Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: You're listening to by the well, a.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Lectionary based podcast for preachers recorded on.
[00:00:09] Speaker A: The land of the Wurundjeri people.
Hello, I'm Robyn Whittaker and welcome to this special episode of by the well, where we're going to do a deep dive into Luke's Gospel to set you up as preachers for Year C, the new lectionary year ahead. And here to help me do this, we have two wonderful guests. The first is Professor Bart Bruler, Director of Biblical Studies at Uniting College for Leadership and Theology in Adelaide. Barth, as you will hear in a moment, is originally from America and taught for years at Indiana Wesleyan University.
He specializes in a socio rhetoric approach to the New Testament and is author of A Public and Political Christian the Social Spatial Characteristics of Luke 18:35-1943 and the gospel as a Whole in Its Ancient Context, and also Holding Hands With Pascal, Following Christ with a Special Needs Child, as well as many other chapters and articles and things in Barth's life. Barth is also an ordained minister in the Free Methodist tradition and an active member now in the Uniting Church here in Australia. So welcome Bart. Wonderful to have you on the podcast.
[00:01:27] Speaker C: So glad to be here.
[00:01:30] Speaker A: And our other person helping us out today is familiar to regular listeners. And this is the Reverend Associate Professor Kylie Crabb.
Kylie holds a research position in Biblical and Early Christian Studies in the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at Australian Catholic University. You both have big long titles, I just have to say.
Kylie is author of a monograph called Luke, Acts and the End of History and also an edited volume, the Reception of Jewish Tradition in the Social Imagination of the Early Christians, and is currently working on a big project about early Christian protagonists and their impairments. Again alongside many other articles, chapters and scholarly work. Kylie is a Uniting Church minister and like Bart, both have spent time in ministry settings, preach fairly regularly, and, you know, work as in addition to their scholarly work and both Luke and specialists. So welcome Kylie too.
[00:02:32] Speaker B: Thanks Rom. Really glad to be here and great to be talking with Bart about this as well. Yeah.
[00:02:37] Speaker A: So my question to both of you to start before we get into some of the nuts and bolts, is what has drawn you to Luke's Gospel? Because you've both spent the very many years it takes to write a book about Luke and spent a lot of your scholarly life on it. What do you like or what puzzles you or draws you into this particular gosp? Bart, let's start with you.
[00:03:01] Speaker C: I will admit that I was probably first drawn to Luke because I Spent a number of years living in an intentional Christian community that was focused on working with the homeless and those in poverty in particular, sort of region of America. And, yes, it was. I think Luke's attention to issues of status and class and wealth and poverty and those types of things that really sort of initially got me interested in Luke. And then I just discovered him to be a fantastic storyteller. I mean, he's just such a good teller of stories. He knows how to turn a phrase. He knows how to pull you into the drama of the account that he's giving you. And I think that made me stick with him even after that first sort of initial interest.
[00:03:50] Speaker A: Wonderful. And we'll return to some of those themes, I'm sure. Kylie, what drew you to Luke?
[00:03:55] Speaker B: I'm really interested in Bart's backstory there because mine is a bit similar. I also worked in ministry in intentional, in supporting people in intentional Christian communities, radical discipleship kind of movements, and lived in community myself. And so there were elements of Luke, you know, the fact that there are beatitudes that are blessings and woes in Luke, and the kind of message about wealth, ethics, and those things that really drew me in and were a big part of my initial study in Luke. And then when I went to do my doctoral study, I was really interested in questions of theodicy, thinking about the justice of God when bad things happen, what's going on? How do we see theological responsibility for that or not, or human responsibility? All those questions, where do we find hope? And for whatever reason, I found, particularly in Luke, ways of asking those questions that were helpful to me. So that kept me there.
[00:04:53] Speaker A: It's interesting, isn't it? Even though we all work in very scholarly spaces, often what initially draws us to the texts we work on is actually something deeply personal or spiritual or. Yeah, yeah. Comes out of that tradition. So when we talk about Luke, who are we talking about? What. What do we know about this author and why he's writing and who he's writing to?
