11

Luke:
The Story of Jesus
from a Gentile Perspective

Luke, the Third Gospel in the Christian canon of Scripture,

poses a mighty challenge for those who claim to be biblical
literalists. His opening segment is the very beautiful and famil
iar Christmas story. This narrative is worthy of the fuller treat
ment it will receive in chapter 13, but suffice it to say in this
instance that its narrative cannot be harmonized with the birth
story of Matthew. These two accounts of Jesus' birth are mu
tually exclusive and mutually contradictory, as we shall see.
Only the Christmas card industry can blend these two accounts
together adequately, and they do so by falsifying what they do
understand and ignoring what they do not understand.
On the other end of Luke's Gospel, his account of the res
urrection tradition also sets himn apart sharply from Matthew
and Mark on one set of issues and makes him incompatible
with John on another set of issues. Luke locates all of Jesus
resurrection appearance stories in the Jerusalem area and
spreads the Easter momnent over a period of fifty days. Once

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 again, these issues will be pursued in detail in chapter 13. I file
them here almost by title.
Beyond these rather glaring inconsistencies, Luke still gives
no support to those who would treat his words literally. Luke's
version of the parable of the talernts is such a strange narra
tive that very few people even know about it. Luke's account
of this story is by and large ignored by the preachers of history
in favor of Matthew's more familiar version (Luke 19:11-27;
Matt. 25:14-30). Luke's parable has the nobleman who gave his
servants the talents conclude the story by saying, "But as for
these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over
them, bring them here and slay them before me" (Luke 19:27).
This hardly sounds like "the Word of the Lord"! At the very
least, a Lord who acted like that would not be worthy of wor
ship.
Despite these problems, Luke's Gospel remains the bearer
of some of the more incredibly rich traditions of early Christi
anity that flowed together to create our biblical heritage. Luke
alone, for example, has preserved for us the stories of the wid
ow's son at Nain (7:11-17), the mission of the seventy (10:1-12),
the account of Mary and Martha (10:38-42), the healing of ten
lepers (19:11-19), the account of Zacchaeus (19:1-10), the ac
count of Easter in the village of Emmaus (24:13-25), and the
content of both the ascension narrative (Acts 1) and the Pen
tecost narrative (Acts 2). It is to Luke alone that we are also
indebted for the parables of the good samaritan (Luke 10:29-
37), the prodigal son (15:11-32), the rich fool (12:13-21), the lost
sheep (15:3-7), the lost coin (15:8-10), the unjust steward (16:1
9), Lazarus and the rich man (16:19-31), the Pharisee and the
publican (18:9-14), and the unjust judge (18:1-8). How poor
and bereft the Christian tradition would be had not Luke de
cided that "inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a
narrative of the things which have been accomplished among
us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the
beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it
seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for
some time past to write an orderly account to you most excel

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lent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the
things of which you have been informed" (Luke 1:1-4).
Who was Luke? Why did he write? To whom did he write?
How did who he was and who his audience was shape his
message? These are the questions that we will now pursue in
our quest to be led far beyond the level of literalism and into
the heart of the gospel message. These questions will also make
us aware that time and place, language and circumstances in
evitably color objective truth. There may well be an eternal ob
jective truth beyond all of our words, but the minute that truth
is spoken by a human being who is a subject, it ceases to be
either eternal or objective. It becomes then truth compromised
by time, concept, vocabulary, history, and prejudice.
Both the sacred Scriptures and the creeds of the Christian
church can point to but they can never finally capture eternal
truth. The attempt to make either Bible or tradition "infallible"
is an attempt to shore up ecclesiastical power and control. It is
never an attempt to preserve truth. Indeed, those who would
freeze truth in any words, concepts, or creed will guarantee a
time warp that will finally doom that truth to extinction. Only
truth that is freed from its captivity to time and words and
allowed to float in the sea of relativity will survive the ravages
of subjectivity. Only truth that can constantly call out new
words capable of lifting yesterday's experience into today's
mind-set will finally survive.
The formulations of today or tomorroW will be no more
eternal than the formulations of first-century people. This is not
plea to give up inadequate ancient words for ultimately in
adequate modern words. It is to force upon us the realization
that all words are, in the last analysis, inadequate. Truth is
never finally found in words. Truth is always beyond words.
Yet there can be no truth for human beings unless we use
words first to understand it and second to convey it. So we
mortals live with our subjective truth in the constant anxiety of
relativity. That is all we can do and that realization strikes a
mortal blow at the traditional excessive claims of all religious
systems.

