by CCW | 18 October 2026 10:00
I love Paul’s simple yet poignant phrase that “only Luke is with me.” There is a compelling elegance and simplicity to it. It captures something of the experience 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 something profoundly comforting about the presence of Luke with Paul. And so, too, I hope, with us.
Luke is the Church’s great spiritual director, especially in the long Trinity season where his Gospel provides over half of the Sunday readings. There is a poignant quality to his writings, both in his Gospel and in The Book of The Acts of the Apostles generally attributed to him. The special quality of Luke’s approach to the mystery of God in Christ, the mystery of human redemption is best grasped in Dante’s lovely phrase. Luke, he says, is “scriba mansuetudinis Christi,” the scribe of the gentleness of Christ. The phrase captures the meaning and truth of our spiritual pilgrimage, the journey of the soul to God and 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. It complements Marylynne Robinson’s insight in Reading Genesis about the quality of divine restraint or forbearance that points to forgiveness and compassion; the very features of his Gospel.
No one better expresses the idea of an ethic of action rooted in compassion and forgiveness than St. Luke. He has been, accordingly, 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 there is only the tyranny of “technocratic totalitarianism” (as Fr. Thomas Plant suggests in his book on the Catechism, King Oswald’s Heirs), whether it is global corporatism, governments or companies, 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]” and that it is Luke who emphasises that Jesus opens our understanding by opening the Scriptures to us, giving us a way to grasp their meaning and their application to our lives. It makes a difference.
St. Luke’s feast day falls upon this Sunday. The Gospel 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, into the compassionate love of God for our wounded and broken humanity. We are being healed and even more than healed, and all through the making visible of the deep compassion of Christ such as we see time and again in Luke’s Gospel. Think of his repeated phrase that Jesus “saw and had compassion” whether upon “the widow of Nain” or upon “a certain man,” symbolic of our humanity, fallen on the wayside in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.
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, not through anything in ourselves, and indeed, sometimes it happens when we are made to confront ourselves. One of the most moving scenes in the Passion is Jesus’s look at Peter in the moment of his betrayal. “And the Lord turned and looked upon Peter.” Only Luke tells us this detail; a look that is not condemnatory but far more moving, a look of compassion and forgiveness. It moves Peter in two ways. First, he “remembered the word of the Lord” that anticipated his betrayal; and, secondly, he is moved to contrition and sorrow; he “went out and wept bitterly.” Such is a profound movement of repentance, really, a turning back to the one from whom we have turned away. But how is that even remotely possible? Only by our being turned by the gentleness of Christ.
In short, Luke shows how we are 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 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 grace of healing and restoration through sacrifice and forgiveness. Thus Luke gives us the first Word of the Crucified. “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Can there be anything more gentle and yet more compelling? And he gives us the last word, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.” Luke opens us out to the mysteries of Christ’s compassionate love for us, the one who opens to us the understanding of the Scriptures for our good, our wholeness, our salvation. Luke has grasped the gentleness of Christ that is found in his teaching, especially the opening of the Scriptures as his reference to the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, meaning the writings, makes clear.
What is revealed in the Scriptures is beyond what we can know and discover on our own. Such is the gentleness of Christ who seeks our good and our perfection. Paul 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 refer to the different media by which the written word is conveyed to us. Luke, we recall, gives us Christ’s great question, “how readest thou?” which leads to the parable of the Good Samaritan. The Christian ethic of action is rooted in compassion, in the gentleness of Christ. It arises from the teaching and the learning from what is revealed in the Scriptures, literally in what is written.
Compassion and forgiveness belong to the healing of our humanity and our 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, because with Luke, there is Jesus, too.
Fr. David Curry
The Feast of St. Luke/Trinity XX, 2026
Source URL: https://christchurchwindsor.ca/2026/10/18/sermon-for-the-feast-of-st-luke-twentieth-sunday-after-trinity/
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