[00:05:17] Speaker C: So I have a particular entry point on this. I don't think I'd stake my life on it, but I think when Luke describes the deacons who are elected in Act 6, that he's probably describing someone in sort of the range of his own social and ethnic experience. We find people there who are Jewish, but one of them is named as a proselyte, but they all have Greek names. And for me, that's just a nice sort of way. There's lots of uncertainties about Luke, but that portrayal right there, again, In Luke's own hand probably, I think, gives to me a little bit of a concrete example of when I think of the sort of cultural, historical, ethnic background of Luke, it's probably like those deacons. These are people who have one foot in a Jewish world and one foot in a Hellenistic world. They live in a city, they're, you know, prominent and active in their community, they're recognized as leaders. All those things seem to capture for me, at least in general, some of the things that I think I would typically characterize Luke as being.
[00:06:32] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks. That's really good way. In one of the things that I would. I mean, there is an old way of thinking about this question that particularly looks at whether Luke is Jewish or not. Right. And people depending on when people have done some other theological training, they might have heard different views on this. An earlier stereotype was that, you know, Luke was the Greek one, the not Jewish one. But I'd really encourage people to kind of maybe reengage with the text of Luke and potentially acts to sort of scrutinize whether that seems very likely.
You know, I think now it's a growing kind of consensus that Luke is in fact coming from a Jewish heritage.
He writes in this way that's like a continuation of the Greek Old Testament. He's steeped in these traditions, he understands them. There are other examples we have of Greek first language Jewish people from around the same time. People like Josephus, maybe even Philo a bit earlier, but people like this. Right. So thinking you can be all these things at once, that's where I'm liking your, your little deacon kind of example there as well. But because it's about a hybrid identity and bringing those things together and sort of showing how that hybridity is also part of the varieties of Judaism at this time as well. So bringing all of that to bear in the way that the. Yeah, the way the text works.
[00:08:03] Speaker A: I love it. You've already bashed one stereotype down. Like we've knocked down that pin. This is not some gentile thing. And all the other gospels are Jewish or something really unhelpful. Neither of you mentioned physician.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah, I was just thinking that. Yeah, yeah, well, you can answer that. What do you think about that?
[00:08:19] Speaker A: Well, it's interesting. I mean, this is because I can't actually remember where I should have looked it up. One of you will know somewhere else. There's Luke, who's a physician. Right?
[00:08:27] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:08:29] Speaker C: Colossians 4:14.
[00:08:30] Speaker A: There you go. I knew the Lucan scholars would know this.
So I mean, there is this tradition that associates this author with that mentioned person.
Again, I don't really have much at stake either way. I guess it would tie him to Paul in a way that the act narrative kind of does already.
Although I do have a friend in America who works on Luke as well and has traced how in Luke's particular version of the Parable of the Sower, the language he uses for seed is actually, and he's traced it in other parts too, is actually gynecological and technical language. So that perhaps there are little hints of evidence that suggest. Suggest he's at least educated in medical terms.
[00:09:16] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah. I sometimes say that if we, you know, often the argument is made. Luke has all this extensive medical vocabulary, but he also has the most extensive seafaring vocabulary. He also has the most extensive leather working vocabulary of the New Testament. And so, yeah, he's just an educated person, period. He knows how to get into. He does his research as a, as a writer. It seems like it's so he can step into that space and speak that language and then step away from it and speak another language.
[00:09:50] Speaker B: And he has more complicated Greek to start with. Right. So he's, he's doing some stuff like that. So he's going to use the, you know, the. Exactly the right word or something in a way that someone like Mark maybe isn't. Who's coming at it from a different level of linguistic. Not saying that it's his work is shabby at all, but you know, like a different kind of linguistic competence in the language they're writing in.
[00:10:10] Speaker A: And it might depend if Greek is your first or second language. Exactly, you know, that kind of thing as well.
Luke. I love the way Luke, as someone who likes rational, ordered things myself, I love the way Luke's Gospel starts with this little prelude about, you know, many have undertaken to write accounts of Jesus basically.
But you know, I sat down to write an orderly account. He uses language here of a narrative having. Having looked at the other. So he's acknowledging that other stories, he doesn't necessarily call them gospels, but there are other Jesus accounts out there.
But obviously Luke thought something was missing or there was need for a new one.
So a couple of questions emerge out of that. Is how do we think about Luke in relation to particularly Matthew and Mark, but we might want to consider John. So and, and then we might explore what is therefore unique, what is Luke adding that if we didn't have Luke, what would we lose?
And I mean, the first few chapters are a fairly obvious answer, but I don't Know which way into that you want. But, yeah, you go ahead, Kylie.