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 Religion almost inevitably tries to take our anxiety away
from us by claiming that which religion can never deliver
absolute certainty. If religious systems succeed in giving us cer
tainty, they have surely become idolatrous, for the ultimate
mystery and wonder of God cannot be reduced to a particular
language or captured in the concepts of any human being. The
Christianity that I advocate and follow does not rob me of my
humanity by making claims of either inerrancy for Scripture or
infallibility for papacy or sacred tradition. My religion does not
reduce God to an idol of its own creation. It does not give me
certainty or even security. Rather, in my religious system I
meet a God in Jesus who calls me deeper and deeper into my
humanity-part of which is a constant quest and journey into
truth.
That journey in time always becomes for me a journey into
God. In this journey I find thecourage to live by faith as I think
the Bible understands that word. It also provides me with the
integrity of honesty as I live in the midst of religious uncer
tainty and insecurity. This kind of Christianity does not affirm
those whose deepest need is to know that they are right, that
in their religious tradition they possess the truth. My under
standing and knowledge of the history of religious systems
convinces me that whenever a group of religious folk begin to
believe that they possess God's truth, almost inevitably they
become those who in the name of their version of that truth
persecute, excommunicate, purge, burnat the stake, or justify
cruel religious wars against any who will not salute their tra
dition or acknowledge their rightness in things religious.
It is not coincidental that the angriest mail I receive comes
from those who claim to be the most religious and who think
they speak with the very voice of God. Indeed, some of these
letter writers even state that their hostile missives do not con
tain their own fallible words but the divine words spoken di
rectly by God to me through them. I am always surprised at
how vindictive God has become. I suppose these people need
some authority beyond themselves to give them permission to
be so angry.

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 In more sophisticated but no less inadequate ways, this
infallible mentality feeds the activity that mainline churches call
"evangelism" and "foreign missions." Both movenments assume
that truth lies with those who do the evangelizing and the mis
sionary work. The history of both activities is rife with insensi
tivity, the brutalization of local customs and traditions, religious
and political imperialism, and even the violation of human
rights. It is no wonder that when churches begin to talk about
"a decade of evangelism," Jewish people begin to lock their
doors and secure their windows. Foreign missions has in our
day become far more rhetoric than reality. Christians continue
to talk about the process. Very few in fact engage in it signif
icantly, for after two thousand years Christianity, even allied
with the world's most powerful political, social, economic, and
military systems, has still ailed to penetrate the non-Western
world save in the most minuscule way. The time has come, in
my opinion, for all religious systems, including Christianity, to
look at the truth that lies beneath the words of every great
world religion, to respect that truth, to learn from that truth,
and to spend its "missionary" efforts only on those lives that
have no sense of the holy, no experience of a transcendent
wonder. Most of the people who fit that description, I might
add, live in the secularized Western world.
In the attempt to remove imperialism from Christianity, to
become humble before the infinite mystery of God, a proper
starting place for me is in facing the subjectivity of ail religious
words, including the words of Holy Scripture. The subjectivity
of the Gospel of Luke can serve as a perfect doorway into this
understanding.

