I’m currently working on a talk that I will deliver at a church this weekend. It revolves around the encounter between Jesus and a blind beggar in Luke 18. It has driven home for me how much I love the Gospel of Luke. If it had the expanded version of Jesus sermon in Matthew 5-7 rather than the condensed version found in Luke and if it somehow incorporated John 1, it would easily be my complete ‘go-to’ gospel… and that’s not to exclude the importance of the others, it’s just my favourite.

Tradition conveys that Luke is a physician with a Greek background and he is writing to a Greek audience (an individual or collective). He shows a special concern for the poor, sick, women and children – those on the outside or considered to be at the lower rungs of society.

The Greek culture he was writing towards and from would have been steeped in ingrained cultural classism born from many factors. His position as a physician could be considered evidence of his natural concern to help the ailing and it could be argued that this personal bent is born out in his writing but make no mistake, his upholding of Jesus as one who reached beyond class to those outside of the system would have been taken by many as a complete affront to life as it was understood.

This isn’t too dissimilar from Paul’s equalizing words in Galatians 3:26-29. It’s easy to read these things now as simply being wonderful expressions of a humanitarian approach to life, but let’s not underestimate their complete challenge to whole cultures.These guys challenged the very foundations of the cultures around them and showed a whole other way of life. Them and others who followed Jesus weren’t harassed, thrown in prison, tortured and killed for nothing.

That challenge Jesus represented to various cultures and power structures was true in their day and if we’re willing to hear it, it is also true in ours.

Luke lays out the story with beauty – when you really read him you find a master storyteller – a guy who weaves and links things together in a way that many of us dream of doing. Sentence by sentence he uses every word to carefully craft a picture of Jesus and the picture he draws is of someone I have devoted my life to following.