[00:11:19] Speaker B: Yeah, okay.
Right. How do we think about the relationship? What would we lose if we didn't have it? So there's a boring way to answer this, which is, you know, there are scholarly theories about this and that people generally agree that Mark is written first amongst the first three Gospels and that, you know, nearly everything that's in Mark is in Matthew, sort of. It's a question about whether it makes it redundant or not. You know, like there's this, and then Luke is doing something that also uses Mark and maybe uses something else. So we have this question about how to deal with the similarities and differences with Matthew, and we have different solutions to that.
People who've done some New Testament studies will be like, quaking thinking about Q at this point and with it, about what to do with that. We don't always have to come down on a clear side about that. Right. I think we might have.
[00:12:08] Speaker A: For people who haven't heard of Q, can we.
[00:12:09] Speaker B: Oh, sorry.
[00:12:10] Speaker A: Q is like a saying source or this common. The idea is it's a common source.
[00:12:14] Speaker B: That Q is a scholarly hypothesis. It's not a text that anyone's ever found. And it is a way of explaining why there are word for word bits in Matthew and in Luke that are not in Mark. So that's, that's. That's as complex as it is. So it might mean that it's a whole set of different sources that are all being quoted word for word. It might be one source or it might not exist at all. And it might be that Luke is using Matthew, which seems the most plausible one, rather than the reverse, and just making a lot of changes. So different people have different views on that. I sit kind of loosely on the Luke used Matthew side, just because I'm also less keen on making up sources that we don't have. But there's lots of sources from antiquity we don't have, so that's not necessarily a deal breaker.
But there are wonderful stories that we would not have if we didn't have Luke. Like, yes, Robin's already mentioned the particular vibe of the Luke and infancy narratives, the first two chapters. So you get a. You get a story about the birth of Jesus in Matthew, but it's much more developed in Luke where you get the story of Elizabeth and Zachariah as well. You get these parallels. You also get the story of Jesus when he's 12 in the temple, all these things. And before that, the story, you know, when he's eight days Old with Simeon. But we also get a stack of wonderful parables. All this kind of long travel narrative in Luke that goes from chapter nine to chapter 19. You know, you get told in 951, all Luke and scholars have this drummed into them where Jesus sets his face towards Jerusalem. You get this long and get all these teaching and stories along the way and a variety of other things that the Emmaus story, all of these things that would be.
[00:14:01] Speaker A: Would be missing 24 at the end there. Yeah, but how do you think about the relationship of Luke to the others? And what would. Would we miss if we didn't have Luke that perhaps Kylie hasn't mentioned?
[00:14:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that seeing Luke as, you know, largely working with Mark or something like Mark that existed, and I would say probably lean towards something like Q existing if it's an oral source, if it's a combined oral written, something that's floating around out there in Christian circles that people know about and that there's useful things in a lot of those cases to look at how Luke is working with that tradition and learn from it and see how he has a different emphasis or a different take or a different stress on things. Sometimes a very different retelling of an entire story in some cases.
One thing that I think, and you mentioned this a little bit already, Robin, Luke is just profoundly interested in continuity. I mean, he shows that the stories that he tells in the infancy narratives emerge out of the Hebrew tradition. You know, read like a continuation of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. You know, he has these sort of interlocking pieces that tie the end of Luke into Acts, references to the Ascension, references to the Spirit. He wants to show a very clear sort of handing of the baton from Peter to Paul. So I think we really gain a sense of the continuity of the progress of revelation in Luke, and that's a piece that he gives to us.
Another key thing that I think Luke gives to us as a whole is that an emphasis on repentance. If we didn't have Luke and Acts, really the only place that would speak in any way about repentance in much depth would be revelation, which is mostly to say that people did not repent.
All these terrible things happen, they don't repent. Whereas Luke, you know, has an extensive vocabulary and uses the notion of repentance in a very rich way that I think a lot of the Christian tradition is really indebted to his presentation of repentance in particular.
[00:16:19] Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. I love the way you framed the continuity. And we'll Get Kylie to say something about historicity and history and all of that in a moment, too, because I'm always struck, particularly when way back in the day, I was taught that Luke was the more gentile kind of gospel. And yet this is a story that begins with priests and the temple and Jerusalem. Right. And Jesus parents are these faithful Jews who take him to be circumcised. And, you know, again, the story of when he's 12, they're back in the temple. In Luke, Luke's gospel, Jesus is in and out of Jerusalem multiple times in Mark. He doesn't get there until the end, when he dies.
