“Only Luke is with me.”
I have always loved this simple yet poignant remark of Paul. There is a compelling kind of elegance and simplicity to it. It captures something of the nature of the loneliness of the ministry in its deep truth and meaning. Even more, it captures something of the spiritual significance of Luke, “Evangelist and Physician of the soul,” as the Collect puts it, for the life of the Christian Church. There is, it seems, something profoundly comforting about the presence of Luke with Paul. And so, too, with us.
Luke is the Church’s great and primary spiritual director, as it were, especially in the long Trinity season. There is a certain felt quality to his writings, both in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, generally attributed to him. Dante captures the special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption, in a phrase. Luke, he says, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. I have often been struck by that phrase. It seems to capture the real meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God with God in Jesus Christ. It highlights a special quality to that pilgrimage – gentleness. Not our gentleness but the gentleness of Christ, which at once provides a profound insight into God’s engagement with our wounded and broken humanity and a strong corrective to the negative views of divine judgment; a counter to our despair and our anxieties.
We have been pondering the powerful teachings of the Trinity season, emphasising, in our own poor way, the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion. Not surprisingly, Luke has been our principal instructor about such an ethic which speaks so profoundly to the confusions and lunacies of our day where either Profit or the Self is God which neither can possibly be. In the absence of any kind of principled ethical discourse, and even on the eve of a federal election here in Canada, there is really only the tyranny of global corporatism or the subjective tyranny of the self. Yet here in this feast, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]”. It seems somehow to make a difference to our thinking and our doing.
We celebrate the Feast of St. Luke today for his feast day happens to fall upon this Sunday. The Gospel reading for The Feast of St. Luke speaks directly about the purpose of our prayerful reading of the Scriptures in the ordered liturgy of the Church. What is it all about? “Then opened he their understanding that they might understand the Scriptures.” In the opening of the Scriptures, a phrase that Luke uses about Christ in relation to the disciples and, by extension, to us, we are being gathered into the gentleness of Christ. The Scriptures, meaning here the Old Testament, seen through the figure of Christ, reveal the compassionate love of God for our wounded and broken humanity. That is the understanding which Christ provides and Luke proclaims.
We are being healed and even more than healed. The classic story of thanksgiving is Luke’s insightful account of the healing of the ten lepers of whom only one and he a Samaritan “returned to give thanks,” about whom alone Jesus says he is “made whole.” In returning and giving thanks, we are being made whole. There is a wonderful gentleness to Luke’s depiction of Christ, a wonderful gentleness that opens us out to the deep meaning of Christ’s being with us. It is about our being made whole and complete, but not through anything in ourselves.
How, then? By our being gathered into the gentle love of Christ who seeks our good and our perfection. Luke is, it seems, a great comfort to Paul, but his comfort is grounded in Christ’s opening out of the Scriptures for our understanding. The way in which such things are opened to us is the special charisma and grace of Luke, the “Dear and Glorious Physician,” as the novelist, Taylor Caldwell, defines him. And truly and rightly so. Luke opens us out to the mysteries of Christ’s compassionate love for us, for it is Christ, he says, who opens out to us the understanding of the Scriptures for our good, our wholeness, our salvation. Luke has grasped that the gentleness of Christ is found in teaching, especially the opening of the Scriptures for our understanding.
Something is revealed in the Scriptures beyond what we can know and discover on our own and that something more is the gentleness of Christ who seeks our good and our perfection. Paul, too, grasps this in asking Timothy to bring not only the cloak he left behind in Troas but more importantly, the books and especially, he says, the parchments. Books and parchments, references to different media by which the written word is conveyed to us perhaps. Luke, we remember, is the one who gives us Christ’s great question, “how do you read?” which leads to the parable of the Good Samaritan, to the question, “how do you act?” An ethic of action rooted in compassion, in the gentleness of Christ, arises from the teaching and the learning about what is revealed in the Scriptures.
Healing and being made whole. These ideas give fuller meaning and significance to the writings of St. Luke and to the way in which saving grace is conveyed to us. At issue is our willingness to attend and learn, to feel and love the gentleness of Christ. “Only Luke is with me,” Paul says and yet with Luke we are with Christ in the gentleness of his love for us. It is the meaning of our journeying in the Trinity season and beyond. “Only Luke is with me,” and yet that is enough because with Luke, there is Jesus, too.
“Only Luke is with me.”
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of St. Luke/Trinity XX