Friday in the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, October 18, 2024

2 Timothy 4, 10-17

Beloved: Demas, enamored of the present world, deserted me and went to Thessalonica, Crescens to Galatia, and Titus to Dalmatia. Luke is the only one with me. Get Mark and bring him with you, for he is helpful to me in the ministry. I have sent Tychicus to Ephesus. When you come, bring the cloak I left with Carpus in Troas, the papyrus rolls, and especially the parchments. Alexander the coppersmith did me a great deal of harm; the Lord will repay him according to his deeds. You too be on guard against him, for he has strongly resisted our preaching.  At my first defense no one appeared on my behalf, but everyone deserted me. May it not be held against them! But the Lord stood by me and gave me strength, so that through me the proclamation might be completed and all the Gentiles might hear it.

St. Luke is thought to have been born in Roman-occupied Syria at about the same time St. Paul was born in Tarsus.  Luke must have come from a well-to-do family because he received a good education, as is evidenced by the very correct Greek of his Gospel and his interest in history.  Paul calls him “the beloved physician” in Colossians 4, 14, so his father might well have practiced medicine, leading him to follow in his footsteps.  Born and raised a Gentile, Luke became a Christian around the time that St. Peter was preaching in Antioch, his hometown.  He became associated with the Apostles after that, and especially with other early converts such as St. Barnabas and St. Mark.  When St. Paul began his missions outside Israel, Luke went with him.  He wrote his Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles during this time.  After Paul was beheaded in Rome, Luke continued to preach in Greek-speaking lands.  He is believed to have died in the city of Thebes.

His Gospel is very deliberately aimed at a Gentile-Christian audience, having as its stated purpose the fortifying of the faith of these early believers.  These folks had a great interest in portents, and so Luke spends much time on the beginnings of the lives of John the Baptist and the Lord Jesus.  Because the people for whom he was writing also came from a culture that appreciated Plato’s Dialogues, he included very many of the Lord’s parables, especially the longer ones.  Luke also paid great attention to getting the chronology of the Lord’s life right.  He says himself in his prologue to his Gospel that he had studied earlier accounts of the life of the Lord in preparing to write his own.  Doing so, he would have noticed how the Jewish Christians tended to write their “lives of Christ” according to topic rather than according to the preferred Greek method of correct chronology.  We find this very pronounced in St. Matthew’s Gospel, for instance.  Putting the words and deeds of the Lord Jesus in order and in good Greek would have gone far to captivate his readers and to lead them to a greater devotion to the Lord.

It is very much worthwhile sitting down and reading the Gospel of St. Luke straight through.  It would only take a couple of hours and this is a small price to pay for what we will experience in reading it.