Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus (Hinges of History) (23 page)

There is a roughness to this parable—a man in a one-room house, closed up for the night, his whole family in the one bed; gruff fathers, showing their love for their children in acts of silent, seemingly begrudging, generosity—that easily convinces
us of its Palestinian origin. Luke, the Greek biographer, has done his homework, however unpleasant it may have been, however persistent he had to be. But Jesus’s understanding of the God we pray to is pellucid: if you are a good, though reluctant, neighbor, God is much more generous than you; if you are a good, though undemonstrative, father, God is a more loving father than you could even imagine being. Therefore, ask boldly and without fear.

L
UKE
SEES
C
HRISTIAN
LIFE
as an alternation of two activities, prayer and kindness, each feeding the other. The plight of those in need sends me to prayer; prayer strengthens me to help those in need.
⁵
But for Luke there is one thing that can make a Christ-like life impossible. For Jewish
Matthew, who was so sensitive to the haughty high-mindedness of the
Pharisees, that one thing was religious hypocrisy. For Luke, at one remove from the conflicts of Jewish life and looking s
quarely at the far more insidious temptations of Greco-Roman society, the one thing that can make a Christ-like life impossible is
wealth. Carefully pruning the many-branched tradition he has received, Luke presents us with
teachings of Jesus that especially stress the evil obstacle of riches:

To this ominous parable, Luke adds his own ominous words: “This is how it will go with anyone who piles up treasure for himself but is not rich before God.” And as if this parable were not enough, Luke gives us another that follows a similar rich man beyond the grave, where we find out what happens to those who die without being “rich before God”:

We cannot know if Jesus’s original parable ended with this glancing reference to his own
resurrection; but Luke certainly intends the Christian reader to catch it and therefore to reflect that even something as spectacularly singular as the revelation contained in the Torah and the Prophets or the resurrection of Jesus will not impress those who are determined to pursue only their own aggrandizement. And though Luke’s many
negative references to wealth make it clear that he saw personal riches as the preeminent blindfold to spiritual sight, he is not as far from Matthew’s concerns as this might seem to imply. Both wealth and religious hypocrisy blind a man to his true responsibilities. The rich men of the Lucan parables can see only their wealth, which blinds them to the needs of others that they should be so able to minister to. The
Pharisees of Matthew “shut up the Kingdom of
Heaven in people’s faces” and found their own justification on hairsplitting legalistic distinctions but “neglect the weightier matters of the Law—
justice, mercy, good faith!” They “lay on people heavy [religious] burdens but will not lift a finger” to help them with those burdens. Their sanctimony in the service of their own self-aggrandizement is as blinding to them as the rich man’s wealth is to him. So hoarded wealth and the arrogant complacency of churchmen—both of them forms of uncaring power—are just two of the traps that can keep human beings from seeing the true nature of their situation. For, says Jesus in Luke’s Gospel, “The very things most valued by human beings are abominations in the eyes of God.”

Wealth and religious hypocrisy may seem rather rarefied temptations, available only to the privileged few. But Jesus was aware that, for ordinary mortals, grinding worry could easily take the place of arrogance and greed. Jesus, always far more sympathetic to ordinary people than he ever is to the privileged, is far gentler in dealing with the stumbling block of worry, even though he sees it as an obstacle to a full life:

This is Luke’s redaction of the teaching, better known in its Matthean version. Both evangelists took it from
Q—in whatever version of that surmised document each was using, which may account for the slight variations between them. Matthew’s “birds of the air” become Luke’s “ravens”; his “lilies of the field” become the more prosaic “lilies”; and his “Seek, rather, his Kingdom and God’s Justice” loses its final phrase in Luke’s version. But if the substantial similarity is proof of the care of both evangelists in an age in which research libraries and reference tools were virtually unknown, Luke’s special material—all the
parables (the Good Samaritan, the sleepy Palestinian householder, the stories of the rich men) and incidents (Jesus reading from the Isaiah scroll, Jesus with his friends Martha and Mary) that appear only in Luke—is proof of Luke’s unremitting industriousness and his dogged resolve to compose a life
of Jesus that, though as accurate as he could make it, was to be pitched specifically to gentiles.

There are in Luke’s choices traces of the reticence that we find in the classical Greek dramatists, who kept violent and lascivious episodes off their stage. In relating the imprisonment and execution of
John the Baptizer, which Luke has taken from Mark’s earthy account, he carefully omits any mention of
Salome dancing provocatively before her stepfather,
Herod, reflecting, as
Raymond Brown remarks, Luke’s “distaste for the sensational.” Similarly, when Jesus cleanses the Temple of those who, treating it as a bazaar, have set up businesses there, in Luke’s version he merely “drives them out,” whereas in Mark and Matthew he overturns tables and stalls and in John goes on to scatter coins and whip the vile shopkeepers into the street.