So, you know, there is a sense that Luke really does want to set this story in the history of Israel and as a continuity to the promises of God and the prophecies of in Israel.
Obviously, there's some famous scholars who've talked about that and the way they think about Luke and periods of time.
Kylie, do you want to say something out of your research about how we might think about these relationships of, you know, Luke and time and history? I know that's a really general question, but you'll know what to say.
[00:17:37] Speaker B: Just read my book. Yeah, yeah, just.
[00:17:39] Speaker A: Kylie, could you summarize your giant book in 25 words or less?
[00:17:42] Speaker B: No, no, but there is. I mean, one of the questions that we end up with, right, with this focus on continuity and the way in which, as well, some of. Especially in the. We get it, especially in the infancy narratives that people be very familiar to people, you know, that the characters are described in ways that look like types from the Old Testament as well. So you get Elizabeth is a continuation, really, not just her life and is a continuation, not just of things that happen in the Septuagint, but she's modeled on, you know, Sarah and Hannah and, you know, all these people in the. In the past.
[00:18:20] Speaker A: The barren women of the Old Testament.
[00:18:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And in. I mean, one of the things that people end up talking about is also, you know, who's the main character of Luke and maybe Acts. And, you know, people might think, well, it's kind of like a biography, so the main character is Jesus. But there is a sense in which the main character is the continuing work of God. And that's told in particular ways in Luke's Gospel, including statements about how particular sort of opposing characters reject the purposes of God. But the purposes of God can't be stopped, actually. So they. They unfold anyway as they do in Acts. So some scholars have kind of. I think.
Well, you have this question about how you deal with continuity and change. There's obviously also something totally radical going on in, in this, in this context. You've got the birth of this child who is.
Yeah. Whose conception is the Spirit plays a really important role in that. And then his life is right from before he's even born governed by those things. So there, there is something really new happening as well. So some people, like, people may have read, people like Hans Kunzelman especially as a standout example of this, have divided things up so that you've got kind of like the period of the promises from before the period of the Old Testament, the period of Jesus and then the period of the church which kind of keeps on going rather than expecting a kind of culmination of all things anytime soon.
But I actually think that, I mean, one of the risks that we run there is how we deal with.
We don't want to be super sessionist as well. There is a genuine continuity here there. It's, it's. But we also want to see the radical change that is part of this. But I think the radical change is that what's happening in the life of Jesus already in, in Luke's Gospel is the beginning of the end times. So already this is happening with Jesus. This is also happening with the church. And it's, it's, it's escalating towards some kind of hoped moment interrupting in human life the life of the community from that time on, which is a bit different sometimes. People have worried about whether Luke is advocating a kind of church bureaucracy. This is especially something that happens if you see Acts as part of, as part of Luke, but some kind of complicity with ruling authorities and setting up church bureaucracy. Because we're here for a long time. And I think that we can show that the themes in the Gospel and in Acts are actually not about that. They're about a kind of more radical politics than that and about a radical.
[00:21:04] Speaker A: Hope and that that world, the world has already shifted with the Jesus.
I don't know if you'd locate that in the incarnation or kind of in the resurrection and ascension, but. And certainly with the gift of the Spirit.
[00:21:15] Speaker B: Right.
[00:21:15] Speaker A: The new age is already here in some form.
[00:21:18] Speaker B: Yeah. I would say that those events are all the kind of inevitable outworking, unfolding. You know, this is God's activity breaking in in event after event that are all, you know, all leading towards this end time activity of, of God rather than being something that's like a new period that then you just wait for ages before the next one. Yeah.
[00:21:39] Speaker A: There's so much we could unpack here. So I'm really. I'm struggling to pick which question to go to next.
Let's get into some of the themes. So we've already touched on some continuity, the, you know, promise, this new age already happening in Jesus repentance you've mentioned. But what other themes do you see as prominent in Luke that preachers might just want to have in mind? That when we're looking at specific passages, we're kind of aware, you know, So I don't know if you want to. It seems Luke is often talked about as a gospel who's got lots of women's stories. Whether that makes him pro women or not, I still sit on the fence about. There's lots of meals, there's lots of miracles, there's a lot of activity of the spirit. I don't know. What do you want to pick up on or what would you focus on?
