Dear Theophilus

Luke is quite obviously the fussiest of the gospel writers. Mark starts his gospel in the middle, jumping straight into the action; Matthew sets a prophetic stage; John starts the story in eternity. Luke, though, complains. He says he wants to tell us a “well-ordered” account, which most definitely means that all the other accounts he’s seen aren’t well-ordered—and wouldn’t you know it, Luke knows just the person to clean up this mess. Surprise! It’s Luke!

I like imagining Luke, always a bit overdressed and particular about his coffee, pedantically correcting Mark’s poorer command of Greek, but Luke is also a fun sort of fussy. For him, a well-ordered account must include musical numbers—the only gospel to give us these wonderful scenes. I like to imagine he had choreography in his mind for these numbers—Mary bold in the spotlight, Simeon in soft-focus, Zachariah marching and thoughtful—and perhaps his original copy contained little side notes on the page with stage directions that are long lost to the present scholarly editions.

Luke may fuss, but he is passionate, too, about re-ordering. Luke is the gospel that moves straight to the political and economic implications of Jesus. All the gospels mention this, but Luke never stops. The expected world is turned upside down by a God who loves the least, and everyone needs to get on board. Prodigal sons—another Luke-only story—are welcomed back, so good older siblings need to find some sympathetic joy and give up their huffing. Samaritans, impure in religion and politics, might make the best neighbors, and that’s whose love we need to recognize and accept and even copy. 

In Luke, the big sermon happens on a Plain, not a Mountain, and so instead of describing some higher moral universe that people love to admire, Luke tells it like he sees it. Like an ox, the traditional symbol of Luke’s gospel, Jesus is coming to knock down the important and rich people and plow the ground for everyone’s food. God’s love is level with all of us, not just a few. Jesus has infinite patience for our becoming accustomed to this—“Forgive them, they know not what they do,” he’ll say during his own execution, and he will be quick to welcome a repentant thief—again, all moments unique to Luke. Jesus will explain this over and over again, including on the road to Emmaus and to anyone anywhere, until, in a moment of broken and shared bread amongst friends and strangers, we realize Jesus himself has been doing the teaching all along. 

Luke thinks this godly order has been coming since Adam—which is the start of Jesus’s lineage in this gospel—but now that it’s here, the Jesus-kingdom-order is going to take over the earthly kingdoms. The Spirit is here! This is why Paul, Luke’s hero, becomes the standard-bearer for this order in Acts. He’s spreading the vision of this world-upside-down order, and it’s going to change everything—even that terrible and huge civilization, the Roman Empire.

Sitting here, writing these words and thinking of fussy and passionate and sophisticated Luke, I wish I shared more of his optimism about the spread of order that Jesus makes real. The world continues to suffer in ways Luke would immediately recognize, and I wish it were more obviously becoming better. The poor, the immigrant, the hungry, the foreigner, the lost—it’s never been a good time to be these, but God’s great equalizing love seems to be conveniently ignored by the proud, the powerful, the rich. Paul’s arrival in Rome did not fix the situation. We still long for a well-ordered world, one that would make us and the world well.

And so, let me share that my favorite thing about Luke’s gospel has always been that it’s addressed to a particular person, Theophilus. Of course, that’s you. Maybe Luke wrote the gospel for some dude named Theo—why not?—but the name is also clearly a pun, meaning something like God-Lover or God-Friend. This is the kind of love that is due not to our lovers, eros—although that’s good—nor that shining love, agape, that gives indiscriminately—also good! This is a connecting, friendly kind of love for a person, a human being. Who are Christians, thinks Luke, if not the people who have loved God in and as the friend Jesus? 

I am struck that the love of Jesus—that revolutionary, reordering love; that forgiving, welcoming love; that fussy, wanting to get things right love—comes to Luke first as a friend, a love he claims to have witnessed himself. God expresses the great leveling divine love by graciously also being on our level, as a friend. If we are surprised at God being on our level, so were the shepherds at Jesus’s birth (again, a Luke-only story). If we want to take our part in the well-ordering that Jesus is for our world, we might do well to remember that we meet it first in friendship—through the Spirit, Jesus himself does the teaching—and out of this friendship grows this well-order. Friendship with our neighbor, and with God, creates faith.

The musical numbers, though—they’re pretty great, too.