Luke: Believers Church Bible Commentary

By Mary H. Schertz

Elkhart, IN 46516

• Language: English
• Publisher: Herald Press
• Release date: Jun 27, 2023
• ISBN: 9781513804286

Mary H. Schertz

Mary H. Schertz is a professor of New Testament at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Ind. She is co-compiler of Take Our Moments and Our Days (Vol. 1): An Anabaptist Prayer Book: Ordinary Time.

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Author’s Preface

Beloved Reader:

Like many people of my generation, I grew up with too much cross, too much blood of Christ, too much wretch like me, too much substitutionary atonement, too many questions about my personal relationship with Jesus. As a young adult, I had little patience for such talk and tended to dismiss such piety. Yet last week when a student asked me what place the cross has in my life, I said without hesitation and with conviction, The cross of Jesus is at the very center of my life.

This return, this second naivete, this transformation, is thanks in no small part to Luke and the Gospel he wrote. Let me be clear: I have no desire to go back to an emphasis on the cross that ignores Jesus’ life and ministry. I have no desire to embrace a theology of the cross that ignores the political and human factors that led to Jesus’ crucifixion. I have no love for a notion of salvation as either beginning with Jesus or dependent on an angry God who demands appeasement.

But the years of teaching Luke-Acts and writing this commentary have required me to rethink and rework almost every theological concept I have ever dismissed or, for that matter, embraced. I have been changed by my extended encounter with this first-century follower of Jesus who thought deeply and with great care about the Jesus he followed.

We can think of Christian formation as orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and orthopathy. Orthodoxy is thinking rightly; orthopraxy is doing rightly; orthopathy is feeling rightly. Luke addresses all three aspects as a call, guide, or perhaps inspiration to become mature disciples.

For Luke, thinking rightly is seeing rightly. Disciples are blind people with renewed and restored sight. Disciples can see the light. Disciples have hope—not for a national prosperity but for an eternal hope in the mercy of God for this life and the life to come. Disciples are, furthermore, ministers of this hope: commissioned like Jesus to heal, to teach, and to preach.

For Luke, doing rightly is exercising mercy in all ways toward all people, Jew and Gentile alike. Acts of compassion are primary ways that people are invited into the kingdom of God and the body of believers. Blessing and giving without thought of recompense, deeds of kindness and generosity especially for those who cannot return the favor, an abundance of forgiveness (seventy times seven), and profligate provision out of one’s resources (fourfold), partying and celebrating joy and justice: all these are essential to the practice of following Jesus.

For Luke, feeling rightly integrates thinking rightly and doing rightly. The disciple’s orientation is to the passion of Jesus for the sick and the passion of God for the lost. Orienting and reorienting oneself to those passions are foundational tasks for the ongoing work of learning to see and do the will of God, which is so important to Luke. Love is at the heart of the gospel. Love compels both thinking and doing. Passion and compassion are the beginning and the end.

This orientation toward the love of God begins with one’s own experience of salvation. Some of us know that we are sick and lost. We have a head start. For others of us, recognizing that we are among the sick and lost, no matter how stellar our upbringing or how strong our heritage, is the first turn toward the light. Some of us stand with the faithful Jews of Luke’s birth narratives in that respect. We also need the message of John the Baptist. Indeed, we also need that baptism. The kingdom is for all, wherever we begin the journey.

But regular reorientation to the love of God is equally important. Prayer, participation in groups of table fellowship and instruction, and worship are the primary ways that Jesus models for his disciples; these they continue to practice after his death and resurrection. Regular and practical relationships with God, Jesus, the Spirit, and other believers are the disciples’ nourishment for the journey with Christ. We grow to love God, our neighbor, and our enemy by regularly experiencing God’s love for us and the believers’ love for us through prayer, table fellowship, and worship with others in the presence of God.

All three aspects of discipleship formation have become more important and more life-giving to me because of my encounter with this ancient text and with those who have read it with me over the years. Perhaps the simplest way to explain this growth is by saying that the dear ones of Luke 10 have become friends and companions on my way to learning how to think rightly, act rightly, and feel rightly. These four friends are the lawyer, Mary, the good Samaritan, and dear Martha.

I have a more wholesome view of the role of thought and intellect in faithful discipleship, for Luke allows neither a dismissal of knowledge nor its exaltation. Knowledge with proper perception is essential, but knowledge for its own sake or for the aggrandizement of the learned one without proper perception can lead us astray. The lawyer and Mary in chapter 10 become examples of improper and proper knowledge and perception. The lawyer tries to gain and use knowledge for self-justification, but Mary has chosen the better part as she sits at Jesus’ feet and learns from him.

Through Luke’s Gospel, I have also come to a saner and simpler relationship with service, for Luke contends that this practical art of mercy and compassion is essential to our growth in love toward God and others even as it can get out of hand. The courageous caregiver, a despised Samaritan, shows us what service looks like at its matter-of-fact best. But dear and lovely Martha, one of Jesus’ best friends and mine, serves in order to justify herself in much the way the lawyer seeks knowledge to justify himself. Jesus gently chides her to slow down and perceive herself and her service in a new way. He needs her loving attention more than he needs her fussing.

As helpful as Luke has been for me in terms of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, his insight into this business of orthopathy, orienting and reorienting ourselves to the passion of God, has been most transformative and is the reason I can say confidently that the cross of Jesus is at the center of my life. The critical orthopathic moment—for Luke, for Jesus, and dare I say, for God—happens at Olivet. Jesus, as Luke portrays him, has been struggling with these two wills, his dual heritage: these age-old tensions between the divine warrior and the suffering servant, or the way of redemptive violence and the power of nonviolent love. In chapter 22, Jesus leaves his disciples to watch and goes forth alone to come before the Father; in the pressure of the moment, he forges a new resolve. Or perhaps he and the Father together forge a new resolve, since the Bible is less concerned about the changeability or unchangeability of God than many theologians are.