[00:22:25] Speaker C: Yeah, one that I might add that we just haven't mentioned yet. Again, part of Luke's deep indebtedness to the Hebrew tradition is the casting of Jesus as a prophet, the paradigm of the prophet Isaiah, Jeremiah in particular. But I think he draws back significantly on Elijah and Elisha as well. That becomes a really important way that Jesus care that Luke characterizes Jesus. I mean, we get that language on the road to Emmaus. We get it in Jesus inaugural sermon where he cites Isaiah, which is distinctive from anything we get in Matthew and Mark. And this notion of, again, like Kylie said, the. The ongoing activity and intervention of God that God has now sent the prophet like Moses, the. The final eschatological culminating prophet that we've been waiting for. But a prophet like almost all the prophets of the Old Testament, who faces rejection and is scorned by a wide swath of the.
So I think we want to keep a hold of that particular emphasis.
Another one that I think is really important, and it starts in the Christmas story and infancy narratives in a significant way is Luke's portrayal of the defeat of evil, both in terms of the figure of Satan, but also in the exorcisms, but also in healings.
The story touches on the women theme as well as the story of the quote unquote bent over woman in Luke, where it appears on one hand she's being healed, but then Luke has Jesus very quickly identify this as her being under the oppression of Satan and that he's releasing her from that as a daughter of Abraham. And so, yeah, Luke has so much sort of tied up around that defeat of evil, release from liberation from all those kinds of things and that that language is really critical to him and that he shows Jesus actively doing that throughout the narrative. So that notion of defeat, of evil, I think is important one as well.
[00:24:41] Speaker A: That's helpful because I think there can be a temptation because Luke clearly does have a concern for the poor and to read particularly though in those early speeches of Jesus and Mary's song, you know, the, you know, lifting up the humble and bringing down the lofty kind of language as it is political, you know, and about social justice. But if we remove the spiritual evil, you know, the cosmic dimensions of that, we are losing something of Luke.
[00:25:14] Speaker B: Yeah, totally.
[00:25:16] Speaker A: What other themes? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: I would say it's interesting you bring up the Magnificat as well. That one of the other things I was thinking of which relates to the conversation about repentance and stuff as well is the theme of reversal, which is big theme in Luke. People will know the first will be last and the last first and these kinds of things. But also thinking about how that works in Luke. So Luke has this sort of vibe that is about sort of extending a further opportunity for people to repent as part of the repentance narrative.
Even from the inauguration of Jesus ministry in Nazareth. In chapter four, where he quotes from Isaiah, he talks about the year of the Lord's acceptance or favor, but doesn't include the next line which would have come in Isaiah about the day of vengeance. You know, you've got the parable about the, you know, like giving a bit more time for the fig tree to flourish. So you get this kind of sense of. And you get a lot of story, like say the story of Simon the Pharisee and the woman who's just identified as a sinful woman at the, at the meal. In chapter seven, you get this, this thing where there's a direct challenge to Simon. Actually Simon thinks he knows what, what Jesus or what a sort of pious person would be on about. And then he's a bit horrified that Jesus is more accepting of this so called sinful woman.
But he gets a bit of a serve for not. Not approaching things in the right way himself. But the story ends before his decision. So we get this thing about people. People are challenged. The story doesn't tell us what their final choices are, but the story does tell us that there are consequences for choices. So it's not a kind of divine reversal that's like we'll just. It just happens that if you're first, then you. I'll make you last. It's that the people who are first, like the, like the people invited to the. In the parable of the great banquet, who don't accept the invitation to the banquet. They're invited but they're so distracted by other things that they don't take up the invitation. And then there is a real side to judgment in Luke as well. But it gets. Maybe people don't notice it as much, maybe because they're used to the weeping and gnashing of teeth of Matthew or something like this.
But there is a real barb in the. Oh yeah, in the background that actually it relates also to another theme which is a good little technique when you're. As you. Throughout year see, dealing with passages from Luke. Look for where there are interactions that are triangular, where there's. There's like maybe, maybe it's Jesus and then two other characters who respond in different ways to Jesus. So this is. Brendan Byrne has this wonderful idea of Lucan triangles from his Hospitality of God commentary. And so you think, you know, so you've got, say, the story of Mary and Martha and how do they each respond and who is the real focus?
