A helpful spiritual exercises is to read each of the four gospels as a unique document worthy of attention in itself. We tend the weave the different evangelists into a coherent narrative to create a “life of Christ.” Films like The Chosen do this. However, the four evangelists told their story in their way because they were trying to bring others to Christ. Their particular perspective was intentional. The texts as we have them were not gathered as “the four gospels” until several hundred years after they were written. Meeting Jesus as the four authors present him will be a richer experience than a generic picture mashed together. That realization makes the passage from St. Luke today startling. “No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” If you saw this by itself it sounds like Jesus speaking in the fourth gospel by St. John. That Luke includes it (and remember the evangelists are writing fifty or so years after the events themselve and drawing on the memory of the Church) tells us how important the understanding of Jesus as the Son of God was to the first Chrsitians.
