological dogma, but as deeply personal experience and practice. Peter and fellow Israelites had heard, seen, and felt Jesus in Luke’s Gospel as “a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you, as you yourselves know” (Acts 2:22); and now “all of us are witnesses” to the grand finale of God’s raising up “this Jesus” from the dead (v. 32; cf. 10:37–42). But as amazing as that story is, it is not the end of the matter. Peter caps his initial sermon in Acts by inviting his hearers to embrace the living Jesus through baptism and communion with other believers (2:37–47). Knowing the Lord Jesus Christ is a lifelong pilgrimage of discipleship (experiential learning).

While the epistemological-christological (getting to know Jesus) thrust of “the events that have been fulfilled among us” (Luke 1:1) seems clear from the ensuing narrative, we must not ignore the overarching theological horizon that shapes these events and illumines their meaning. Here I use “theological” in its strictest sense—that is, concerning the person and purpose of God the Creator and Savior, in whom “we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Peter unequivocally attributes Christ’s significance to the work of God. To repeat parts of Acts 2:22–26, with emphasis: “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power . . . that God did through him among you. . . . This Jesus God raised up. . . . Therefore let the entire house of Israel know with certainty that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

The gospel preface is more subtle, but no less theocentric. The use of a passive verb without a designated subject often suggests a divine passive construction, presuming God as the actor. While perhaps lost on a general Greek reader, a biblically informed reader, as Luke assumes, would readily pick up the point: “the events which have been fulfilled among us” are those events purposed and precipitated by God.⁴ Luke dares to narrate an account of God’s climactic work in Christ “among us” (Luke 1:1), including the author, who, while remaining anonymous, does not remain aloof. He writes inside the story, out of his own faith experience and community, regarding what he has come to know about God. He is no mere chronicler of others’ eyewitness accounts (1:2); while committed to certitude and “truth” (1:4), he presents his case, his story, as a fully engaged “subject,” not as a putative “objective” reporter. Regarding Luke’s “I” claim to “investigating everything carefully from the very first” (1:3), as the NRSV renders it, David Moessner significantly amends this translation in light of his extensive comparative study of the perfect participle + adverb (παρηκολουθηκότι . . . ἀκριβῶς, parēkolouthēkoti . . . akribōs) by ancient authors, especially Demosthenes and Josephus. Rather than “investigating carefully” in the more pedestrian sense of a dogged reporter or professional historian, the language connotes “one who has a thoroughly informed familiarity” with all the matters one relates. The resulting narrative is less formally factual (though it presents reliable information) than faithfully familiar—the outgrowth and overflow of “faithful adherence” more than of rigorous research.⁵

Luke writes as one of “us” in the fellowship of Theophilus and like-minded readers. “We” are called to read sympathetically with the faithful writer as Theophilus-types: not as a Greco-Roman official, if that is what the historical Theophilus was, but as a God-lover, as the name “Theophilus” means.⁶ The divine passive construction at the beginning of the preface modulates into a divine nominative appellation at the end. Luke aims to expound in narrative form the significance of what God has done in Christ for those who love God.

More than an invitation, however, for interested God-lovers to hear and read his Gospel, Luke’s “theophilic” address also intimates the means and ends of interpretation. Those who seek after and love God with all their heart, strength, and mind (10:27) will find God, though God “indeed is not far from each one of us” (Acts 17:27). Luke will not argue or strong-arm anyone into receiving the good news about God’s saving work in Christ. He lays out his story for those with an open mind and (pre-)disposition for knowing God better.⁷ Love for God, however tenuous and imperfect, begets more love with ever-increasing faithfulness and understanding. Luke presents his Gospel as a labor of love for God in hopes that all who encounter it will grow toward a more mature, stable, “solid” loving knowledge of God. Playing on the original Greek nuance of ἀσφάλεια (asphaleia) as surefooted balance and the derivative English term “asphalt,” we may envision Luke’s narrative-theological purpose as paving the solid path for progressive knowing, loving, and living for God as faithful followers of Jesus Christ. Let the journey begin!

1. BDAG, 147; related to the verb σφάλλω, sphallō, which often “refers to the act of making someone fall or trip.”

2. While BDAG glosses the meaning of ἀσφάλεια (asphaleia) in Luke 1:4 as “stability of idea or statement, certainty, truth,” it broadens the notion with the related adverb ἀσφαλῶς (asphalōs) in Acts 2:36 to encompass “being certain, assuredly, certainly, of intellectual and emotive aspects” (147 [emphasis original]).

