Sermon: 'Only Luke is with me'

2 Timothy 4:5-17, Luke 10:1-9

There are two ways of telling most stories. So in the epistle today we heard Paul say ‘Only Luke is with me', but if there were an epistle of Luke I think it would say the same thing slightly differently:

‘Luke, a servant of Jesus Christ and travelling companion of Paul, to Theophilus, beloved in the Lord. Having followed Paul round Asia and Europe, been shipwrecked, thrown out of cities, had to say goodbye to several travel companions sometimes after they fell out with Paul, we are in Rome where he is under house arrest and I'm running round looking after him.'

It's conjecture, because there is no epistle by Luke, but probably not too wide of the mark. Luke is a man of many parts and appears to have been a faithful travel companion to Paul for many years as well as an author. He wrote the gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostle for Theophilus, which means lover of God and could refer to a particular person or be a symbolic name for a group of Christians, in order to provide an orderly account of the truth into which Theophilus had been instructed, perhaps in preparation for baptism. Luke does not claim to be an eyewitness of the life of Jesus, but half way through Acts he switches from telling the story in the third person to telling it in the first person plural which suggests that at that point, when Paul was in Troas and about to cross into Europe, Luke became part of the group and shared some of his subsequent experiences. It appears he is drawing on something like a travel diary and, from the alternating use of third and first person in Acts, it looks as though Luke stayed in Philippi while the others moved on then linked up again when Paul returned. Having made it back to Jerusalem, he suddenly found himself getting back on board ship to accompany the now-prisoner Paul to Rome because Paul, facing strong opposition from the religious authorities, had perhaps somewhat intemperately and on the spur of the moment, appealed to the emperor for a hearing. That was Paul's prerogative as a Roman citizen but it had implications for Luke who appears not to have been consulted before the appeal was made. Unlike the others, who had at various times declined to go along with Paul's plans, Luke stuck with him.

In the letter to the Colossians, Luke is referred to as ‘the beloved physician' which can help us to read between the lines of what it was like to travel with Paul. We know that Paul had a serious physical affliction that continually troubled him and was not healed by prayer, possibly that it was an eye complaint. Now if you have someone with you who is a physician, who do you think deals with that medical problem on a regular basis? And Paul was rather in the habit of being stoned, lashed with forty lashes, shipwrecked, generally badly treated by his various enemies, bandits, and at times hungry, cold and worn out. Again, who do you think patched him up and kept him on the road?

I suspect Paul was not always an easy travel companion and that patience was one of Luke's virtues - after all, at the end in Rome he was the only one of several previous very dedicated travel companions to have stuck with Paul. Paul refers to several companions by name in the various epistles but we know that he could fall out with them in a big way: for example, there's the very sharp disagreement with Barnabas over the young Mark whom Paul considered to have been lacking in commitment, which led Barnabas to leave Paul and sail off to Cyprus with Mark. Interestingly, as we heard in the epistle today, Paul later realised his mistake and asked for Mark to be fetched because he was useful in Paul's ministry.  

At the end of the letter to Philemon, Luke is one of Paul's named companions, along with Epaphras, Mark, Aristarchus, and Demas but by the time 2 Timothy was written (and it may have been written in Paul's name by one of his disciples, rather than by Paul himself) Demas had abandoned Paul and gone to Thessalonica. Paul says rather bitterly that Demas was in love with the present world which we can take as a sign either that he had abandoned the faith altogether, which is unlikely, or had been unable to go along with Paul's sense of his mission and Paul had taken that as a sign of weakness of resolve. So for Luke to make it through to the end suggests abnormal grace and patience with Paul that others hadn't managed.

So who is Luke? Christian tradition tells us that he was born in Antioch, was a Gentile and died at the age of 84, having never married. His skilful use of language indicates that he was better-educated than most early Christian writers. He wrote no letters, as Paul did, but an orderly account of the life of Jesus and of the expansion of the early church through Paul's mission in particular - it's a particular slant on the spread of the gospel and a different story would be told of the early church had another author told the tale. He was not a disciple of Paul, converted by him, so much as a colleague who was already a Christian when they met. He appears to be a city-based person who concentrates his story in Acts on cities and on Peter and Paul, virtually neglecting all the other early Christian missionaries.

