Link to audio file of the service of Matins & Ante-Communion for St. Luke/Trinity 19
Then opened he their understanding
St. Luke is the Church’s spiritual director especially during the Trinity season, it seems to me, at least in terms of the quantity of readings from his Gospel appointed for the Holy Eucharist. But more than just the quantity of readings, there is the quality of these readings, captured best, perhaps, in Dante’s lovely phrase about St. Luke as scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. This captures wonderfully something about the quality of the man and his writings. Today is the Feast of St. Luke.
In the Gospel reading, we are told that: “He opened their understanding, that they might understand the Scriptures.” As with the Epistle and Gospel for Trinity 19, the emphasis is one what Jesus wants us to know; “that ye may know,” in the context of the healing of the paralytic in the face of animosity and skepticism. But then, what is that understanding? The Gospel is emphatic: “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer, and rise again from the dead the third day; and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be preached in his name among all nations.” Powerful words which provide us with a sense of the tenor of his Gospel. Death and resurrection, repentance and forgiveness. Could anything be more concise, more clear, and more complete?
We know very little about St. Luke. His “praise is in the Gospel,” the Collect tells us, meaning that St. Luke is mentioned in the Scriptures of the New Testament, quite apart from the traditional attribution of the Third Gospel and the Book of the Acts of the Apostles to his mind and pen. The Epistle reading specifically places him in the company of Paul. “Only Luke is with me,” he says in the context of a discourse about evangelism. Elsewhere Paul identifies him as “the beloved Physician” (Col. 4.14).
The Collect, drawing upon these Scriptural hints, identifies St. Luke as both “an Evangelist, and Physician of the soul”. A healer, to be sure, but by way of something which must strike us as rather strange. The healing is by way of “the wholesome medicines of the doctrine delivered by him”. Healing is by way of teaching.
Health care and education are two critical areas of concern in our contemporary culture. The traditions of medicine and education have been strongly and profoundly shaped by Christianity. Hospitals and schools in our western world have their roots and being in explicitly religious institutions arising out of the medieval European world, however much they have become secularised.
Our contemporary anxieties about health care and education arise from our confusion about two basic questions. What is health and what is the purpose of education? In clinging to our various secular assumptions about these things, we remain trapped in our confusions. If health is simply about the body without regard to some sense of human purpose and dignity, and if education is but a means to an end, we miss out altogether on the radical message about health and teaching.
Both are about the soul and its relation to God. Thus the great medieval healing ministries are fundamentally acts of charity, works of corporal mercy towards the sick and the dying. The word corporal refers to the body. We are embodied souls. There is no illusion about avoiding death. In a way, the healing ministry is about learning how to die without which one cannot learn how to live. It is about how to face suffering and death.
Education, too, is about something more than acquiring the tools and the means to obtain some sort of job or position of power and regard in the eyes of the world, mere credentialing, as it were. In other words, we are not in pursuit of either health or learning simply for worldly ends or so as to create some imaginary heaven on earth. Such are our modern illusions. Death is in the picture, inescapably so, but even more what is in the picture is the reality of our being souls, as selves. This alters everything. To speak of ourselves as spiritual beings means to know ourselves as made in imago trinitatis, made in the image of the God who is Trinity, the mystery that is made known to us through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the mystery of the love that is God himself. Such are the mysteries conveyed to us by the Evangelists such as Luke.
Charity is the moving principle of health care. As St. Luke’s gospel so clearly shows us, it is intimately connected to our understanding, to our coming to know what God wants us to know without which we cannot truly live. It is captured, I think, in the scene which today’s gospel presents. Jesus sets the meaning of his life in the context of the Hebrew Scriptures – the Law, the Prophets and the Writings, of which the Psalms are the outstanding example in a kind of synecdoche (where the part stands for the whole). These are the classical categories of the Jewish Scriptures captured in the acronym TANAKH referring to the Torah (Law), the Nevi’im (Prophets), and the Ketuvim (Writings). It will be Paul’s point, perhaps learned from Luke, that “all scripture is inspired by God and is profitable for teaching” (2 Tim 3.16).
“He opened their understanding,” Luke tells us, an understanding which is intimately connected to the interpretation of the Scriptures. We find our wholeness and completeness in the Word of God and, especially, that Word made flesh in Christ, who died and rose again for us and whose grace lives in us through repentance and forgiveness. These are the themes of St. Luke’s teaching. As one of our hymns puts it:
O happy saint! Whose sacred page,
So rich in words of truth and love,
Pours on the Church from age to age
This healing unction from above (# 206, The Hymn Book)
Repentance and forgiveness are the forms of death and resurrection in us by the grace of Christ in his Word. They are the signal notes of the witness of St. Luke as “evangelist and physician of the soul”. Repentance and forgiveness carry over into our approaches to healing and teaching. We are obliged to think about one another in relation to God, as beings who are immortal souls.
Over and against the illusions and confusions of our culture and world in its fears and anxieties, Luke recalls us to the primacy of our lives as spiritual beings. That alone offers a new relation to our world and to one another clearly illustrated in today’s Gospel. The apostles encounter the Risen Christ who in their presence ascends to heaven. Note the creedal or doctrinal elements of his Gospel. On his command, they return to Jerusalem. To do what? To build a better world? No. “They returned to Jerusalem with joy and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.”
The tragedy of our culture is that we insist on measuring everything by our worldly pursuits, to things which by their very nature are always passing away, like autumn leaves scattered on the wind. The paradox of the Gospel is that we only contribute to a better world by living better lives. And that can only be by way of repentance and forgiveness becoming the patterns and realities of our lives.
It can’t happen without our attention and presence in the place where God is worshipped and glorified, where the Word of God is proclaimed and His Sacraments celebrated. It can’t happen without the charity of Christ being carried from the altar into us, as it were, and then out into our daily lives. Both are necessary. It is the necessity of the interplay of the teaching and the healing becoming more and more the very fabric of our lives. This remains the constant task of the Church.
We have forgotten the radical meaning of such powerful spiritual forces as repentance and forgiveness, spiritual realities which can never be measured or understood by the yardsticks of the world and yet convict the conscience of every age and every soul. They are the spiritual realities that belong to the renewed understanding that we are embodied souls. Wehave an end with God whose charity teaches and heals us.
St. Luke points us to Jesus, the great teacher and healer of our souls. The name ‘Jesus’ means Saviour or healer and it belongs to St. Luke to emphasize precisely that understanding. He serves to recall us to Christ, the teacher and healer of our souls.
“Then opened he their understanding”
Fr. David Curry
Christ Church, Windsor
St. Luke/Trinity XIX, 2020,
re ‘09 – reworked