3. See Wilson, Strangers; Damasio, Self.

4. Johnson, 27; cf. Luke 4:21; 22:37; 24:44; Acts 1:16; 3:18.

5. Moessner, “Luke as Tradent,” 293–94; see 291–300.

6. Though names can be overinterpreted, their etymological meanings are often linked with characters’ identities in biblical narratives. Numerous names ending in “el” or “jah/ah” signify integral relationships with God or Lord: e.g., Samuel (“God hears”); Elijah (“the Lord is God”), Zechariah (“the Lord has remembered”).

7. On the importance of faithful, “yielding” attitudes and dispositions in biblical-theological interpretation, see Green, Seized by Truth, 11, 24.

Knowing God the Creating Savior in the Birth and Growth of Jesus (1:5–4:13)

Though not matching the Fourth Gospel’s commencement “in the beginning” of God’s creation (John 1:1; cf. Gen 1:1), Luke also echoes Genesis and emphasizes God’s powerful activity in generating the earthly lives of God’s Son Jesus and prophet John and equipping them to blaze the way of renewed life for God’s people. The conceptions of both John and Jesus are “impossible” (Luke 1:37) in natural terms. Elderly, postmenopausal women like Elizabeth and young, sexually inactive girls like Mary cannot conceive children apart from divine intervention. And intervene God does via angelic announcement and dynamic operation—quite intimately in Mary’s case. As God’s Spirit brooded over the chaotic waters at creation (Gen 1:2), so this same Spirit “comes upon” and “overshadows” the amniotic waters destined to permeate Mary’s womb and generate the Holy One “called Son of God” (Luke 1:35). Genealogically, Luke tracks Jesus’s ancestors back to primordial origins as “son of Adam, son of God” (3:38), thus representing “all flesh” (3:6) via Israel (“son of David . . . son of Abraham” [vv. 31, 34; cf. 1:54–55, 68–73; 2:11]) and realizing God’s good purposes for all creation. The temptation scene following the genealogy demonstrates Jesus’s commitment to faithful worship and exclusive service of the Lord God (4:8), where Adam and Israel had both tragically failed.

In the face of the world’s barren, broken condition, God’s creative work in Christ is in fact re-creative and restorative. Nothing less than this complete, cosmic re-creation is envisioned in God’s salvation extolled in three foundational Christmas carols.

• Mary’s Magnificat (1:46–55) magnifies “God my Savior [σωτήρ, sōtēr],” not only for elevating her “lowly” state, but also for “lifting [other] lowly” persons and feeding the hungry exploited by proud, prosperous elites (1:46–48, 51–53). Salvation thus redresses social, political, and economic injustices.
• Zechariah’s Benedictus (1:68–79) extends the scope both outward to international politics, rejoicing in God’s appointing Christ as a “horn of salvation . . . [through whom] we would be saved from our enemies,” and inward to spiritual “knowledge of salvation . . . by the forgiveness of sins” (1:69–71, 77).
• Simeon’s Nunc Dimittis sums up the theological and universal thrust of “your [God’s] salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples” (2:29–32).

These holistic salvation themes are echoed in the angel’s heralding the newborn Jesus as Savior, Messiah, and Lord “for all the people,” yet particularly for nocturnal, nomadic shepherds on the fringes of society (2:8–11). Such “last,” lowbrow folk are the first invited to see the Savior-child lying in a manger, an apt site for shepherds’ attendance instead of a mansion suitable for Caesar Augustus, whose census edict provides the political backdrop for Jesus’s birth (2:1–2, 12–16). Subtly, but surely, Luke polarizes the antithetical “Savior (σωτήρ, sōtēr) / Lord (κύριος, kyrios)” agendas of Caesar and Christ: the former boosting the rich and powerful at the expense of the poor and lowly; the latter dismantling this unjust hierarchy, so that “all flesh shall see the salva...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Reading Luke Theologically
• Interpretation: Theological Commentary on Luke
• Integration: Theological Reflection on Luke
• Bibliography
• Index of Authors
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Scripture and Other Ancient Writings