What can be said, minimally, is that the inspired Scriptures, as Jesus knew them and as we know them, have shown both divine war and suffering love to be ways that God acts. Jesus sees the struggle as a struggle of his will with the Father’s will. The two-swords passage in 22:35-38, just before this prayer at Olivet, portrays Jesus’ attraction to holy war as a way to finish this journey on which God has set him. Two swords are enough for holy war; holy war might be one way that the cup could be taken from him, and he prays that the cup be taken from him. But finally, in the small Greek word plēn (22:42) (translated as nevertheless, however, or yet) that echoes down through history as the most poignant word in the Bible, Jesus, with God, resolves the question in favor of suffering love. It may be more accurate to say that he, with the Father, redefines both the divine warrior and the suffering servant and goes to the cross as a nonviolent divine warrior and a nonpassive suffering servant.

What happens in that moment turns the world upside down. It rends the veil between earth and heaven. It lets human and divine embrace. It proclaims forever that love is stronger than death. It binds evil and forever stretches wide the portal to redemption for all peoples, both Jew and Gentile.

That mysterious and grace-filled moment, that moment when the most powerful love ever known embraces the world that God created, that moment when Jesus both empties himself and takes on his full Sonship—that moment crystallizes what is worth living for and what is worth dying for.

I know this love; it is this love that I yearn to know more fully. It is this love without which I cannot live. It is this love that pulls me toward the light. It is this love that orients and reorients me to the passion and compassion of God.

In this journey with Luke and his Gospel, I had many companions. I thank my neighbors in South Central Elkhart, most of whom were not aware that I was writing a commentary. Nor would most of them have understood what a commentary is. As a white person, I am a 20 percent minority in my community; as a person with a degree beyond college, I am even more an anomaly. Still, their acceptance of me and their love for me have provided a foundation for my thinking in ways nothing else could have. Everything I have taught or written over the years must pass muster as something that would be true in my neighborhood. I am indebted to these dear ones beyond measure.

I also thank my colleagues at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary, and especially the Bible department. The seminary’s dedication to the Bible and the department’s dedication to text-based learning and instruction have been my North Star. Through the ups and downs of seminary life, we have together looked to the words of these sacred texts for guidance and inspiration. It has been my privilege to contribute to and receive from that fond gaze at these ancient wisdoms.

My gratitude also goes out to what we called the Luke Group. I spent many wonderful evenings with Barbara and James Nelson Gingerich, Rebecca Slough, Rachel Miller Jacobs, and Eleanor and (before his untimely death) Alan Kreider. We ate good food, talked, laughed, sometimes teared up a little, and read over every chapter of the commentary. Their insight and affirmation were critical to my well-being and to the good of the commentary. They especially helped me discern where and how I lost my voice when my writing dropped into academic jargon or was otherwise lacking. They bore me up on eagles’ wings: would that every writer could know this love and collaboration.

Loren Johns was my editor in this work and served me and Luke so very well. Insofar as the volume exhibits consistency and structural cohesion, I owe much to Loren. I have appreciated his careful and helpful notes as he worked through the manuscript. The staff at Herald Press have provided helpful clarity.

Finally, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my family. My brothers, Edward and Fredde Schertz, and my sisters, Ann Schertz and Kate Kortemeier, have taken me seriously but never too seriously and kept me grounded and, even more important, laughing through the years of this project. I dedicate the volume to our parents, who told me when I was about eight that just because someone says that’s what the Bible says doesn’t always mean that’s what the Bible says.

—Mary H. Schertz

Epiphany, 2023

Introduction to Luke

One flinty spring evening, I heard the Blind Boys of Alabama sing Ben Harper’s I Shall Not Walk Alone at Goshen (IN) College. Unforgettable and haunting, the song features someone at the end of strength, fortitude, and endurance—unutterably weary and barely able to discern between light and darkness. The phrase that has forever captured my heart and mind is the conclusion: I must kneel to fight. The singer is not giving up the fight, there is still resistance and the will to carry on. But at the end of resources, the fight changes. There is no longer an illusion of one’s own power. There is only reliance upon a force outside and beyond oneself.

This phrase, I must kneel to fight, captures both Luke’s relationship with his readers and what, centrally, he wants to tell them. This poetic fragment also captures my passion for this Gospel and the life it offers us as members of the same body of Christ to which Luke belonged. Luke imagines the church free to worship God without fear because turning toward the light and kneeling to fight becomes united with the love of God in and for the world. That self-giving love of God—shaped and lived out by Jesus, embraced by the church through the Spirit—becomes, paradoxically but actually, the richest possible sustenance of life for believers.

Luke was writing in 80–90 CE, when his world had fallen apart. We surmise that he was a Jew for several reasons. He addresses both the Gospel and Acts to Theophilus, or God-lover, orienting someone sympathetic to the Jews, but not Jewish himself, to Jewish perspectives. Luke has an intimate knowledge of Jewish life and customs. See especially his description of Jewish worship in chapter 4. Finally, that he was Jewish might also be extrapolated from his relatively sympathetic stance toward the Pharisees compared to the other gospels, as well as by taking Acts into account.

