The way my sister and I remember the events of our childhood, now at fifty years remove, can differ widely. We experienced the same things but what they meant to us and how we interpret them today says alot about us. Something similar happens in the written gospels. What Jesus said and did fifty years or so before the actually writing of St. Luke’s Gospel had been carried in the memory of his Church. Luke takes those memories and interprets them in the light of his experience to call the reader to faith. Take his version of the Beatitudes, for example. Matthew’s account (the Eight Beatitudes) diverges markedly from Luke’s four. In Luke, Jesus says, “Blessed are you who are poor.” It’s a personal address (not “the poor” but “you poor”) and it confronts concrete situations (not “poor in spirit” but real, actual poverty.) In Luke’s rendition, our faith in Jesus must be personal and concrete. The fact that Jesus attaches “woes” to his Beatitudes is a warning against complacency. How blessed we are to have these two streams for memories about Jesus to enrich our faith.
