There's something profoundly moving about Luke among
the gospel writers, he wasn't there. He never walked the dusty roads of Galilee
with Jesus, never witnessed the transfiguration, never saw the empty tomb on
that first Easter morning. Yet this Greek physician, this meticulous
documentarian, gave us perhaps the most tender and human portrait of Jesus we
possess. Luke interviewed the witnesses, gathered the stories, and then did
something remarkable: he showed us a Savior who noticed everyone. The
widow dropped her last coins into the temple treasury. The criminal dying on
the adjacent cross. The woman who wept at Jesus's feet. Luke's Gospel reads
like it was written by someone who spent his life looking closely at suffering
people, because that's exactly what he was.
What strikes me most about Luke is his radical inclusivity at a time when
society was obsessed with boundaries. His Gospel gives unprecedented voice to
women, Mary's Magnificat, Elizabeth's blessing, the widow of Nain, the women
who supported Jesus's ministry from their own means. He records parables no one
else does: the Good Samaritan that makes a heretic the hero, the Prodigal Son
with that father running undignified down the road. Luke seems obsessed with
the margins, with those whom polite society overlooked. Perhaps his medical
training taught him that every person's story matters, that healing requires
seeing the whole person, not just their surface. Or perhaps traveling with
Paul, watching the Gospel explode beyond Jewish boundaries into the Gentile
world, convinced him that God's mercy simply refuses to be contained by our
human categories.
Luke's attention to detail is a gift that keeps giving two thousand years
later. He alone tells us about the census that brought Mary and Joseph to
Bethlehem, about the angels appearing to working-class shepherds, about the
twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. He preserves Jesus's teaching on prayer
more fully than anyone else, the friend at midnight, the persistent widow, the
Pharisee and the tax collector. It's Luke who records Jesus's last words as
"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit", the prayer of trust
rather than abandonment. You get the sense that Luke, the scientist, the
researcher, was determined that this story be told accurately and completely,
that future generations would have access to the eyewitness testimonies before
they faded away. His is the Gospel of a historian who understood he was
documenting the hinge point of human history.
But perhaps Luke's greatest gift is simply this: he shows us that you don't
have to be there from the beginning to become essential to the story. This
convert, this outsider, this second-generation believer became the bridge that
helped the Christian story cross from the Jewish world into the wider human
family. He reminds us that asking questions, seeking understanding, and
carefully attending to people's stories is itself a form of devotion. In an age
that often values hot takes over careful thought, Luke stands as a patron saint
of thoughtful faith, proving that rigorous investigation and profound belief
aren't enemies but partners in seeking truth.
©2025 James Dacey, Jr., OFS