Luke was not only a Jew, but a Jew living in the aftermath of the fall of the temple in 70 CE. Judaism was heavily factionalized and struggling to find a way forward from desolation after defeat by the Romans in the Jewish War (66–70 CE). Luke was part of a new Jewish sect forming around the memory of a beloved Jewish healer and the shared experience of the healer’s death and resurrection amid that chaos and uncertainty. The struggles of that new movement, with its parent Judaism and with faraway but not-to-be-trusted Rome, reflected the more general religious uncertainty and upheaval in Jerusalem and beyond. Luke’s experience of the fracturing relationship with Jews was not as bitter as that of the writers of Matthew’s and John’s Gospels—whether because of his time, or his temperament—but the tensions are present in both his Gospel and in Acts.

In addition to the tension between the new and the old and the upheaval within Judaism itself, the world at large, as Luke knew it, was restive and unhappy. The Jewish people in Jerusalem were nervous about Rome. Roman occupation might have seemed like Pax Romana to the powerful people in Rome, and to the writers sympathetic with them, but it was not experienced as peace in the far-flung lands governed by Rome. But Rome as an occupying force did not only affect the Jews and the emerging Christians in Jerusalem. Other peoples in Palestine and beyond were also facing identity crises, economic exploitation, political volatility, and the shaking of long-held assumptions as a result of the oppression and upheaval associated with the so-called Pax Romana.

As David Tiede notes, theodicy was an issue for both the Jews and other people groups of the era. How does one understand the relationship between the experience of whimsical and often malevolent political forces and any faith in the divine? Although the Jews were not the only people facing this dilemma, they had an advantage for those within their tradition, which may have attracted others to their views. The Jewish people had faced these questions and dilemmas before. They had, in their literature, the writings that developed out of the destruction of the first temple in 587 BCE. In that sense, these writings, from several points of view and supplemented with commentary, provided a rich resource for the questions of the first century (Tiede 1980: 1–7). For five hundred years, Jewish thinkers and writers had worked with hard questions about God’s faithfulness in the face of evidence to the contrary. That tenacity, that resilience, that garnering and guiding of hope: this was part of what drew other Greco-Roman people groups to Judaism and later to Christianity. Luke’s view of faith is influenced by the stream of Jewish thinking and writing on theodicy and was, in fact, part of that stream. Other people besides the Jews were looking for hope in a world run amok, and Luke’s view was profoundly appealing. Like the singer in Harper’s song, Luke is looking for the light in his way and for his time.

Theophilus, the God-lover addressed in Luke’s two-volume work, was that utterly weary, tattered reader seeking the light. Lukan scholarship has not been able to resolve whether Theophilus was a specific person, perhaps a patron, or an every person or dear reader figure. But blurring of private and public is part of this gospel writer’s genius and also the product of his place in history. Luke is writing both to individuals and to people groups, most notably members of his own Jewish community but also Gentiles he knows and loves. However, like all writers who have put pen to paper, or quill to papyrus, Luke hopes his work will speak to any Jew or Gentile drawn to and interested in Jesus. In Acts 2, Luke names over a dozen language groups; yet that list includes only the groups of devout Jews in Jerusalem at Pentecost. The Gentiles are never listed in such a way, but the variety of languages and peoples among the Gentiles was equal to or greater than that among the Jews visiting Jerusalem. Our contemporary notion of nationalism doesn’t quite fit what we know of Luke’s environment, nor does our contemporary notion of individualism. The world of the New Testament was far more collective than what we can easily imagine in our individualistic Western society. Yet there is little doubt that the New Testament writers call on people, persons, groups, and individuals to decide to follow Jesus. There is individual as well as a collective responsibility in responding to Jesus and his message.

In Luke’s mind, finding a way forward, individually and collectively, is the business of the day, the impulse of his writing, his pastoral concern. He has a vision for the mission of God, shaped by Jesus and for the world. Simeon, in Luke 2:32, describes the baby and his life as revelation to the Gentiles and for the glory of Israel—in other words, for Luke’s known world of persons and groups. In social, political, and religious terms, Luke’s readers represent the battered and tattered, torn and worn, of which modern-day musician Ben Harper writes. Acknowledging these realities, Luke is nevertheless as certain as Harper that the light shines. Luke and Harper resonate in their assessment of the reality of the human condition and in the certainty that the light exists and is adequate to guide the way.

Turning to Find the Light

In Luke’s view, we need to turn to find the light. Lukan scholars give voice to the notion of Luke’s reversal of values; you will find many references to that in this commentary. In this Gospel is a sense of needing to turn around, sometimes a full 180 degrees, to find the light and to move toward it. From Mary’s Magnificat to Jesus’ healing of an enslaved person’s ear while he is being arrested at Olivet, expectations, powers, and circumstances regularly get turned upside down. Becoming a disciple of Jesus involves changing our perceptions, mentally turning around, repenting, and redirecting our actions. Right knowledge or right perception is the precursor to repentance. It is fundamental to life as a believer and a member in the body of Christ.

Thus, when Luke in his introduction promises Theophilus a more accurate account, he is not talking about the details of the events or their arrangement. Luke wants to give Theophilus, and all his readers, the correct understanding of Jesus’ life, ministry, death, and resurrection. Luke wants his readers to perceive Jesus rightly. This focus on perception as key to discipleship becomes especially clear in Jesus’ inaugural sermon in Nazareth in chapter 4 as he takes the scroll and turns to Isaiah 61 to read about the release of captives. Luke has artfully arranged that passage as a chiasm, a literary feature characterized by a repeated a-b-a pattern. Luke folds both the frame of the story and the quotation from Isaiah into this pattern of repetition and resonance. For example, Jesus stands up, takes the scroll from the attendant, unrolls it, reads it, rolls it back up, hands it to the attendant, and sits down. That pattern emphasizes or highlights the reading of the scroll as the center of the story. It is the most important part—which Luke designates by writing in a way that makes the act of reading stand out from the logistics of standing, sitting, unrolling, rolling.