Luke's Story and Its Setting

When Luke wrote his story, he had before him and was
significantly aware of the Gospel of Mark. About half of Mark
was incorporated into this Third Gospel, but Mark was not
sufficiently adequate for Luke's purposes. The world had
moved significantly in the fifteen- to twenty-year period since

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Mark's Gospel had achieved written form. A Jewish rebellion
had brought disaster on the holy land. In the ensuing warfare,
Judea had been conquered and Jerusalem destroyed. Christi
anity thus lost its Jewish center, and by this time most of the
first generation of Christian leaders, all of whom had been Jew
ish, had died. Chief among these leaders were Peter, Paul, and
James. John, who might well have been the youngest of the
twelve, may also have lived the longest. At least this was the
tradition of the early church, which seemed to need to explain
his death in a particular way (John 21:23). Christianity by this
time was becoming more and more a gentile movement. For
this gentile world a Gospel nuanced to their lives and concerns
was increasingly needed. It was to meet that special and pe
culiar need that Luke felt called to take up the task of being a
Gospel-writing evangelist.
Luke was a gentile. This is the conclusion of most of the
world of New Testament scholarship. There are those who still
maintain that Luke was a hellenized Jew, but they are a minor
ity. In some sense it does not matter, for the more thoroughly
hellenized a Jew became, the more the barrier that separated
Jew from gentile blurred and faded. In my opinion, Luke was
more a Jewish-influenced gentile than he was a gentile
influenced Jew, but where this line crosses is relatively insig
nificant.
In the ancient Mediterranean world near the end of the first
century of this common era, the gods of the Olympus were
dead. No viable unifying religious system had risen to take
their place, creating a vacuum at the religious heart of life. That
vacuum spawned a wide variety of cults, mystery religions,
and superstitions. In that environment many gentiles found
themselves drawn to the God of the Jewish tradition. The syn
agogues had galleries for those gentiles who were attracted to
the ethical monotheism that marked Jewish worship. These
gentile worshipers, however, seldom became converts. They
were not drawn to what might be called cultic Judaism with its
dietary regulations, the requirement of circumcision, and the
Sabbath day regulations. This was an eclectic time, and people

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felt free to pick and choose those aspects of the various reli
gious systems that appealed to them.
Gentiles who worshiped regularly at synagogues -known
officially among Jewish people as "proselytes" --did, however,
become familiar with the great stories of the Jewish Scriptures.
These Scriptures had been translated into Greek in an official
version, called the Septuagint, between 250 and 130 B.C.E. The
Jews' enslavement in Egypt, the deliverance under Moses at
the Red Sea, the account of the giving of the Law at Sinai, the
conquest of the holy land under Joshua, the figures of David
and Solomon, the defeat of Judah and the subsequent exile into
Babylon--all becamne familiar history to gentile worshipers. Per
haps most important and to the gentiles the most appealing
part of jewish Scripture was found in the writings of the
prophets-that peculiar and unique Jewish gift to the world.
The prophets addressed their messages to such universal
themes as justice, peace, and future hope.
When one reads the Book of Acts-also written by Luke,
the author of the Third Gospel, as the second volume of his
story-it becomes clear that among these gentile proselytes
Paul found his most enthusiastic response. Regularly the Book
of Acts told the story of the rejection of Paul's message by the
Jewish leaders and his subsequent turning to the gentiles.
Paul's understanding of the gospel had the effect of driving a
wedge between worship and the various cultic practices that
marked traditional Judaism. It was the same wedge that he
drove between grace and law.
Thus Christianity, as people like Paul interpreted it, found
itself increasingly capable of fully welcoming gentile converts
without placing onto them the culticrequirements of the Jewish
Law. This created an enormous discomfort in the early church
between those Jews who found in Christ the fulfillment of Ju
daism to which they were committed and those gentiles who
found in Christ a way to separate faith from cultic practice. The
first great battle in Christian history, as we have noted earlier,
was between these two elements, and the issue was how much
of the Jewish Law must be imposed upon gentiles when they,