You know, there's a traditional focus maybe focusing on Mary, but what's it look like when you focus on Martha? Or the parable of the so called prodigal son. Or we might think of it as the parable of the two sons, where you've got the father but then you've got. Each of the sons responds in different ways. And it's obvious the traditional focus has always been on the prodigal son, the younger son. But there's this real barb in the interaction with the elder son. And like those other stories, the story ends before we find out whether he's going to have the humility to join the party or not.
Yeah. So anyway, look for triangles in Luke. You'll find them in lots of places. Parable of the sinner and the pharisee in chapter 18. All sorts of places.
[00:28:56] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great.
Years ago, when I was in congregational ministry, I had my confirmation class of teenagers read all the way through Luke's Gospel and we discuss a few chapters at a time. And about halfway through this process, one young woman did declare to me that Jesus wasn't very nice in Luke. And I felt for me that was a major breakthrough because I was like, yes, you're paying attention to the text. Jesus is not. So we think of this as the gospel that has women's stories and concern for the poor and we have the shepherds instead of kings. All these Lovely stories that we're in danger of perhaps having domesticated a little bit. But you're pointing out that the judgment, the call for repentance, there are these sharp edges that we cannot ignore either in this gospel.
[00:29:45] Speaker B: Yeah, Woes with your Beatitudes.
[00:29:47] Speaker C: Oh, yes, that's right.
[00:29:50] Speaker A: And of course, I want to ask you about, you know, ideas of atonement or what's going on with the cross and the end of the gospel. If we leap forward, famously, this is a gospel where Jesus is declared innocent by the centurion that watches.
And then we have these longer resurrection appearance narratives, the Emmaus road, and we have the Ascension, which is maybe alluded to in, I mean, John, but this is. The proper narratives we get about ascension are really here and in Acts. What do you make of that? What do you think, theologically, Luke is doing with the way he ends the gospel?
[00:30:28] Speaker C: Yeah, I think you've sort of put the two correct pieces of the puzzle together there, you know, just to sort of frame it a little bit. I mean, if. If I think for John, really especially the prologue, the key event of salvation is the incarnation. That's the piece upon which all others are connected. From Mark and Matthew and Paul, especially, the crucifixion is the central piece. But for Luke, the resurrection is the center of salvation and atonement.
I mean, again, the crucifixion is necessary. Luke uses that. That language of, you know, it's. It's deemed necessary. It again, puts Jesus in this storyline of the prophets, the one who's rejected and sometimes even killed for his obedience, loyalty, spokesmanship for God. But that salvation. And this becomes a lot clearer explicitly in Acts, especially in the speeches in Acts, where it gets unpacked a little bit. But it's because God has exalted Jesus and demonstrated this through the resurrection, that now Jesus has the authority to both declare you free from or liable to judgment, and to, as Paul says in Acts 13, release you from the sins that no other means could have released you from before. And that's really located in the resurrection for Luke, even more than the crucifixion, I think.
[00:31:56] Speaker B: Yeah, I would agree. I don't know that I could add to that. I think that's right, and I think that it functions in a couple of ways. The resurrection is vindication, but it is also, as we hear in Acts 17, it's the sign that the times of ignorance are over and that God has set a date on which the world will be judged. And he's shown this by raising Jesus from The dead. So this, this resurrection sets in train the things that are the ultimate kind of events that, that are coming.
[00:32:34] Speaker A: So yeah, so that's something to watch out for particularly in the post Easter season. Looking, looking ahead for the year.
So probably last question for the day. In the interest of time, any pitfalls for preachers? So what should we not do when preaching Luke? Actually the penultimate question because we should end on a positive note and ask you what we should do.
But before we get to what we should do, what should we not do? Are there any sort of. We've, we've busted a couple of myths, I feel, but is there anything we should. Preachers should be careful of when preaching a gospel like Luke?
Do you need some thinking music?
[00:33:14] Speaker C: Well, I think and sorry mentioned, I think Kylie mentioned it. Antisemitism and supersessionism always hover in the background of a lot of the gospel portrayals. And again, as a good storyteller, Luke is not giving us complicated backstories to Jesus's opponents. Right. It's a very, they're a very stark foil for Jesus in a lot of cases which we do have examples of, you know, Jewish persons in that era holding those positions, but there's also lots of other Jews who hold lots of other positions that don't look the same as Jesus's opponents in the gospel. So I think we always have to be a little wary of just following that path that has been set before us even farther down, harmful to a harmful point at the end.