The pattern Luke uses to describe the act of reading is also evident in the content of the reading as Luke has incorporated it into his Gospel. The text of Isaiah is poetic, so this structure should not surprise us. However, Luke has emphasized that structure to highlight the center of the reading: the phrase sight to the blind (Luke 4:18). Thus, while Jesus announces his mission to his neighbors and kinfolk in Nazareth as a general ministry of healing and justice, the central and most important motif of that ministry is bringing sight to the blind. Certainly, sight to the blind refers to physical restoration of sight in this Gospel, as in the other synoptic gospels. Some of Jesus’ work of healing is restoring eyesight to people afflicted with physical blindness.

In Luke, sight to the blind also refers to metaphorical blindness, or ignorance. Throughout his ministry, Jesus addresses perception and contends with ignorance. In chapter 7, John’s disciples come to Jesus and ask whether he is the one they have been looking for. Jesus tells them to look around and see what he is doing. Later in the same chapter, Jesus asks Simon the Pharisee whether he sees the woman of the city who is disrupting his dinner to anoint Jesus’ feet. In the story of the good Samaritan, seeing is defined as seeing with compassion and taking action. The priest and the Levite see the victim lying on the road and pass by, but the Samaritan sees the hapless chap as his neighbor—and acts on that understanding. Neither Simon the Pharisee nor the passersby in the good Samaritan story are physically blind, but they need to see differently. They need to see better, they need to really see, they need to see rightly.

Kneeling to Fight

As Luke proceeds with his narrative, the story he hopes will turn people to Jesus fundamentally and transformationally, it becomes increasingly clear that seeing rightly involves the most counterintuitive and controversial reversal of reversals. It is seeing with compassion and acting to heal in situations of human greed and violence. It is kneeling to fight. As Luke sees the gospel, how to resist evil and how compassion and its cost, suffering, contribute to that resistance become the critical issue of Jesus’ ministry, life, death, and resurrection.

Before we delve deeply into the role of suffering in the Gospel of Luke, we need to make one small but critical distinction. In Luke, as elsewhere in the New Testament, suffering is not valued for itself. It is not suffering that redeems. As womanist theologian Karen Baker-Fletcher points out in her discussion of the fears and hopes that Jesus’ mother had for him,

this does not mean that suffering is redemptive or sacralizing. Suffering does not make us more holy, and suffering is not what makes God, God. God’s empathy in Christ is redemptive. God’s overcoming evil in Christ is redemptive. And God’s forgiveness in Christ is redemptive. We are called to overcome the production of hatred and violence. We are called to live into the resurrection life promised to us and given to us in the here and now. The cross is symbolic of all weapons of hatred and violence—physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual. The significance of Christ’s response to weapons of evil is not a passive bearing of it all, but it is God’s profound No to evil. In following Jesus, we participate in the divine No to evil and suffering. For these reasons, it makes sense to follow Jesus while also challenging an adulterous relationship with worldly power, greed, and violence. (139, emphasis in the original)

In some Anabaptist settings, we may come close to seeing suffering as an end in itself, as a test of faithfulness, or may attach some virtue to suffering for its own sake. Such a notion is contrary to the gospel and especially contrary to the Gospel of Luke. As Jesus works with his disciples, what often stands in the way of clear perception and consequent action is fog around the notion of suffering. However, the problem for the disciples is a profound desire to avoid suffering of any kind. They particularly do not want to associate the Messiah with suffering. But as we take up that issue in this Gospel, we should note that as Luke portrays him, Jesus does not seek suffering for its own sake. He accepts the likelihood that faithful implementation of the mission of God in the world may entail suffering. While suffering may be a realistic expectation, it does not itself redeem. God redeems by overcoming evil.

Just before the transfiguration scene, Jesus asks the disciples who others think he is; then he asks who they think he is. Peter speaks immediately: Jesus is the Christ, the anointed one of God. But instead of affirming this good answer, Jesus tells them that the Son of Humanity must suffer, and those who would follow him must also accept the possibility that they will suffer. That the disciples have not fully heard this teaching becomes apparent in the transfiguration. The three disciples who accompany Jesus up the mountain see the transfigured Jesus, along with Moses and Elijah. But they don’t see rightly, as Peter discovers when he impulsively offers to make three booths. They do not understand that the conversation between Jesus and these forerunners has to do with Jesus’ exodus (9:31). They do not understand that freedom entails cost, sometimes lethal cost. They have not integrated the possibility of suffering into their notion of the Messiah and their hope for the restoration of Israel.

It is a hard truth to understand. It is a hard truth to live. Peter, alone of the disciples, seems to get it when he tells Jesus at the Last Supper that he will follow Jesus even to death. But Jesus, knowing Peter better than Peter knows himself, warns that Peter’s understanding is incomplete and will end in his denying Jesus.

But Peter and the other disciples deserve our compassion rather than our censure. We too have difficulty understanding suffering for the gospel. Furthermore, Jesus himself struggles with his own choices as the end draws nearer. Only in his prayer that last night does he finally come to terms with the mystery of the gospel as the encounter between evil and love. This struggle has much to do with Jesus’ full humanity and, as the creeds put it later, with his full divinity. One of the tensions, perhaps the most intense tension, in the dilemma of his humanity is the place of suffering in the work of love, in resisting evil. What is suffering saying no to and what is it saying yes to? This tension is resolved only in Jesus’ prayer at Olivet before he is arrested. At the cross, finally and definitively, we hear the results of this struggle to accept suffering and embrace redeeming love. There Jesus pleads his executioners’ case before the Father: they do not understand or see what they are doing. The theme of perception thus comes full circle. Understanding fully and correctly ends in loving those who do not understand. In gospel terms, love grounds good and does what good alone cannot do. Good might counter evil, but only love transforms evil.