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by baptism, entered Christianity. The issue was more intense
before 70, for before this date Christianity was primarily a Jew
ish movement. However, with Jerusalem's fall the Jewishness
of Christianity began to recede and the gentile identity of the
movement began to predominate.
The story of Peter's conversion told in the Book of Acts
(Acts 10:9ff) was a significant transition point in this conflict. It
isinteresting to me to note how much more familiar people are
with the Book of Acts' version of Paul's conversion than ihey
are with Acts' version of Peter's conversion, In Peter's conver
sion narrative he was asleep on a rooftop in Joppa when he had
a dream. In that dream a sheet was let down from heaven
containing all sorts of "animals and reptiles and birds of the air"
(Acts 10:12) that violated the Jewish dietary laws. A voice from
heaven said, " Rise, Peter; kill and eat.' But Peter said, 'No
Lord; for I have never eaten anything that is common or un
clean.' And the voice spoke a second time and said, 'Peter,
What God has cleansed, you must not call common' (Acts
10:13, 14). Rising from this dreamn, Peter went to the home of
Cornelius, a gentile, baptized him, and said, "Truly I perceive
that God shows no partiality, but in every nation any one who
fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God" (Acts
10:34, 35).
The barrier dividing Jew from gentile had been trans
gressed. Peter, himself the leader of the Jewish movement,
walked across it. For our purposes we need to remember that
these words and this account were written by Luke, who was
in all probability one of these gentile proselytes who had re
sponded to Paul's gospel and who now, in the ninth decade of
the Christian era, needed to tell the story of Jesus in this new
worldwide context. He wanted to show Christianity projected
to the stage of the world. He wanted to show how its center
had shifted from Jerusalem, the capital of Judea, to Rome, the
capital of the world. Above all he wanted to show how gentiles
like himself had come to be included in this Jewish religion.
Luke also wrote at a time of tension in the empire and in
a rising fever of persecution. When Rome had burned while

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Nero, the mad emperor, had fiddled (64 c.E.), a scapegoat was
needed. The Christians had filled that role nicely for Nero.
There were laws against starting new religions in the empire.
Judaism was a recognized and protected religious system.
Christianity was not so recognized nor was it protected. There
were rumors about the Christians that excited the fears of the
populace and provided justification for those who launched the
official persecution. Black magic and cannibalism were two of
the charges frequently leveled against the Christians. This
strange sect, it was said, through its prayers and incantations
produced magic power that could be malevolent. Such power
could even result in the burning of Rome. When these Chris
tians got together to worship, it was alleged, they ate the body
and drank the blood of the one they worshiped. Such orgies
were repugnant, and these rumors, to most people then as
now, were more a cause to believe the gossip than they were
a call to seek the facts. A wedge was thus driven between Jews
and Christians in the minds of typical Roman citizens that left
the Christians vulnerable to blame and persecution. That per
secution under Nero was fierce and resulted in the deaths of
many Christians. Some Christians were crucified, some were
torched to provide light for Nero's garden parties. In time this
fervor subsided, as always happens, but the threat of its re
newal was ever present.
About the year 81 c.E. the Emperor Domitian came to
power, ruling until the year 96. With his ascent to the throne,
the fires of persecution began to be stoked once again. It was
in this context that Luke decided the time had come to write a
public document addressed to a Roman official he called "most
excellent Theophilus" to counter, if he could, the rising tide of
hostility. It was Luke's task to show that Christianity, far from
being subversive, was a natural development within a recog
nized and respected Jewish religious tradition. Christianity,
Luke was asserting, had simply grown past the Jewish limits
and had become a worldwide religion. Luke's gentile status
and the circumstances of his world dramatically shaped his
message.