Another thing is on one hand, yes, Luke is orderly on one hand. On the other hand, what is going on in the travel narrative? Where is Jesus going for 10 chapters? And so sometimes I think we take that language of orderly and we very easily read it as a sense. Well, it should make ordered sense to us.
And often Luke is not doing that, he's doing something else that is to him organized and makes sense and flows in a certain kind of way, but is not linear, you know, in the same kind of way that we might think of it. Or again, the collections of things that are in Luke 9 through 19 are sometimes barely topical. You know, it's just sort of one thing after another. And so, yeah, it's good to sort of keep that in balance with it being an orderly narrative.
[00:35:08] Speaker A: Anything to add, Kylie?
[00:35:11] Speaker B: I think those are very good and important things.
I think the other thing I would add on the same point that Bud is making that about the, the anti Jewish kind of readings or something like this, just, just bearing in mind that, that if we think of Luke as a participant in Jewish tradition, then he's making the kind of criticism we might all make of someone from within our own tradition.
It's not an over against thing.
It's something that is a critique from within. And so I think that radically alters the kind of vibe that we would give to that. I guess the other thing, this is a bit out of. It's a bit specific actually, but it's a bit out of left field. But it's also think. I mean, there are so many like wonderful parables in, in Luke's gospel. And I hope that people find ways to engage with them creatively and think about them throughout the year ahead.
One of the things that's really worth thinking about is how we apply those parables to our experience or how we kind of wonder about them reading them into. Sometime there is a trap. There are particular traps. So think about, you know, like the stories like the unjust Judge or something like this, right? The idea that God like if we too easily slip into this idea that God is like certain characters in the parables, we start to draw a really sordid picture of God's character. And that's not necessarily, you know, Luke is a master at telling stories that use everyday images, everyday examples to make a particular point. But it doesn't mean that he's saying that if you want to get a response from God, then you need to hassle them like the hassle God, like the widow does because God doesn't otherwise listen to us or you know, the dishonest manager who counts the cost or, you know, that. Very sorry, that's. I'm mixing two parables. But you know what I mean, there are these parables that are based on everyday examples.
Even in thinking about how the parables talk about the use of money and stuff. Like there are some examples where you just got to kind of delve into the parable and think what's the point that's being made here? Rather than. I can work out in a sort of allegorical way what each character represents here. And if this tells me something about the character of God, be, be just mindful of that, I think is one.
[00:37:47] Speaker A: Thing I'd say I think that is a big trap in parables generally and particularly the way Luke tells parables and also reminds me of one of the things I always say to students is, you know, when it is the year of Luke and you're trying to be faithful to Luke, read Luke. And it's really hard. If you've sat in church for Years and years and years to bracket out the other Gospels. And of course, there's times we want to put them in conversation because we want to notice what's different.
And putting them side by side can be helpful. But. But it can be really hard not to then just read in things that are perhaps not there in the Lucan story because we've actually got Mark's version of something in our head or. Yeah, yeah. So this is now actually the last question.
[00:38:30] Speaker C: I might just jump on the parable train there, just briefly, because I find that I really appreciate what you said there, Kyleen. There's usually two pieces of advice that I always try to pass along with parables. One is very much what you've said is that the comparisons that Luke and the other Gospel authors build have limits in both directions.
Luke is going to do creative storytelling, things inside of the parable that really aren't meant to reflect God and sort of vice versa. It works as well. The other thing I always say is that if something in a par. If you haven't been profoundly bothered by something in a parable, you probably haven't read the parable. Well, there's always something almost. There's a couple of exceptions, as there always are. But. Yeah, if you haven't come across something that's shocking or disturbing or upsetting or just strange. I mean, the sower throwing his seed on the path, who is that dumb?
[00:39:26] Speaker B: Yeah. What a waste.
[00:39:27] Speaker A: Yeah, that's right. Yeah.
[00:39:28] Speaker C: What's going on there? And so. And. But every parable has some characteristic like that that's really important to capture because. Yeah. So many fantastic parables to preach on, and in Luke's Gospel especially.
[00:39:40] Speaker B: Yep.