The key question confronts us: What really happened that night at Olivet? No other gospel prefaces the prayer before Jesus’ arrest with what we know as the two swords passage (Luke 22:35-38). In those passages, Luke makes most clear that the battle against evil is won through the cross rather than through holy war. What led Jesus from his statement that two swords are enough to his putting a stop to the use of the sword and healing the wound a sword caused? What changed for Jesus as his disciples fell asleep and he wrestled alone with God?

To understand Jesus’ prayer at Olivet and his decision about the place of his own will and that of the Father, we need to explore more fully the alternative to kneeling to fight. Jesus had another choice. The disciples had another choice. We have another choice. In many respects, that other choice is much more attractive than the one Jesus made. This other choice looks a lot less costly and more successful. One can stand up to fight. One can fight evil—with God, for God—through holy war. This choice is time honored. It is biblical. It is the way most religious people have responded to the problem of evil.

But it is not the conclusion that Jesus comes to in Luke’s Gospel. Instead, in this greatest of reversals, Jesus determines that he will go to war against evil: he will resist evil in its most insidious form by going forward in love to the cross. Luke has been leading us toward this insight throughout the Gospel, particularly from the temptation narrative onward. But the theme comes to a head in chapter 22. Here Jesus must decide for all time whether he and his disciples will wage holy war with the two swords they have in their possession, or whether the way of suffering love on the cross emerges as another, better, way of combating evil. The themes of divine warrior and the suffering servant are both strong motifs in Jesus’ Bible and his tradition. Both would have presented themselves to Jesus as possibilities. Both have scriptural support in a tradition that Jesus knew well.

Like Gideon of antiquity, even the most faithful in Israel were questioning God’s presence. In Luke’s mind, the path Jesus chose was meant to fulfill the mission of God to restore Israel. The vision set out in the infancy narratives at the Gospel’s beginning is obvious. Through the songs of Mary and Zechariah, Luke helps his reader picture an Israel free to worship God without fear, a nation where the lowly are lifted up and tyrants are deprived of power. But neither Jesus nor Luke imagines this restoration, this salvation, in conventional, superficially political terms. Because of the gap between conventional views and Jesus’ view of restoration, Luke’s evangelistic purpose becomes understanding or seeing the paradox crystallized in kneeling to fight. The path toward wholeness, shalom, salvation leads through the cross to the way of love.

In Luke’s Gospel and in Acts, that reversal of perception finds its center, its culmination, its focal point, its grounding, at Olivet when Jesus tells the disciples to wait and watch with him and then prays that the cup be taken from him. In this commentary, my main argument is that Luke weaves into his Gospel story Jesus’ struggle to fully understand how to fulfill the mission of God he has been given, from the temptations in the wilderness to this stark and lonely scene at Olivet with the disciples. The sacred texts that Jesus read—at least from the time he was twelve—contain the motifs of holy war and of the suffering servant. Of course, the Hebrew Scriptures contain more than these two approaches to evil. But these two themes present clear tensions for every first-century Jew, including Jesus, as well as for the church in the millennia that have followed his resurrection.

Holy War and Suffering Servant as Keys to Understanding Luke

In biblical terms, holy war is fighting alongside God and under God to fulfill God’s will for the preservation and protection of the people of God. This type of fighting entails unusual trust because the foundation for successful war is not the size or strength of the nation’s army, but dependence on God. Sometimes, even usually, underdog status is a necessary component of holy war. How else to assure that it is God and not the people who wage and win the war?

Think of Gideon as the prototypical holy warrior. At the time, Israel was being overrun by Midianites. When God appears in an epiphany and announces his presence to the mighty warrior, Gideon is less than impressed. He poses the question that Luke is also trying to answer: If you are with us, why are so many bad things happening to us? (cf. Judg 6:12-13). After some negotiation and various demonstrations, Gideon, who does not see himself as a mighty warrior by any means, agrees to fight the Lord’s battle. But God tells Gideon that he has too many warriors. The danger is that Israel will think it solved its Midianite problem by itself. God tells Gideon to release any soldier who is afraid. Twenty-two thousand go home, and he is left with ten thousand. But according to God, ten thousand are still too many to fight God’s holy war. After another culling process, Gideon is down to three hundred men, and God is satisfied with that number. They then prepare to take on the Midianites (Judg 7:2-7).

Jesus, as Luke portrays him, is steeped in his tradition. He knows the stories of holy war. But he is equally versed in the suffering-servant motif that emerges from the prophetic tradition in the book of Isaiah. Prophets are called from within God’s people to speak the oracles of God. But the prophets’ message to these beloved ones is often, perhaps even usually, unpalatable and filled with judgments that the people find hard to hear and hard to bear. So prophets—chosen by God from among the very people God has chosen, those whom God loves and wants to protect—risk peril and face a precarious existence. The prophets and their messages run afoul of the human tendency, in the face of hard news, to reject the messenger, often with violence. Key to the integrity of the prophet is a willingness to absorb this rejection, to suffer on behalf of the people, so that the people might be saved through repentance and return to the God who loves them. In Isaiah, himself a prophet, the image of prophet is taken a degree further and melded, mysteriously, with that of the enigmatic suffering servant.

Isaiah includes four servant songs: 42, 49, 50, 52:13–53:12, and perhaps a fifth: 61:1-3. They portray a leader of the people, one charged with bringing justice and restoring Israel. But this leader is abused and degraded by his own people in horrible ways. In the poems, the tortured leader endures to the end. He remains faithful to God despite his utter ruination at the hands of the people.