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 In the birth narrative of this Jesus, Luke had a heavenly
host in the sky herald, for all the world to see, the arrival of this
child. The old priest, Simeon, announced that this child would
be "a light for revelation to the Gentiles" as well as "for glory
to thy people lsrael" (Luke 2:32). In the genealogy of this Jesus,
Luke had traced his heritage not back to Abraham, the father of
the Jewish nation, as Matthew had done, but to Adam, the
father of the entire human race. In the "seed" of Adam, gentiles
as well as Jews were present. In his narrative Luke constantly
fought against limiting prejudices that would rule some group
out. Perhaps this is why only Luke made a hero out of a good
Samaritan and only Luke told the story in which a Samaritan
leper, alone out of the ten cleansed, returned to give Jesus
thanks.
Because Luke was arguing for official Roman recognition of
the Christian movement, he treated Roman officials kindiy in
his narrative. Christ was pronounced innocent by the Roman
procurator, Pontius Pilate. Pilate acquiesced in Jesus' execution
only to placate the religious leaders of Judaism, who placed
extreme religious and political pressure upon him. In Luke it
was Herod's soldiers, not Roman soldiers, who scourged Jesus,
while a Roman soldier, a centurion, at the cross pronounced
Jesus the Son of God. Luke repeats the Marcan injunction to
render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's. The Christ
about whom Luke would write had turned his back on political
revolution in favor of a revolution of the spirit. The Kingdom
this Christ proclaimed was "not of this world." There was no
threat here to the political establishment, Luke was arguing,
and there was therefore no need for persecution.
Similarly Luke showed Paul protected by such Roman of
ficials as Felix, Festus, and Agrippa and even delivered from
hostile mobs and Jewish imprisonment by his Roman citizen
ship. The fact that Paul was put to death under the Roman
Emperor Nero was never mentioned in the Book of Acts. That
book closed with the words "And he [Paul] lived there in
Rome]two whole years at his own expense, and welcomed all
who came to him, preaching the kingdom of God and teaching

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about the Lord Jesus Christ quite openly and unhindered"
(Acts 28:30, 31).
Before Luke could make clear to the Roman officials his
universal claim for the Christian religion, he had to present
Jesus as the fulfillment of Judaism. This meant that, like all the
Evangelists, he had to draw deeply on the Jewish heritage.
Matthew had done that well in his attempt to address a Jewish
world. Luke must do it equally well in his attempt to address
his gentile audience. Matthew had leaned particularly on the
figure of Moses, who was the dominant personality in the Jew
ish religion. He had presented Jesus as the new and greater
Moses. As the giver of the Law, Moses stood at the apex of that
inward-looking tradition of Judaism. The law defined internaly
the life of the Jewish people. Moses was a figure in Luke's
background also but not as the lawgiver so much as he was the
one who led Israel from bondage to freedom, from Egypt to the
promised land. When Luke wrote the journey segment of his
Gospel (Luke 9:51-18:14) that would carry Jesus and the disci
ples from Galilee to Jerusalem, the figure of Moses could be
discerned in the background as Jesus led his followers from the
bondage of sin into the Kingdom of God.
A second Hebrew image that resided powerfully in the
background of Luke's story was the suffering servant portrait of
Second Isaiah. The servant role was born only when the exiled
people returned from captivity in Babylon to discover that their
holy city was a broken and abandoned town surrounded by the
weeds of neglect and the once-proud temple was a pile of rub
ble. Upon these hard facts the delusions of greatness, fanned
by the national dreams of the ages, were broken. Israel would
never again be great or powerful or influential in any worldly
sense. What then did it mean to be the elect of God, the chosen
people?
The unknown prophet whose postexilic work was added to
scroll of the preexilic prophet Isaiah, thus acquiring the
name Second Isaiah, addressed this question quite specifically.
His answer was to propose a new role for the people of God
not power but servanthood, not grandeur but a willingness to

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be abused for the sake of revealing the presence of God. The
role of Israel or the role of the ideal Israelite was for Second
Isaiah the role of vicarious suffering for the sake of the world.
This servant figure lodged in the Jewish tradition as a minority
report and was a primary means through which the early
Christians came to understand Jesus of Nazareth.
The echoes of Second Isaiah are present throughout the
New Testament, but they are heard most consistently in Luke.
In Simeon's song, which we call the Nunc Dimittis (Luke 2:29
32), there were three overt references to the words of Second
Isaiah (Isa. 42:6; 49:6; 52:10). At the baptism of Jesus the heav
enly words "Thou art my beloved son; with thee I am well
pleased" (Luke 3:22) were echoes of Isa. 42:1. In Jesus' sermon
in the synagogue at Nazareth that inaugurated his publicmin
istry, the scroll from which he read was Second Isaiah: "The
Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to
preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim
release to the captives and recovering of sight to the blind, to
set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the accept
able year of the Lord" (Luke 4:18-19; Isa. 2; 58:6; 61:1). The
words of the servant had become the words of the Christ.
When the temple was cleansed during the last week of Jesus'
life, the words of Jesus "My house shall be a house of prayer;
but you have made it a den of robbers" (Luke 19:46) were in
fact a quotation from Second Isaiah (56:7). Finally, in the
Emmaus road story, Luke had the risen Christ "open the scrip
tures" to Cleopas and his friend so that they understood that it
was "necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and
enter into his glory" (Luke 24:26). No scriptural portrait of sal
vation through suffering was more powerfully developed than
in the servant passages of Second Isaiah. For Luke this was an
important image, and he leaned upon it heavily. The servant
was also a universal figure who served well the universal thrust
of Luke's message.
There was another Hebrew figure, however, that was for
Luke a means to show that Jesus fulfilled the Hebrew tradition
even as he transcended it, making it capable of including gen

