by CCW | 18 October 2019 06:00
It is a poignant phrase. “Only Luke is with me,” Paul says. And yet that seems significant. For Luke, too, has been very much with us during the Trinity season. He is, we might say, the Church’s great and primary spiritual director especially in the Trinity season. There is a certain quality to his writings in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles, which work is generally attributed to him. Dante has captured best, I think, the special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption. Luke, he says in a memorable phrase, 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.
The powerful teachings of the Trinity season largely focus on 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 idiocies 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 there is only the tyranny of global corporatism, the ideological vacuum of contemporary politics, or the subjective tyranny of the self. But here, almost as a kind of counter to those totalizing concepts, we are reminded that “only Luke is with [us]”. That seems to make a difference.
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 gathered into the gentleness of Christ, into the compassionate love of God for our wounded and broken humanity. We are being healed and even more than healed. Once again, in Luke’s insightful account of the healing of the ten lepers of whom only one, and he a Samaritan, “returned to give thanks,” we are being made whole. Luke opens us out to the deeper 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 the Scriptures for our understanding. The way in which such things are opened to us is the special charisma and grace of Luke. The novelist, Taylor Caldwell styles him as “Dear and Glorious Physician,” thus capturing a point made in the Collect which identifies Luke as “an Evangelist and Physician of the soul,” drawing upon Scripture. And truly and rightly so. Luke opens us out to the mysteries of Christ’s compassionate love for us, the one 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 as the reference to the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, meaning the writings, makes clear.
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 are references to the different media by which the written word is conveyed to us. Luke, we remember, is the one who gives us Christ’s great question, “how readest thou?” which leads to the parable of the Good Samaritan. An ethic of action rooted in compassion, in the gentleness of Christ, arises from the teaching and our 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.
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of St. Luke
2019
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2019/10/18/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-luke-2/
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