The identity of the suffering servant is not clear in the context of the poems in Isaiah, nor is it clear that the identity of the servant remains static in the poems. Certainly, the figure has roots in Israel’s prophetic tradition; it may even have represented Israel itself, in light of Israel’s mission to the Gentiles. Clearly, the author of the servant poems did not have Jesus of Nazareth in mind while writing.

Yet there is a remarkable affinity between the servant and Jesus. Early Christians, including Luke, made this connection. They chose to interpret Jesus in light of the servant songs of Isaiah—not solely, not only, but surely. In many ways, the identity of Jesus found resonance in the Scriptures of the early Christians, the sacred writings of the Jews. One of these writings, which became important for Luke, is the figure of the servant as Isaiah portrays him.

These two motifs, holy warrior and suffering servant, are in tension. Most essentially, the role of violence differs in the approaches. Violence is, in both motifs, secondary rather than primary. Violence is not the objective; it is secondary to the objective. But violence toward those threatening God’s people is expected, however regrettably, in holy war. The warrior and God are partners in delivering judgment and punishment to the enemy. The suffering servant may not anticipate violence as inevitable, yet this servant must prepare for its likelihood and must prepare to absorb it.

The second tension, or major difference between holy warrior and suffering servant, is the naming of the enemy. The holy warrior knows who the enemy is. The enemy is against the people and against God. The enemy is outside the children of Israel. The enemy of the suffering servant is much less defined, and for the most part is not named as such. In prophetic literature generally, the opponents of the suffering servant are the wayward people of God. But they are never really called enemies. Hostility is noted, perhaps, and the people of God are clearly denounced for their sin. Yet enemies remain people outside Israel, even when they are occasionally used by God against Israel.

The motifs of holy warrior and suffering servant also have important similarities. Both the holy warrior and the suffering servant are serving God, first and foremost. Both are putting themselves in danger. From the perspectives of normal human happiness and satisfaction, both are sacrificing themselves and their futures. Both are manifesting courage. Both serve—and serve well—the purposes of God.

While clearly discrete, these approaches, these ways of being fully and obediently Jewish, have powerful affinities. They have their attractions. Jesus as the Son of God, seen as beloved in baptism, anointed with the Holy Spirit, and uniquely called to God’s mission, was, as Luke portrays him, caught in this dilemma. For Jesus, the dilemma comes to a crisis after the Last Supper, when Jesus, in conversation with his disciples, determines that two swords are enough—as they would be for holy war. With those two swords, and those beloved disciples, he then leaves for Olivet, where he wrestles alone with God, with God’s will and his own, and with these two ways of fulfilling the mission. So much in Luke leads up to and then away from this pivotal moment.

The Way of Love

Luke’s understanding of what Jesus did in his work with his God, his people, and particularly his disciples, has much more to do with life than death. It has more to do with love than suffering. Perceiving that kneeling is the correct posture from which to resist or fight evil, even to death, has more to do with living rightly than with dying rightly. The right way of knowing has more to do with compassion than with absorbing violence as a way to combat evil. Yet to our consternation, coming to this awareness and these recognitions entails facing our fears of suffering and death. Our life and love depend on, paradoxically and precisely, our not grabbing for the usual markers of life and love. Possessions, status, security, and praise are suspect. As Jesus says ironically in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, people who seek such satisfactions and acquire them have their reward. But this is not the reward of the ways of Jesus and the salvation toward which he points us. The ways of Jesus and the salvation he offers constitute a greater and more profound freedom.

Facing our fears of death and suffering and learning to live outside of those oppressions frees us to commit fully and joyously to the ways of love. Paradoxically, as the ways of Jesus work in us and among us, we find ourselves in an expanding world and a growing love. Life opens before us as, with Theophilus and the rest of Luke’s readers, we kneel to fight. This commitment to love others to death as Jesus did affects the way we live, and does so in every respect. If we no longer fear death, so many other gods to whom we might give homage topple. If we no longer fear suffering, we are ourselves released and, in ways almost unfathomable, find our truest selves. If we no longer fear suffering or death, no earthly power or person or entity owns us, because we know to whom we truly belong. We know our true home. We are released from the power of death to become free to live. This gift is the gift of the one we call Christ. It is a gift that comes to us through Luke, intrepid evangelist, evangelist of hope. It is, as Ben Harper reminds us, the act of following the light through kneeling.

A Road Map to Luke

Luke’s Gospel progresses through four movements. In Luke 1–2, I understand Luke to be setting forth his themes and overall vision in orchestrated ways. The poetry of Mary’s Magnificat and Zechariah’s Benedictus is part of the orchestration. The symmetry of the births of the two babies and the presence of the pairs of the faithful—Mary and Joseph, Elizabeth and Zechariah, Anna and Simeon—contribute to the development of themes and motifs that Luke will attend to in the rest of his work in Luke and Acts. In that sense, these first chapters function to introduce motifs.

The second movement presents Jesus as an adult becoming ready for a life of ministry. John, also an adult by this time, performs his preparatory role and, although the sequence is not entirely clear, incurs the wrath of Herod. Jesus is baptized and declared beloved by God as the Spirit descends upon him. The ministry then begins with the presentation of Jesus’ credentials (the genealogy) and his examinations in the wilderness. From the wilderness, he emerges to preach his first sermon and begin teaching and healing. In the first part of this second movement, Jesus calls disciples and shapes his ministry. In the second part, he is fully into his practice of preaching, teaching, and healing. At the end of the section, in the transfiguration scene, God repeats the baptismal blessing of Jesus as the beloved Son, and Jesus sets his face toward Jerusalem in 9:51. The question of suffering now enters the story.

