CONVERSATIONS WITH SCRIPTURE: THE GOSPEL OF LUKE
By FREDERICK W. SCHMIDTChurch Publishing Incorporated
Copyright © 2009 Frederick W. Schmidt
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-8192-2361-6Contents
Chapter One
Telling the Old, Old Story
Luke had a story to tell and he told his story to change people's lives.
If you have ever worked with a therapist or a spiritual director, you know how important stories can be. The best of therapists and directors rely upon storytelling. They tell their own stories. They tell stories about other people. Most important of all, they rely on the storytelling skills of their clients. Getting them to tell their stories is what finally makes the difference.
The Primal Need for Stories
Stories help us to remember our past. They help us to make sense of new events in our lives; and, when we are stuck or confused, they help us to imagine where we go next.
Think, for example, of the story that explains how you overcame a significant life challenge. Perhaps you suffered an injury or illness, or at some point in your life you lost a job. The chances are the story has chapters and turning points. There were important things said by someone who loves you or advises you. You discovered a new insight that changed the way in which you viewed your circumstances or managed the challenge you faced. Whatever the details, there were elements of the past, the present, and the future involved.
What is interesting about stories of this kind is that they not only help us to recount the past, they help us to imagine a way forward. Until we've told our story, we are often at a loss to know how to go on. We live uneasily with the stuck-place we find ourselves in and we can drift through days on end without making any progress. It is only when we wrap a story around what has happened to us that we can tell to others that we can imagine a new chapter that begins with the words, "And then ..."
Luke did not know anything about modern therapy or spiritual direction, and he hardly would have described the value of stories in the terms that I have used. But the power of stories to change our lives does not depend upon modern theories. Their power arises out of a far more primal and human need; that need accounts for the universal presence of stories across time, cultures, and races. This description is more an effort to bring to the surface what we intuitively know about those stories.
Luke knew this too. He understood the need to recount the past, to put it in order. He knew that this kind of storytelling helped to explain the present. And he knew that if he could do that, he could also describe the future. Addressing the needs of other Christians, he used the stories he had heard told about the ministry of Jesus to help his circle in the ancient church understand where they had been, where they were, and where they were going.
The staying power of those stories led the church to read and re-read his gospel, copy it, and eventually treat it as sacred Scripture. Millennia later Luke's stories still shape our lives and the life of the church; and therein lays both the gift and the challenge of reading Luke's gospel.
Basic Elements of Storytelling
Stories—ancient, as well as modern—are never told in a vacuum. Their shape, content, and focus depend upon the environment in which they are told. The four basic elements of that environment include:
* The storyteller
* The circle of listeners to whom the story was told
* The circumstances under which the stories were told
* And the events that prompted the storytelling
When someone first tells a story, those basic elements are taken for granted by both the storyteller and the people who hear it. Imagine, for example, the stories told around your family dinner table. Everyone knows Uncle Robert and remembers the pipe he smoked. The way he gestured with it to make a point; the smell of the cheap tobacco he used. You can see Aunt Martha in your mind's eye—her quick wit, the ready smile. You can even smell the gingerbread she made for family gatherings.
So when you start telling the stories of the fishing trip they took to New Mexico, no one needs to fill in the blanks. The storyteller and the listeners know one another; and both know the circumstances under which the stories were told and the events that prompted the original telling of the story.
But as time passes, the common elements that made that kind of storytelling possible are not as readily obvious. As communities grow, circumstances change, and generations pass, the identity of the storyteller and the first audience is often lost to us. It is harder to know what concerned or interested them, or what first prompted someone to tell a story.
People, places, circumstances, and cultures can and do completely change. With them the original meanings of stories can be lost as well. Even the details about Uncle Robert's pipe and Aunt Martha's gingerbread can be lost.
This is not to say that there are not enduring themes and common human characteristics that continue to shine through the oldest of stories. Bible stories, Aesop's fables, even a story about Uncle Robert can still entertain or teach us something. For that reason we can almost always get some kind of meaning out of a story, and it's that broader meaning that often tempts us to forget how different our world is from the one in which the original storyteller lived.