There is also a tradition that recognises Luke as the first person to produce icons and some icons of Luke show him sitting at an easel. Tradition says he wrote three icons (you write an icon rather than paint it) of the Virgin Mary, Peter and Paul. But there is no hard evidence for that, just a tradition particularly in the Orthodox Church.

So the picture we have of Luke is of a faithful man who was prepared to sacrifice the opportunity and gift of family life for travel to support one of the early missionaries of the church, who used his medical skills to keep that missionary on the road and his education to record some of the stories that would otherwise have been lost to the church and the world. He also offered the simple but demanding gift of stable friendship to a complex and perhaps volatile person, thus facilitating the spread of the gospel throughout much of the known world. This was at enormous personal cost, quite apart from his own sense of loss when other close companions left and the stamina needed to walk the distances involved, we should remember that not only was Paul shipwrecked, Luke was shipwrecked too and faced the likelihood of drowning.

We are coming to the end of a year in which we have been reading our way through Mark's gospel; in a few weeks time we turn to Luke as our next our gospel companion. So with St Luke's Day falling on a Sunday this year, this is an opportune time to renew our acquaintance with him and his writing in anticipation of the coming year.  

Luke's two volume work, the Gospel and Acts, stresses the universal mission of Jesus - Luke traces his ancestry back to Adam rather than Matthew's Abraham - emphasises Jesus' mission to the despised race of the Samaritans as well as the Gentiles and Jesus' inclusion of women in his ministry. Because of his Gentile background and audience, he has relatively few Old Testament quotations and gives Jesus in the classical Greek title ‘master' rather than the Jewish ‘rabbi'. He probably wrote the gospel as a free-standing work in the last third of the first century, perhaps at Antioch, and then Acts maybe at Rome while Paul was imprisoned there or a few years later. He drew on other sources, both oral and written, and set his account in a broader context by providing historical benchmarks and making connections between events, but he was not an historian as we know historians today although scholars say he is accurate. He uses sources selectively and describes his writing as ‘an orderly account' and I suspect Luke was an orderly man, which makes his willingness to stick with Paul whose plans seemed to change frequently and at short notice, all the more remarkable. His orderly account presents the story of Jesus and the story of the church as one whole, finding their meaning in each other.

All that is background for the coming year. But, in closing, what of today's gospel reading? The previous passage anticipated Jesus' death in Jerusalem and the radical commitment required of his followers. Jesus had previously sent his twelve closest disciples out on mission, now he sends seventy or perhaps seventy two - the text is not clear but in the Jewish tradition both represented all the nations of the earth so this hints at a global mission. They go ahead of him in pairs to prepare the way for his arrival, not so much by preaching but by staying with the local people, healing their sick and telling them that the kingdom of God has come near to them. We could examine the text in detail, but given that today is St Luke's Day and our focus is on him as much as on his gospel, I wonder if, with hindsight, he can see his own vocation fitting in here. He was not one of the seventy, but did end up in a pair with Paul on the road, staying wherever they were offered hospitality, going to many of the nations of the known world and, I'm sure, using his skills as a physician when they met people in need of healing.

What do you think of as your vocation, your calling? Perhaps Luke reminds us that commitment to Christ is about using our gifts well and in combination with each other and the gifts of others: so, writing if we write, painting if we paint, healing people if we have medical training, being a companion to other people and helping them fulfil their vocation, facing danger if necessary, sacrificing the opportunity of marriage for the freedom to respond to a peripatetic lifestyle and sudden changes in plan, or of city life for the road. That was Luke's story, what is your equivalent set of gifts and responsibilities? Our Christian vocation is not just about doing something religious, it is about finding ways to use our particular circumstances, gifts and skills in God's service wherever we are. It is about putting up with difficult people, hanging in when it would be easier to drop out, keeping going not ‘when I'm sixty four' but when I'm eighty four, being ready to face changes in the direction of life when circumstances demand it. In Luke's case it is about literally going the extra mile for God.

There's a lot behind those five words, ‘only Luke is with me'. It's the story of a lifetime given to God. On this St Luke's Day, we can thank God for Luke's example and set out to follow it.