The third movement is the journey to Jerusalem, from 9:51 to 19:44. Luke 9:51 is the hinge between the two parts: ending the Galilean ministry and beginning the journey to Jerusalem. The first part of this rather meandering journey has mainly to do with Jesus and his disciples. Jesus is concerned with developing the habitus, the character and reflexes, of his disciples—their mission, their relationship with God, and their response to good and evil. Jesus characterizes himself as a tender mother hen and encourages his followers with parables of growth. The next part of the journey concerns the table of the kingdom of God. Through scenes of table fellowship, with accompanying interactions, teachings, and parables, Jesus leads his disciples and other people who come to him, introducing his vision of God’s table as a place where everyone is welcome and from which no one leaves unchanged. The third part of the journey spells out the practical results of eating at that table of the kingdom. Jesus takes up issues of money, status, and faith. The freedom and the costs of eating at the table and becoming part of this kingdom begin to come clear. The last part of this movement describes the end of his journey to Jerusalem. The exuberant joy of Zacchaeus is part of the picture, but the cost of discipleship dominates as Jesus weeps over Jerusalem in the last scene.

The fourth movement of Luke’s Gospel presents the passion and resurrection narratives. It includes the most intense moments of this Gospel: Jesus works out what it means to finish God’s project and then proceeds to fulfill the mission. From the struggles and controversies in the temple courts, through the last meal with his disciples, the momentous merging of wills at Olivet, and the trials before Pilate and Herod and Pilate again, the tension mounts. Then there is the final journey to the cross. Jesus is alone because his named disciples desert and deny him, while his friends and acquaintances, including the women who have followed him from Galilee, observe from afar. After his death, the male disciples, told by the women disciples things they can’t believe, slowly and clumsily find their way to renewed hope and faith as the risen Lord encounters them on the way to Emmaus, then back in Jerusalem, and finally, in blessing and departure.

In general, I follow the consensus among Luke scholars that some unknown convert to the Jesus movement in the first century wrote the Third Gospel, along with Acts, late in the first century, perhaps in the 80s. He had access to a version of Mark similar to our own as well as to a collection of teachings that also shows up in Matthew—an unknown source commonly referred to as Q. Luke also had access to sources known only to him.

The Method of This Commentary

There are many ways to read a book of the Bible and many ways to write a commentary. The method of this one is primarily a literary one. I am convinced that understanding ancient texts has much to do with understanding how ancient writers guide our reading by giving literary clues. Being able to pick up at least some of the literary features of the text and what they meant at the time of writing is essential. I have drawn attention to the chiasm in Luke 4 as an example of ancient underlining or highlighting. As you read in the commentary on Luke 22, I believe Luke gives us a similar reading guide that informs us about how to understand the two-swords passage and the prayer at Olivet in its literary context. We will never be able to read these texts as a first-century reader read them. Still, working to understand these ancient writers more empathetically, and more nearly in their own terms, can deepen our appreciation of the texts and how they were designed to help us know Jesus.

As an English major beginning seminary studies in the early 1980s, I became fascinated with how these ancient texts were put together. Although literary approaches to the text were barely existent then, I was fortunate to have a teacher, Willard M. Swartley, who supported my beginning efforts. A visitor to campus, Phyllis Trible, captured my attention with her literary analysis of Jonah. In graduate school, Mary Ann Tolbert was my adviser and mentor. She is a pioneer in literary studies of the New Testament and one of the finest practitioners of the art. I am grateful to her keen eye for literary features of texts and for honing my skills. I have also benefited from being a part of the Bible department at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (Elkhart, IN) for many years. I am especially grateful to Perry Yoder, who allowed himself to be persuaded by literary arguments, and to many students over the years who played an important role in helping me read Luke. I am indebted to so many of these dear ones for their questions, their insight, their laughter, and their love.

Unless otherwise indicated, quotations of the biblical text are from the New Revised Standard Version.

Part 1

The Birth Narratives

Luke 1:1–2:52

OVERVIEW

I am not the only one whose first memory of the birth narratives is playing with the family crèche (very carefully, since the figures were breakable: our baby Jesus was already missing a hand). It is a lovely memory, but it is also the memory of a mushed up and mixed together acquaintance with the two birth narratives in the Gospels. Only much later did I learn that Luke’s infancy narrative, as Luke 1 and 2 are often called, has its own distinctives. First, of the four gospels, only Luke and Matthew tell the stories about Jesus’ birth. That was a revelation. Second, Luke and Matthew differ quite radically in how they tell these stories. Matthew emphasizes Joseph and the magi from the East. Luke emphasizes Mary and the shepherds in the hills around Bethlehem. That was also a revelation. But I still smile when I see children playing with manger scenes, as we called them.

Luke uses these beginning chapters to introduce his motifs and themes. In the first chapter, a prologue establishes Luke’s credentials and his purpose in writing this account. He then tells stories of the annunciations to Zechariah about the birth of John and to Mary about the birth of Jesus. Zechariah’s wife Elizabeth and her kinswoman Mary spend time together in significant theological discourse. This section includes Elizabeth’s blessing in 1:42-45 as well as Mary’s hymn, the Magnificat, in verses 46-55. Toward the end of the chapter, Elizabeth’s baby is born. Zechariah, his father, names him John and breaks out into the hymn we know as the Benedictus, verses 68-79. In the second chapter, Luke tells about the birth of Jesus, his circumcision, and his visit to the temple at the age of twelve. In both chapters, pairs are important. There are two annunciations, two pregnant women, two songs (Mary’s Magnificat and Zechariah’s Benedictus), two babies, two people at the temple (Simeon and Anna), two temple stories.

