The Gentile Evangelist

Homily for the Feast of St. Luke the Evangelist

The Gospel for this feast day records the sending of the seventy-two disciples of Jesus to heal, expel demons, and preach the nearness of the Kingdom of God. St. Luke’s was not among these seventy-two disciples. We know this simply because Jesus never recruited any Gentiles as his followers. Only through the preaching of St. Paul and through the approbation of St. Peter and the Church of Jerusalem was the Gospel spread to people who had not been Jewish first.

Because he was a Gentile, St. Luke’s Gospel portrays Jesus in a different light than he appears in the Gospels of St. Matthew and St. Mark. In St. Luke’s Gospel, he takes great pains to show that the Gospel is meant for all humankind. He includes the story of the Good Samaritan, and it is in his Gospel that we meet the Samaritan leper who came back to thank Jesus while the nine Jewish lepers went off to the temple so that they could be declared clean. Of course, the Samaritan leper would never have been welcomed in the Temple of Jerusalem. He is, therefore, free to come back and thank Jesus while the Jewish lepers are required to go to the priests to be declared clean.

St. Luke is good at including people who would ordinarily be excluded because they were not Jewish. He writes of Jesus as the personification of God’s mercy. He portrays Jesus at prayer frequently, and it is only in his Gospel that one of the thieves who was crucified alongside Jesus was promised paradise. While St. Matthew and St. Mark put the words of Psalm 22 on the lips of Jesus as he hangs on the cross, St. Luke writes that Jesus forgave those who crucified him before handing over his spirit to the Father.

If we take anything from this feast day celebration, perhaps it would be the notion that all of us are children of God no matter what our race, our tongue, our creed, or our country of origin. Jesus has given his body and blood to all who put their faith in him.