Luke’s legacy

Saturday, October 18, 2025

Feast of Saint Luke, Evangelist

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Luke’s legacy

The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few.

Luke was a busy man. Physician, author, son, evangelist, he accompanied Paul to Rome, where he might have spent many days with Paul, who was going blind, perhaps in a Roman prison, listening to the nearly endless stories about Paul’s adventures. Watch Paul, Apostle of Christ, and imagine yourself into the story.

Go on your way, like a lamb among wolves. Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals. Wherever you are welcomed, cure the sick and preach to them, “The Kingdom of God is at hand!”

Luke dedicated both his gospel and the Book of Acts to a man named Theophilus. In his book, Michael O’Brien imagines Luke is the son of Theophilus, a Greek physician, philosopher and agnostic. He loves his father and wants to share his newfound faith in Jesus with this Greek agnostic. O’Brien writes about us all, and specifically about Luke and his father.

Children need to see that they are part of a history and that the story of their family is a living thing. God tells it, a new story in each generation, and each must hold hands across the sea of time, joining together the ones who went before and the ones who come after. It is given from above. Little do we understand this in the beginning, but time teaches us many things we did not expect to learn. That is life. It is the same everywhere.

Theophilus worries about his son. He is “gravely concerned about the deadly illusions Luke has succumbed to regarding the incredible stories surrounding Jesus of Nazareth, a man of contradictions who has caused so much controversy throughout the Roman Empire.”

And Luke worries about his father, who settles for human philosophy when he could choose to worship God in Jesus and become his brother.

Theophilos, the light of reason that we both reverence is not a god. Neither does the highest development of the human mind confer divinity upon us. We may quote Aristotle one moment and in the next find ourselves betraying our wives and children—for the sake of passion, in the name of love—and not know how we arrived at that lamentable state. Reason is a gift of God but of itself cannot ennoble a man.”

Luke the physician felt his way through philosophy into acts of compassion and service. He might have seen, like many of us, the ultimate value of loving acts just by looking at the mistakes and victories of his parents and following them into the fray. Theophilus was also a physician, and Luke learned much from him:

To love mankind merely in the abstract”, he once said, “is one face of a single coin, and on its other side is hatred of mankind in the abstract. To love in truth is to serve the suffering person before you, and to do what you can to assist him.”

When and how did Luke hear the stories of Jesus’ birth? He must have met Jesus’ mother Mary and spent time with her. The story is so intimate; he could not have heard it from anyone else. As for the rest of his gospel, filled with Jesus’ healing, Jesus’ preaching, and of course Jesus’ passion, he must have interviewed everyone involved, along with relying on the first gospel, written by Mark, and other sources (Q and L).         

The Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the proclamation might be completed.

I just found, surfing with Saint Luke, that our special guest for today’s Feast wrote 27.5% of the New Testament. As for what we know of Paul’s travels and troubles, much more than 27.5% comes from Luke’s Book of Acts. Luke traveled with Paul on his second missionary journey, and his third. He went with Paul to Asia, to Jerusalem, to Caesarea and at last to Rome.

Only Luke is with me (2 Tim 4:11). Your friends make known, O Lord, the glorious splendor of your Kingdom. The Lord is near to all who call on him.

If he wrote his Acts of the Apostles while he was with Paul in Rome, then perhaps Luke was executed along with Paul, in the year 67. Or he might have preached elsewhere throughout the Mediterranean world and been martyred decades later. The books he wrote, officially included in the Word of God as defined by early church councils, have been instrumental in changing the lives of many of us, during all those two thousand years since.

I chose you from the world to go and bear fruit that will last, says the Lord.

 (2 Timothy 4, Psalm 145, John 15, Luke 10)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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