Above all, these two chapters ground Luke’s story of Jesus in the narrative and faith of Israel. The births of John and Jesus are steps in fulfillment of God’s promises to the people of God. They witness to the faithfulness of God to Israel through the ages, no matter whether Israel has been worthy or always able to discern that faithfulness. Ultimately, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Mary and Joseph, and Anna and Simeon exemplify the obedient servants of God and are filled with the Spirit of God.

OUTLINE

Prologue, 1:1-4

The Births of the Cousins, 1:5–2:21

Two Temple Stories, 2:22-52

Luke 1:1-4

Prologue

PREVIEW

With a few notable and much appreciated exceptions, letter writing is a lost art these days. But if Luke were a letter writer of my parents’ generation, he would not have forgotten to inquire about his recipient’s well-being or to comment about the weather before getting to the main message of his letter. Of the four gospels, Luke’s is the only one to begin with a formal salutation and prologue. Matthew begins with the title of the genealogy and then leads directly into the genealogy. Mark’s first sentence is The beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, which is best read as Mark’s own title for his Gospel. He then inserts a quotation from Isaiah that introduces the story of John the Baptist. John begins his Gospel with a lovely, formal hymn—the melodious In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. Each gospel has its unique beginning. But Luke differs the most from all the other gospels in that he addresses his reader, Theophilus (the name means God-lover), in quite formal, literary Greek before he starts his story of Jesus. Beginning with a formal, rather abstract prologue is more like the beginnings of other classical Greek writings than like the openings by his fellow evangelists.

EXPLANATORY NOTES

An introduction to a work that is meant to be read and reread serves both the first reading and the rereading—in different ways. Reading fresh, or as nearly fresh as we can manage as twenty-first-century Christians, we admit that we know nothing about Theophilus. He may have been a real person, perhaps Luke’s patron. Theophilus was a proper name, well used in the area for at least three centuries before Jesus was born. Writers were sometimes supported by wealthy people who believed they had a mission to support the literary arts. While writing is usually laborious, even today, in the first century it was not only laborious but expensive. Luke wrote copiously—his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles make up about one-fourth of the entire New Testament. No doubt he needed someone to provide his living and pay for his papyrus when he was writing.

On the other hand, Theophilus might have been a persona that Luke constructed to characterize his reader. Thus, Theophilus might be more the Gentle Reader whom nineteenth-century novelists sometimes addressed. Perhaps Luke, like many writers, envisioned a particular reader to help him keep his purposes for writing clear and vivid in his mind.

Regardless of whether we think Theophilus was a real person or Luke’s characterization of the reader, we can gather how Luke imagined his reader from what he says in the prologue. Luke expects Theophilus to know something about the story of Jesus. He is not writing to a person or to people who know nothing about Jesus. In verse 4 he tells Theophilus that he is writing to help him better understand things in which he has already been instructed. Luke shows great respect for his reader, addressing him as most excellent or highly esteemed (AT).

Several other things are noteworthy about the prologue. Luke is concerned about the authenticity of his Gospel. Perhaps he feels the need to establish his credentials, since he himself is not an eyewitness. Nevertheless, he assures his reader that eyewitnesses and servants of the word have handed down the elements in the narrative he is compiling. Not only are they eyewitness to the people and events of Luke’s Gospel; they have also dedicated themselves to that story. They are assistants or helpers (AT) of the word.

The prologue also reports that Luke is writing out of some dissatisfaction with the available accounts. We must be careful not to speculate too much at this point, yet we must also be careful not to ignore what is in the text. In the first verse, Luke acknowledges that many have compiled narratives of what Jesus said and did. We do not know what number many represents in Luke’s mind. We do not know whether these writers finished their work. But we do know that Luke is aware of efforts by other writers. Then in verses 3 and 4, Luke makes some significant claims about his work: (1) He has followed the story accurately, closely, and carefully. (2) He is going to write Theophilus an orderly account. (3) His purpose is so the reader might know the truth about things already heard. These claims imply that Luke has in mind at least one account that is less accurate, less orderly, less true than other available accounts. We do not know specifically whether Luke has in mind Matthew or Mark, two works that he may have used as sources, or another gospel, such as the Gospel of Thomas or its precursor, which eventually was excluded from the canon. Or he may be referring to an account or accounts lost in the mists of history. We can, however, be clear that Luke is writing partly to correct other accounts or other writers that he knows. He is determined to give his perspective on the events and people that make up the story of Jesus. We need to keep this in mind as we enter the world of the Gospel according to Luke. What is it that Luke wants us to understand more accurately? What is he trying to correct for his readers? What new or more correct perspective does he want them to gain?

The prologue also serves the reader. This purpose is likely the more important of the two, at least for us as twenty-first-century, churchgoing readers. After we have read the whole Gospel and reflected on it, we can return to the prologue to see what Luke meant there. Then we can see that what Luke meant by a more orderly account is a particular perspective on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Luke wants to give his readers a theological understanding of who Jesus was and what he did. Luke is invested in helping his readers see that Jesus’ suffering and the potential suffering of his disciples, for the sake of the gospel, is part of the redemption of Israel and the world. Redemptive nonviolence is the key to Luke’s Gospel.

THE TEXT IN BIBLICAL CONTEXT

Beginnings

The ways we use the Bible in worship and preaching rarely allow time or space to consider the separate writings of the Bible as literary works with their own integrity and character. In most instances, we look at individual passages or follow a particular theme through various texts in one Testament or in the Bible as a whole. But occasionally, in Sunday school or other Bible study settings, we do have an opportunity to focus on a book of the Bible. When we do so, it is especially important to look carefully at how a