The Message Remix (303 page)

INTRODUCTION
LUKE

 

Most of us, most of the time, feel left out
—
misfits. We don’t belong.

Others Seem to be So confident, So Sure of themselves, “insiders” who know the ropes,
old hands in a club from which we are excluded.

One of the ways we have of responding to this is to form our own club, or join one that will have us. Here is at least one place where we are “in” and the others “out.” The clubs range from informal to formal in gatherings that are variously political, social, cultural, and economic. But the one thing they have in common is the principle of exclusion. Identity or worth is achieved by excluding all but the chosen. The terrible price we pay for keeping all those other people out so that we can savor the sweetness of being insiders is a reduction of reality, a shrinkage of life.

Nowhere is this price more terrible than when it is paid in the cause of religion. But religion has a long history of doing just that, of reducing the huge mysteries of God to the respectability of club rules, of shrinking the vast human community to a “membership.” But with God there are no outsiders.

Luke is a most vigorous champion of the outsider. An outsider himself, the only Gentile in an all-Jewish cast of New Testament writers, he shows how Jesus includes those who typically were treated as outsiders by the religious establishment of the day: women, common laborers (sheepherders), the racially different (Samaritans), the poor. He will not countenance religion as a club. As Luke tells the story, all of us who have found ourselves on the outside looking in on life with no hope of gaining entrance (and who of us hasn’t felt it?) now find the doors wide open, found and welcomed by God in Jesus.

 

 

From:
Luke was a doctor, well educated in Greek, with an organized mind and a literary flair. Yet as one of the apostle Paul’s close friends in spreading the Message among Gentiles, Luke wrote in street Greek to communicate with everybody, not just the well-educated. He may have been drawn to Judaism for some years before the Message reached his hometown (possibly Antioch in Syria or Philippi in Greece).

 

To:
Luke addressed his two-volume work (this account of Jesus’ life, plus the book of Acts) to Theophilus, whose name means God-friend. Theophilus was probably a real person, Luke’s wealthy patron or publisher. But he also stood for the many pagans, God-fearers (the Jewish term for pagans attracted to Judaism), and new Christians of all social classes who wanted to get in on the story of Jesus.

 

Re:
Roughly 6 B.C. to A.D. 30. When Augustus Caesar became Rome’s first emperor in 27 B.C., he ended the civil wars that had plagued Rome’s territories. The Pax Romana, or Roman Peace, had begun, and an Altar of Peace was set up in the capital. With pirates and marauding armies suppressed, the Romans made commerce possible at a level never before known. By the time he died in A.D. 14, Augustus was lauded as divine with titles such as “Savior of the world.” But the official version of peace on earth didn’t thrill everybody. There was more bloodshed on the borders of the empire than before. Dissent in provinces like Judea was ruthlessly quashed. A Roman named Tacitus wrote an account of the conquest of Britain in which he had the British commander comment, “To plunder, butcher, steal, these things they misname Empire; they make a desolation and call it peace.”