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tiles. This figure was little known outside Judaism, but he was
generally regarded in the Jewish tradition as the founder of that
prophetic tradition that drove Judaism beyond its limits and
onto the stage of the world. Luke lifted him out of his Jewish
setting and made him, I believe, the primary model by which
Jesus of Nazareth was understood as the exalted and universal
Christ of heaven and earth. The name of this Jewish figure was
Elijah.
Luke was careful in his Gospel not to give the Elijah role to
John the Baptist, as both Mark and Matthew had done. Luke
did not clothe John in the garments of Elijah, specifically omit
ting Mark's reference to camel's hair and a leather girdle. For
Luke, John the Baptist was only "the voice of one crying in the
wilderness," preparing the way of the Lord (Luke 3:4ff; Isa.
40:1ff). John was one who came in the "spirit and power of
Elijah" (Luke 1:17), but for Luke he was not Elijah. The reason
for this subtle shift in the tradition becomes clear as Luke's
story unfolds, for Luke wanted to see and to portray Jesus as
the new and greater Elijah.
Elijah emerged overtly in Luke's narrative in the story of
the transfiguration. Upon the twin towers of the Jewish reli
gion, the Law, symbolized by Moses, and the prophets, symbol
ized by Elijah, were thought to hang all the sacred traditions.
So Luke chose Elijah upon whom to pattern his portrait of Jesus
for the gentiles. From the transfiguration onward the Elijah
theme rose in Luke's story until it reached a crescendo in the
climax of this Gospel.
At the turning point of Luke's Gospel, this Evangelist had
Jesus "set his face to go to Jerusalem" (Luke 9:51). He sent
messengers ahead to Samaritan villages to make ready for him.
The Samaritans, however, would not receive him "because his
face was set towards Jerusalem" (Luke 9:53). This prompted the
disciples James and John to request permission to call down fire
from heaven to consume the Samaritans. Jesus rebuked James
and John and went on to the next village. Those people who
knew the biblical tradition knew that the power to call down
fire from heaven was the Elijah power. In Elijah's showdown

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with the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, the contest was
over whether Elijah or the prophets of Baal could call down fire
from heaven. "The God who answers by fire, he is God" (1
Kings 18:24). Elijah won this competition, for when he prayed,
"the fire of the Lord fell" (1 Kings 18:38). Later in the Hebrew
Scripture, when King Ahab's son Ahaziah sent messengers to
Elijah, Elijah called down fire from heaven to consume the cap
tain and his fifty men. A second captain and his fifty men were
sent, and they likewise were consumed with Elijah's fire. Only
when a third captain and his fifty-man company were sent did
Elijah relent and go to see the king (2 Kings 1:9ff). The power
of a consuming fire was forever afterward associated with the
power of Elijah. If Jesus was the new and greater Elijah,
thought James and John, he would allow us to call for heavenly
fire to consume the unresponsive Samaritans. For their insight
they received only the rebuke of Jesus. The new and greater
Elijah would not use Elijah's fire power to destroy but to ex
pand, to open, to refine, and to save. The disciples did not
understand, and so Luke's story moved on.
The journey of Jesus and his disciples continued until they
reached the gates of Jerusalem. Then, to the accomparniment of
palm branches, Jesus entered the holy city. He accepted the
shouts of hosannah and the enthusiasm of the crowd blessing
the one who came in the name of the Lord. In quick succession
the events of holy week transpired: the betrayal, arrest, denial,
trial, sentence, scourging,, crucifixion, death, burial, and resur
rection. Unlike the other Gospels, however, the resurrection
was not the climax to Luke's Gospel. The resurrection was for
Luke but the prelude to the ascension and to the day of Pen
tecost.
As we noted earlier, only Luke gave us a narrative of the

