by CCW | 17 October 2024 22:00
The Gospel reading for the Feast of St. Luke is the very end of his Gospel. It ends not with the resurrection appearences of Jesus as in Matthew, Mark, and John, but with the Ascension, though that has been, at the very least, prepared for us in John’s Gospel, too. The ending of Luke’s Gospel is somewhat elaborated upon in the opening chapter of Acts, also attributed to Luke. Yet rather than emphasizing the problematic of Jesus’ going from us, as John in particular explains as ultimately being expedient or good for us, despite the sense of loss and grief, Luke sees the Ascension of Christ as the cause of great joy. The disciples, he says, “returned to Jerusalem with great joy; and were continually in the temple, praising and blessing God.” Luke shows us that Christ’s going from us is the condition of his being with us and of our being with him.
Such is “the work of an evangelist”, Paul suggests in 2 Timothy, the Epistle reading for the Feast, already intuiting what the Church Fathers will say about the Ascension as “the exaltation of our humanity”. While the Collect speaks about the healing of “all the diseases of our souls” by the wholesome medicines of Luke’s doctrine or teaching, there is more to the good news of his Gospel than healing. He shows us our end in God, our ultimate restoration to unity with God in his eternity. The point is that we participate in this now because time has been gathered into eternity.
Luke’s feast day belongs to the autumnal pageant which will bring us to All Saints’. What we are given to think is the Ascension of Christ as signifying our end with God and in God now and forever. But how? It is, I think, by attending to what Luke and Luke alone has Jesus ask us. “What is written? How readest thou”. In a way, his Gospel is particularly emphatic about how Jesus opens our understanding by providing a way of interpreting the Scriptures about Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection, about repentance and forgiveness of sins, about the promise of the Father in the coming of the Holy Spirit wonderfully presented in Acts, and here about Christ’s Ascension.
Luke points us to our end in Christ by way of attending to his Word and its radical meaning about the quality of our life in Christ. Luke is the spiritual director of the Church throughout the Trinity Season especially. More Gospel readings come from Luke than from any other Evangelist, readings that move our hearts and illuminate our minds. As Dante so concisely puts it, Luke is scriba mansuetudinis Christi, the Scribe of the gentleness of Christ, and perhaps nowhere more wonderfully than in the readings for his feast day. Only Luke is with me, Paul says, with just a hint that this is almost enough though wanting the books and parchments that belong to the understanding of Christ. Luke shows us Jesus as opening our understanding about our end and life in Christ. This is our blessing and the reason for our gathering in the temple in great joy, “praising and blessing God”.
Fr. David Curry
Eve of the Feast of St. Luke, 2024
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