For example, I teach a class that introduces students to the basics of monastic spirituality. As a part of the work that the students are asked to do, we often read the stories of the ancient desert fathers and mothers whose lives of devotion gave rise to the early monasteries. One of the ancient stories told runs this way:
Some old men went to Abba Poemen and asked, "If we see brothers sleeping during the common prayer, should we wake them?"
Abba Poemen answered, "If I see my brother sleeping, I put his head on my knees and let him rest."
Then one old man spoke up, "And how do you explain yourself before God?"
Abba Poemen replied, "I say to God: You have said, "First take the beam out of your own eye and then you will be able to remove the splinter from the eye of your brother.'"
Left to their own devices, my students will often conclude that the story tells them something about the level of comfort they might experience in prayer; the importance of acknowledging their frailty—even when engaged in spiritual pursuits; and something rather more general about the importance of avoiding a judgmental spirit. But the story was probably told and retold in its original setting as a means of shaping the way in which individual monks treated one another in the close confines of monastic community. In turn, their concern about how they treated one another was rooted in an understanding of community shaped by waiting and preparing spiritually for the return of Christ that required them to set aside every other care. So the story has a context and point of application that, more often than not, my students completely miss at first.
When it comes to reading stories, then, there is almost always some kind of meaning that can be derived from hearing one, even if you don't know why the person who originally told the story chose to tell it or the point they intended to make. But there is also a lot that can be missed.
If we are reading a story to be entertained, that is not necessarily a bad thing. We may want nothing more than to lose ourselves for a time in the story that is told—to laugh, to cry, to reminisce. Reading a story without reference to what it was originally intended to communicate can also be spiritually beneficial. My students often learned things from the stories they read from the desert fathers and mothers, even when they didn't understand their original intention.
Stories as Mirrors and Windows
But they also missed things they could benefit from hearing, and that is the problem with an approach to biblical stories that never asks, "What did the original storyteller have in mind?" When we read Scripture, we are trying to hear more than the stories we would tell ourselves. We are looking for deeper truths and fresh insights into our lives. We are looking for more than the stories we can hear from our cultural, historical, or personal perspective.
Even more boldly—as the words of our liturgy affirm—we are listening for "the word of the Lord." That, in part, is what we mean when we describe Scripture as God's revelation to us. When we fail to ever ask what the storyteller might have originally meant, we foreclose on an important part of that revelation; and we run the risk of assuming that the way we hear the story is all there is to it.
One way to understand the difference is to think of windows and mirrors. If we listen to the story as it was told, Scripture functions like a window into another world. We see the issues an ancient audience faced; the struggle they experienced; and the hopes they embraced. We also discover that our own way of framing life's challenges is not the one and only way to understand the world around us. When we open ourselves up to those differences, the stories of Scripture have the power to challenge, comfort, and provoke us in ways we never expected. The subtle differences challenge our assumptions.
But if we ignore its intended meaning, then Scripture functions like a mirror. We hear (and see) little more than what we already know and we interpose our own story on the story Scripture offers to tell. What is lost as a result? The ability to hear something more—a new chapter, a different path, an unexpected ending—and without that, we lose the ability to grow and change.
The Gospel of the Lord
If reading Scripture were simply a matter of self-improvement, perhaps it would not matter so much. In the course of life, we all have more than one kind of opportunity to learn, and it is difficult to take advantage of all those opportunities. But when we read Luke, we claim that his story is "the gospel of the Lord." It is clearly far more than just another opportunity to grow. It is the word of the Lord.
The failure to ask those questions is not unique to any one theological point of view. People on the "left" as well as the "right" of most theological questions can be supremely confident that their truth is the biblical truth, and fundamentalism has no single home.
And truth be told, most of us have difficulty remaining open to the voice of Scripture when it cuts across our lives at odd angles. A friend of mine who is an editor for a major publisher notes that most people buy nonfiction books to reinforce opinions they already hold by reading the experts who agree with them, rather than to challenge themselves. The same is true of the Bible. Most people use it to reinforce the point of view they already hold. But more often than not there are subtle, if not profound differences between the storyteller's world and ours that makes such easy use of the Bible all but impossible.