ascension and only Luke gave us a narrative of the day of Pen

tecost. These two events have been so deeply burned into the
consciousness of Christians through the celebration of the li
turgical year that we find it difficult to imagine that they hang
by the thread of only one Gospel. Only Luke separated the
events of Easter, ascension, and Pentecost into three separate

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narratives. Why he did that has been a perennial question in
New Testament scholarship. The answer is found, I am con
vinced, in the figure of Elijah and in Luke's desire to present
Jesus in terms of the Elijah portrait. First, however, one must
know the Elijah story or one might be tempted to be literal
about details that Luke surely did not intend to be literalized.
Was Jesus' ascension a literal description of a physical re
ality? We have already observed that when the narrative is lit
eralized, it is tied to a flat earth and to the location of heaven
as just beyond the blue canopy of the sky. That may have made
sense in terms of the understanding of the cosmos available to
people living in the first century, butit makes no sense at all to
space-age people. It would be refreshing to realize that Luke
never intended that story to be literalized in the first place.
Even Luke knew he was writing in a symbolic way. He was, in
fact, retelling the story of Elijah as the vehicle through which to
lead his gentile audience to see a Jewish Jesus who had become
the universal Christ.
Recall the last days of Elijah. He gathered to himself his
spiritual heir and single disciple, a man named Elisha. When
Elijah's days drew to an end, the sacred story said that "the
Lord was about to take Elijah up to heaven by a whirlwind" (2
Kings 2:1). Elijah was aware of this and with Elisha he jour
neyed to meet his destiny. Elisha pleaded with his master not
to send him away, and twice Elisha promised that he would
never abandon his master. The sons of the prophets told Elisha
that "today the Lord will take away your master from over you"
(2 Kings 2:5). Elisha answered, "Yes, I know it." When the
moment of departure came, Elijah asked Elisha what he would
like from him as his final request. Elisha requested a double
portion of Elijah's spirit. It was a difficult request to fill. Elijah's
spirit was an enormous human spirit. Nonetheless, Elijah re
sponded, "If you see me as I am being taken from you, it shall
be so for you; but if you do not see me, it shall not be so" (2
Kings 2:10).
Then as they talked, according to the story, a chariot of fire
led by horses of fire separated the two men. Elijah went up into

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heaven in a whirlwind. Elisha saw the departure, and he cried
out until he saw Elijah no more (2 Kings 2:12). Because Elisha
saw, a double portion of Elijah's spirit was his possession. He
took up Elijah's mantle and found himself capable of doing
extraordinary things with it. The sons of the prophets also saw
this, and they said, "The spirit of Elijah rests upon Elisha," and
they bowed in reverence before Elisha, acknowledging him as
the new leader of the prophetic movement (2 Kings 2:15ff).
Elisha now acted with Elijah's power. This was the story of
Elijah. It was known to all those who had even the slightest
familiarity with the Hebrew Scriptures.
Luke intended to present to his gentile audience a portrait
of Jesus patterned at least in part on this Elijah narrative. He
wanted his readers to see Jesus as the new and greater Elijah,
the heir to that outward-looking Jewish prophetic tradition. On
the model of Elijah, therefore, he constructed his portrait. Like
Elijah, Jesus set his face to walk toward his final earthly des
tiny. He journeyed toward Jerusalem and Calvary. Just as
Elijah's disciple Elisha had accompanied him, so Jesus' disciples
accompanied Jesus. Elisha was tenaciously faithful, however,
and would not be deterred from the disciple role, while Jesus'
followers all fell away, leaving Jesus dramatically alone to en
dure torture, crucifixion, and the grave. But Easter reconsti
tuted this frail group and gave them a second chance. Then
came the climax to Luke's story, rooted as it was not in Easter
but in the narratives of the ascension and Pentecost. Like
Elijah, Jesus was taken up to heaven. He did not need a fiery
chariot and fiery horses; he rose to heaven on his own. Jesus
was greater tharn Elijah. That was Luke's constant message.
Jesus' disciples, like Elisha, beheld his ascension. It oc
curred, said Luke, "while the disciples Were gazing into
heaven'" (Acts 1:10). The reward for seeing the exaltation of the
hero was that the disciples became the recipients of the heros
spirit. Elisha, Elijah's single disciple, had received a double por
tion of the immense but nonetheless human spirit of Elijah. But
Jesus was greater than Elijah, so, Luke asserted, the disciples

