WHAT DOES THE GOSPEL OF LUKE have to teach us today? Plenty.
Read the newspaper almost any day of the week, and you cannot help get the impression that our world suffers from a new intellectual virus: the problem of the many and the one. Many races, one humanity. Many species, one creation. Many nations, one world. Many rights, one truth. We can see, as plain as the nose on our face, the diversity in the world. At the same time, however, we know that diversity can too quickly turn to divisiveness and death if some reason to be unified is not found.
This problem virus, the many and the one, is by no means new. But the form in which it is attacking us seems resistant to most of the antidotes offered to date. One antidote, the move toward one world government, seems least likely to solve the problem. With the breakup of formerly huge governments such as the USSR and Yugoslavia, we seem bent on more nations, not fewer. Racial and ethnic groups seem more eager to fight for their identity (witness Cambodia and Rwanda) than to seek common ground. Can anything stop this out-of-control virus of peace-destroying tribalism?
The gospel truth that Luke describes has the best chance. How? Let me explain. As Darrell Bock shows us in this volume, Luke was concerned to show us that the whole world ran according to a single plan laid out by God. Thus, the first sections about Jesus as a baby and young child illustrate how God was already at work in Jesus’ life; the stories of John the Baptist and Jesus’ baptism and temptation define a call to ministry that was worked out in precise detail; Jesus’ early ministry around the lake called Galilee reveal a minister of extraordinary power and authority; in his final journey to Jerusalem, Jesus met all kinds of resistance and showed us how people following God’s plan are able to persevere; and the stories of Jesus’ final days demonstrate with clarity how Jesus practiced a spiritual leadership that was qualitatively different from the other leaders of the day—political, economic, and religious. Luke shows us that this extraordinary life was not a happenstance coming together of random factors; it was a life breathed by God.
A life breathed by God is one that sets the pattern for everyone. It is precisely this life, the life of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, that pulls the fragmented and divisive elements of the world together. Luke takes great pains to explain how this God-breathed life made the old distinction between Jew and Gentile moot. It is the life of Jesus Christ that pulls together competing visions of life and work.
And it is precisely this truth that forms the central application of Luke’s Gospel for our world today. Only God, through the incarnation of Jesus Christ, can pull a fractious world together. The divisions of our day seem much more complicated than the biblical illustration of Jew and Gentile. But the principle is the same: God unites. God unites not by denying us our distinctiveness—our race, our nationality, our culture. God, after all, made us who and what we are. No, God unites by standing for something above and beyond anything we know, thus providing us with a reason to pull together even as we enjoy our unique, God-created identities.
Darrell Bock has done us a great service by bringing a lifetime of scholarly work on what Luke meant when it was written, and then by answering the question over and over again in the subsequent discussions: What does Luke mean for us today? The answer is, in one word, plenty. We can live together in peace only if we focus beyond ourselves to our sovereign God and the Son sent to save us.
—Terry Muck