This has been a particular problem as it applies to Luke's gospel. Scholars who have ignored the original import of Luke's story have treated his gospel as if it were a dramatization of the Apostle's Creed, ignoring the subtle differences between the message of Luke and the first four centuries of the church's theological development. Some have seen it as the "gospel of inclusion," ignoring the fact that Luke could not have comprehended the contemporary political overtones of that phrase; others as the story of Jesus the Marxist, ignoring the vast differences between first-century Palestine and modern economies. Some of those readings of Luke traipse across more centuries than others, but all three of them ignore just how impossible it is to claim that Luke thought in those categories.
The challenge, of course, is to identify the basic elements that shaped Luke's original telling of the story. Who was the original storyteller? Who was a part of the original circle of listeners? What was happening when the story was originally told? What circumstances prompted the original storytelling? Fortunately, we actually know a great deal.
It is admittedly harder to know precisely what Luke meant. There is educated "guesswork" involved; and making the connections between the challenges that Luke faced and those we face is more like triangulation than it is application. But, by contrast, an approach to biblical stories that strives to hear them as they were told opens up the possibility for Scripture to stand on its own and tell us something we might not have otherwise heard.
The Storyteller
Broadly speaking, there are two opinions about who "the Luke" of Luke's gospel might have been.
One group of scholars believes that the writer is well-educated and the product of a Greek education, but otherwise unknown to us. They base their view on the content of the gospel, which contains very little of an explicit kind that would identify the author. That's not at all uncommon in ancient storytelling. Ancient books did not contain a title page, book spine, or Library of Congress catalog number, so the writer had to identify himself for us to know who he was and Luke does not do that. So most of the scholars who take this position point to the writer's proficiency with Greek, the nature of his word choice, and his facility with the literary forms of the day. They set aside the traditions about the authorship of the gospel that circulated in the early church as too late to be of real value.
Other scholars give greater weight to those traditions and believe that Luke was a physician and companion to the Apostle Paul. For them the convincing evidence lies at the intersection of four kinds of evidence:
* The ascription (or title) added to the gospel describing it as Luke's work (which probably dates to 175 CE)
* The reference made in more than one piece of literature from the early church that describes the gospel as Luke's work (which date between 170 and 208 CE)
* The references made in the New Testament epistles to Luke, a physician and Paul's companion (Phlm 24; Col 4:14; 2 Tim 4:11)
* And the references to first-person experiences in the book of Acts, which scholars widely agree was also written by the author of the third gospel (Acts 16:10–17; 20:5–15; 21:1–18; 27:1–28:16).
Church traditions on matters of authorship should not be accepted at face value. Such claims evolved slowly and informally. They probably circulated orally long before they found their way into print anywhere. It is all but impossible to know where they originated and by modern standards such claims were hardly scrutinized closely. (Although it is easy to overestimate how exacting "modern standards" are.)
By the same token, such claims should not be rejected out of hand. Assuming that the gospel was written around 85 CE, the tradition about Luke's authorship may be as little as eighty-five years old, and if the written claim did circulate by word of mouth (and it no doubt did), then it may have been accepted thinking much closer to the time of the gospel's original composition.
The random mix of third person ("they") and first person ("we") language in the book of Acts would also make a lot more sense if one of Paul's companions was the original storyteller. As some scholars suggest, moving back and forth between the two kinds of language could be attributed to an older man (like the writer of the gospel) reflecting back on his experiences as a younger man (like Luke, Paul's companion). The language in Acts could also be attributed to the perspective of someone who witnessed some of the changes in the church, but not all of them, and who was scrupulous about observing the difference when telling the story. "We did this(I know because I was there.). They did that (I wasn't there, but I heard about it.)."
In the end, it may not make a great deal of difference what one concludes about the authorship of the gospel and both views are necessarily a matter of educated
* The writer was a Gentile, not a Jew.
* He had a Greek education.
* He knew a lot about the ministry of Jesus and the circumstances in first-century Palestine.
* He knew a lot about Judaism and about what mattered to Jews. And it is the only kind of learning you do by being a God-fearer.
* He was broadly familiar with the challenges the fledgling church was facing.
* And he was deeply interested in addressing the issues raised for the church's increasingly Gentile constituency.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from CONVERSATIONS WITH SCRIPTURE: THE GOSPEL OF LUKEby FREDERICK W. SCHMIDT Copyright © 2009 by Frederick W. Schmidt. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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