[00:39:41] Speaker A: So if there was something you did want preachers to do, so we've talked about what to avoid or something you think people should read. If you have a favorite commentary on Luke, any parting thoughts from either of you?
And we can put links to any commentaries mentioned. We've already mentioned Brendan Burns, Hospitality of God.
[00:40:03] Speaker C: Yes, yes, that would be.
[00:40:03] Speaker A: I'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, it's very accessible and short. What else? Yeah.
[00:40:08] Speaker C: Another commentary I would recommend is Joel Green's very, very readable commentary and comes at the text, both in a deeply social and deeply theological kind of way. At the same time, the one thing that I would encourage preachers is to take, you know, 4, 16 through 44 and just preach that whole section. I mean, it really is the preview. I mean, it's the overture to Luke's entire gospel. And there's so much there Is, you know, again, the quotation from Isaiah, the year of God's favor, the conflict and sort of prophetic hostility is there. We get exorcisms, we get healings, we get Jesus preaching of the kingdom. That, that just even those 40ish verses or so will get you a long way into what Luke's message is just by spending a lot of time in that. That passage itself.
[00:41:06] Speaker B: Sounds great.
I think the first thing that I would suggest is that people just sit down with a cup of their favorite tea or other beverage and read it through. Like, read. Read it on its own terms from beginning to end. If you feel like it, you can press on into Acts, but. But if not, like just. Even just to Luke 24 and get to the end of the Gospel and just see, see what surprises you about what's there and what's not there and sit with that.
And the other thing. I really appreciate what you're saying, Bart, about the story at Nazareth being the story within the story. You know, the overture this, you know, it tells both the prophet side what it is that Jesus is being presented as, understanding as his mission, and the rejection side of it. And the rejection will get more sinister as we go on. Like, he does end up getting killed, but there's a threat already of that violence at that point. The other thing I would think about in terms of doing that is that that's the kind of like, I don't know, perhaps the fourth beginning of this story.
There's this beautiful little book by Mona Hooker called Beginnings. She has one on endings and one on beginnings, which are about the beginnings and endings of each of the Gospels. It's not a particularly new book, but it's lovely and I would recommend it. But one of the things she says about the beginning of Luke is that it's like he doesn't know how to begin at all. He's got. He's got the preface, the first four verses. He's got two chapters of infancy narratives. Then he begins with John the Baptist. And then all of a sudden we're getting this inauguration of ministry. Like, when are you going to start?
So to just notice those, those things that do set the story. I mean, there's a kind of biblical tradition, actually, of. Of biblical in the sense of scholarship of ignoring the infancy narratives and just treating like the adult Jesus stories from then on. But I would encourage people to read it and look for the themes just like that. Just like Barth so helpfully said about the themes that will emerge from the Nazareth scene, that it become part of the rest of the story. Just like he's also mentioned about the preface at the prologue to John's Gospel tells that, you know, shows what the bigger picture story is that John's being told in the infancy Narratives tell us all sorts of things about the relationship between Jesus, the story of what God's doing in Jesus and the the past in the Hebrew Bible, about the story of what God is doing in Jesus and empire, how he relates to the in the world of the empire around the parallel with Augustus and you know, all of these things and a whole and you know, it's a story with Simeon and he talks about him as, you know, like the sword through the, you know, sword will pierce your own soul. You know, all of these things directed to Mary as well as that he will be a stumbling block or what I can't remember the right language that it says there but for Israel, but bring about the falling and rising of many in Israel, and he will be a light for revelation to the Gentiles. So notice those things and then notice when those themes come up in the gospel can be quite helpful to yeah, that's fantastic.
[00:44:18] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Kylie and Bart, for sharing your wisdom and all the, you know, many, many things you've both learned and observed in the text or in all your years of scholarship. We really appreciate you lending your wisdom to this podcast.
[00:44:34] Speaker B: No problem at all. It's been wonderful. Great to talk to you about this, Bart, and also Robin.
[00:44:38] Speaker C: Yeah, excellent.
[00:44:39] Speaker A: Thank you. Well, you've been listening to Reverend Associate Professor Kylie Crabb and the Reverend Professor Bart Bruler as we delve into Luke's Gospel for the new lectionary year by the well is brought to you by Pilgrim Theological College and the Uniting Church in Australia. It's produced by Adrian Jackson. Thanks for listening.