There is even in Luke a saying of Jesus that presents him very nearly as a typical pagan wise man, cautioning his followers on their manners at a banquet. Do not, advises Jesus, elbow your way to the best seat. “A more distinguished person than you may have been invited,” and the host may have to ask you to move, much to your embarrassment. Better to take the most humble seat, “so that, when your host comes in, he may say, ‘My friend, move up higher.’ Then, everyone with you at the table will see you honored.” Good advice, no doubt, for the upwardly mobile, but not much to do with the Gospel—and saved only by Jesus’s final comment: “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.”

The “wisdom” of such a discourse would fit smoothly into any of the many ancient how- to books on good manners and laudable conduct, but its ring is not especially Jewish or Christian. In this passage, Luke, building perhaps on an authentic saying of Jesus about the last being first and the first
last, may have added as illustration an exchange on table manners that does little more than exhibit his own social prejudices. These small indications of Luke’s Greco-Roman predispositions have prompted some critics to the extreme assertion that Luke is a Stoic in Christian clothing or even that Luke’s Jesus is a species of Stoic philosopher. Without championing such a notion, which would do violence to Luke’s obvious overall intent, we may say that it would indeed be odd if Luke had no identity other than that of a God-fearer who had committed himself to the Jesus Movement. He had a family, an education, and a cultural background that would, whatever the strength of his adult commitment, leave some traces in his writings—and we should not be surprised to find such.

The
Stoics were in favor of moderation and opposed to the indulgence of the
Epicureans (the original “eat, drink, and be merry” crowd), but not one of them would have signed on to Luke’s opinion of riches. Seneca, for instance, certainly the most prominent Stoic of his (and Luke’s) time, was widely admired for being one of the
wealthiest men in Rome. Luke’s “holy poverty”—long before its Franciscan articulation—would only have appalled the Stoics, who would have found someone like John D. Rockefeller much more to their taste, a man famous for his temperance who also had the keenest appreciation of the holy importance of wealth. There was nothing otherworldly about the Stoics.

Luke’s poverty of spirit went far indeed. He seems to have been, if anything, more radical than Jesus on this point. In Mark’s Gospel, Jesus tells Peter and the other disciples, “In truth I tell you, there is no one who has left house, brothers, sisters, mother, father, children, or land for my sake and for the sake of the Gospel who will not receive a hundred times as
much.” When Luke recounts the same episode, his list of those to be left behind is telling: “house, wife, brothers, parents, or children.” “Sisters” can be understood in the Greek “brothers,” and “mother, father” has been collapsed into “parents.” “Land” is gone, perhaps collapsed into “house”—or is it the sort of possession an urban evangelist would think too marginal to mention? “Children” in both quotations should be understood as referring only to adult children. But the startling Lucan addition is “wife.” It is impossible to imagine Jesus, who made so much of equality and mutual faithfulness in marriage, asking his disciples to give up their wives—or their husbands, since there were certainly married female disciples. And in fact we know from an incidental remark of Paul in
First Corinthians that “the other apostles, the brothers [and sisters?] of the Lord, and the Rock” himself all had spouses who accompanied them on their missionary journeys in the 50s and 60s.

In Luke’s Gospel we are already a half century away from Jesus and decades away from the apostolic missions; and here we discover this gentile disciple, trying to hew as closely as possible to Jesus’s intent but somewhat revising his teaching in an age of such difficulties for Christians that the combination of marriage and firm commitment to the Gospel, even to the point of martyrdom, may have seemed impossible. Beneath Luke’s gentle surface is an uncompromising, all-or-nothing attitude, giving credibility to the second sentence of the identity ascribed to him in antiquity and attached to his gospel: “He served the Lord without distraction, without a wife, and without children.”

I
THINK
WE
MUST
see Luke as an educated man of the first century whose critical assessment of the gross materialism
of his own society and whose profound attraction to truth, first nourished perhaps by pagan philosophy, led him to the one God of the Jews and the compelling power of the
Septuagint. Luke gives us an excellent imitation of the peculiar Greek of this translation of the Hebrew scriptures in the opening chapters of his gospel, in which the parents of
John the Baptizer and of Jesus and the ancient devotees of the Temple cluster around the births of Jesus and his precursor, singing their exceedingly Jewish psalms and canticles. The Temple priest
Zechariah in his vision, his wife Elizabeth in her insight, Mary in her Magnificat, Joseph in his obedience,
Simeon in his ecstasy, and Anna in her prophecy are all meant, in the archaic Greek of their utterings, to remind us of Old Testament figures, the last figures of the old dispensation, singing in the Messiah.

The form of Judaism that Luke embraced involved, by the time he embraced it, a willingness to suffer and even die for this faith. The genuine perils he had experienced in his travels with Paul had paled before the insane cruelty of the rampant
Beast, state persecution by
Nero and his successors. Little wonder that Luke devalued material goods, which could so easily be expropriated by the state, and took every opportunity to remind his readers of how necessary it was to imitate Jesus in prayer if they were to resist not only the powers of this world but the gnawing fear in their own hearts. And little wonder that Luke comforted himself with the belief that his
celibacy, like the exceptional celibacy of Jesus and (at least in his missionary years) Paul, was for the sake of the Kingdom.