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received from Jesus the infinite power of God's Holy Spirit. It
came not just to one lone disciple but was poured on the entire
assembled host of disciples.
When that gift was received, the fire of God's spirit was
pictured as resting upon their foreheads like vibrant and leap
ing flames. The fire of God's spirit differed markedly from the
fire of Elijah. It did not consume or destroy. This fire of God
was designed to purge, to open, to cleanse, to ignite, to fill life
full. When life was filled to its fullness, the fire of the spirit
bound human beings together in a holy fellowship. Elisha,
indwelt by the spirit of Elijah, began to act with Elijah's powe:
The disciples, when indwelt by the Holy Spirit, began to act
with the power of the Christ, and in these "acts of the Apos
tles" the church of Jesus Christ was born. The primary mark of
that church was to ernable alI humarn barriers to fall in the
power of the divine spirit. In Luke's account we can see the
barriers falling in the Pentecost story.

Luke's Meaning for Us

The Christian life was portrayed by Luke as a barrier-free
life beyond language, race, sex, nationality, and economics.
When the spirit came and the tongues of fire danced on the
foreheads of the Christians, they found they could speak to
each other across any barrier. They spoke, said Luke, in what
ever tongue the hearer understood. In the power of the Christ
Spirit, all separations were overcome. All of this, Luke was
arguing, was the gift of the one who took the symbols of Elijah
and expanded them a thousandfold. Because one greater than
Elijah had come, through this Christ the door had been opened
for God to dwell in the midst of God's people and for God's
people to be at one with each other. In Christ, Luke was say
ing, and in those people who had received the Christ Spirit, the
human touched the divine; and when that occurred, the depth
and beauty of the human could at last be seen, ignited, re
vealed, and experienced. To meet Jesus was thus for Luke to

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enter God, and to enter God was to be at one with all human
life. This was the Gospel of Luke that was to be found under
neath the symbols of the Hebrew heritage and, most especially,
underneath the conscious use of the symbol of Elijah.
The ascension of Jesus waS not about space travel or moon
shots. t was not to be literalized in terms of a first-century
cosmology. The Pentecost story did not mean that ignorant
fishermen like Peter and Andrew suddenly were able to speak
Chinese, German, orSwedish. To literalize the Lukan narrative
would be to destroy it irrevocably. The task of the modern
Christian is to learn how to read this story with an open heart,
to hear it beneath the level of a narrow surface literalism. The
task of the modern Christian is to have the living Word that
moves beneath the literal words of the Bible erupt to call people
into life and into the task of building an inclusive community
where Christ is seen in all persons, where those in Christ car
begin to respect the dignity of every human being, and where
all people can begin to respond to the presence of God that is
over, under, around, and through all of life.
God was and is an onmnipresent God. Yet this God was
seen with burning intensity in the full humanity of the one we
call Jesus of Nazareth. This God calls those who have been
divinely created in this God's image to be the persons God
created them to be, for in the fullness of humanity the presence
of God can stillbe experienced. A literal view of Holy Scripture
will never lead one to this vision. Saint Luke knew this, and so
it was that through his masterful use of symbols he called us
beyond his words to a place where we might engage the living
Word.
Fundamentalism is so limited. This is surely why Paul
wrote that "the written code kills, but the Spirit gives life" (2
Cor. 3:6).

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