Today, and for the rest of this year, the gospels read each Sunday will be taken from the third book of the New Testament, the Gospel according to Luke. If you think about it, we have something in common with St. Luke. Luke, like each one of us, learned about Jesus from someone else. Luke never met Jesus in the flesh. He probably never visited Jerusalem. His knowledge of the geography of the area was certainly spotty. Luke relied on what other people told him about Jesus as his avenue to faith. Luke tells us that he has written his gospel reporting things “as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” We might not have access to the first eyewitnesses like Luke did but through all the generations of Christians separating us from St. Luke it was the testimony of others which kept the faith alive. This is necessary because Jesus himself left no writing, no document, no video, no memorial testifying to what he taught and believed. The only monument to the faith of Jesus can be found in the lives of his followers. They handed on their faith to St. Paul’s generation (for he too did not walk the dusty roads of Galilee with Jesus) and then he to Luke’s and finally, eighty or so generations later, to us so that we would come to believe as they did that Jesus was the one who would make life worth living. Luke did not write a gospel to give a report on what Jesus said and did. Rather, he wrote so that others, you and me, would come to encounter Christ in their lives as he had in his.
For St. Luke as for us, it was not so much the words, the teachings, that provide the initial attraction. Rather it was the actions, the example, the lived experience of those first believers that drew him to Christ. Faith is not so much taught as it is caught. When we see people filled with life, love and joy we say, “I want some of that.” When others find out that our faith as Christians propels us to act with loving kindness, they recognize a landing spot for their hopes and desires. When faith in Christ holds up a vision of a world of peace and justice instead of the mess we have now, people are drawn. That helps to explain the mission statement Jesus makes in the Nazareth synagogue when he is starting out on his public ministry. As St. Luke describes the scene Jesus was not envisioning that he would be leading catechetical programs, or Bible study, or religious education. Instead, he intended to make the world look at least a little more as God intended it to be – a place where the captives are freed, the blind can see, the poor have good news. While we might not have many opportunities to free captives or the skill to help the blind to see, everyone of us can bring good news into a hurting world. Doesn’t everyone prefer good news to bad? Luke caught the good news from those before him and passed on good news to those who came after. That is how we encounter Christ.
The foundational good news is that God so loved the world that he sent us Jesus. God is not aloof, above it all. God shares in all the joys and hopes, griefs and sorrows that make up human life. God showers divine love upon us. We don’t need to earn it or even deserve it. All we need to do is accept it. We share in the spirit of Jesus when we convey to others that — just as they are — they are loved by God. We are all poor when it comes to understanding how rich is the love of God for us. Jesus used to image of Father to help us see how God’s love works. We can presume that God is at least as good as we are. As parents love their children simply because they are their children, so God loves us for we are the children of God. If we love our children even when they are wayward and continue to reach out to them, so God loves us and constantly calls us back into love for God is love. This is the foundation of our good news, our gospel.
The good news overflows by recognizing that everyone we meet is a child of God. There isn’t anyone out there who is not made in God’s image, since we share a common humanity with Jesus. The hungry, the homeless, the needy, the immigrant all have a claim on us as part of our family, God’s family. St. Paul puts it in the epistle: “You ARE the body of Christ. Every one of you is a member of it.” Certainly, it is true that we belong to different nationalities and different racial groups, we speak different languages and like different foods, we wear different clothes and listen to different music, we are male and female, rich and poor. (Well, maybe not the rich part.) But if you look around all that you can see are children of God. Our temptation to divide up into US and THEM is an illusion. St. Paul says that the differences fulfill us and make us whole. A body needs hands and feet and eyes and skin and kidneys and…. The differences in the members of the body are what make a body work. So with us. Viva la difference. We are blessed to find that there are no strangers here, only friends we haven’t met yet. We are all in this together. We might have come over on different ships but we’re all in the same boat now. That is the good news, that is gospel, that is the mission of Jesus we have been called to pass on.