Why Luke warns against judging others and ourselves on the bogus basis of power

THIRD SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME [C] | 26 JANUARY 2025 Luke 1:1-4; 4:14-21 

The author of Luke’s gospel was educated and literate: as much is obvious from today’s pericope, which begins with the first four verses of his gospel, possibly the most elegant Greek in the whole of the New Testament. He was also well-connected and familiar with the formalities of officialdom. He addresses his named reader, Theophilos (possibly also his patron) as ‘Most Excellent Theophilos’, the usual address for a high official in Roman provincial government. But however well-educated and well-connected its author was, and for all its literary elegance, Luke’s gospel is in many ways the hardest hitting of the four. For instance, where Matthew’s beatitudes begin with the more nuanced, “Blessed are the poor in spirit”, Luke’s version states starkly (and much more uncomfortably), “Blessed are the poor”.

Again, he makes no bones about the chief cause of conflict between Jesus and the religious establishment: prejudice, pride and pettiness on the part of those who should have known better had turned the broad and generous provisions of the Mosaic Law into a straitjacket, constraining and confining those who were ‘in’ and ostracising and demonising those who were ‘out’. Luke’s sympathies are clearly with the latter and in his second volume, known to us now as the Acts of the Apostles, he charts the breaking out of the Gospel from its narrow Jewish origins to become the Catholic Church, preaching the Good News to every race and nation under heaven: hence the many allusions, more than in any other New Testament text, to historical markers and secular reference-points.

Each of the first three chapters of his gospel, for instance, opens with just such references: “In the days of King Herod of Judea”; “Now at this time Caesar Augustus issued a decree”; “In the fifteenth year of Tiberius Caesar’s reign”. But, just as pointedly, after making these grandiose references, Luke immediately switches his attention to individuals of no worldly importance whatever: a barren woman, an ageing couple, an unmarried, pregnant villagegirl and a desert-dwelling eccentric. So, even at this early stage of his gospel, Luke challenges us, his readers, about where the centre of things lies and how we locate ourselves in relation to that centre. Even more challenging, we are also invited to examine where we draw our boundaries between those we think are ‘in’ and those we think are ‘out’.

This re-balancing sets the perspective for the whole of his gospel: in his account, those who play the central roles are not the rich and the powerful, the wielders of worldly power and influence, but those outside either the recognised structures of political, tribal, patriarchal or merely respectable society – the childless, the widowed, the unmarried, the disabled and the poor – or those who, by their occupation or behaviour, or both, had excluded themselves – tax collectors and prostitutes, for instance. The unmistakable suggestion is that outsiders who have been stigmatised as or who believe themselves through their own fault to be beyond the reach of God’s love, often turn out to be closer to God than anybody else. (A point powerfully made by Grahame Greene). In Luke’s account, it’s these who, according to conventional pious expectation, could never enjoy either the world’s or God’s favour, who are put at the centre, a reversal he represents in the three great songs of these early chapters of Luke’s gospel – Mary in the Magnificat, Zechariah in the Benedictus, Simeon in the Nunc Dimittis.

Luke also has no hesitation in vividly depicting the repeated clashes with those whose authority Jesus calls into question and whose ire he raises by his sympathy for the outcast: as, for instance, when the sinful woman gate-crashes the Pharisee’s dinner, or the greedy collaborator, Zacchaeus, unacceptably plays host to Jesus. Luke, of course, is neither simplistically condoning moral lassitude nor condemning moral superiority; nor is he debunking authority or denigrating effort and industry. He is not suggesting, for instance, that Jesus loves the sinful woman more than the Pharisee; or that the rogue Zacchaeus is more favoured by God than is the sincerely pious and observant, even if it is they who complain about the company Jesus keeps and so evidently prefers.

But what Luke most definitely is warning us about is our ingrained habit of judging both others and ourselves on the bogus basis of power, status, achievement or adornment. It’s precisely that proclivity, usually borne of unacknowledged insecurity, that creates the outsider in the first place. Luke’s lesson is that only God’s view of us ultimately matters, not that of others, or even our own: what we are before God, is what we really are, nothing more, but, just as importantly, nothing less, as St Francis says in one of his Admonitions. Only God sees us as we really are; and still, astonishingly, he loves us with a doting Father’s love.