Preached at Christ Church, Worton
Readings – 2 Timothy 4. 5-17, Luke 10.1-9
“Only Luke is with me.”
The biography of Nikita Khrushchev by the American academic William Taubman is a doorstop of a book. I mean that literally. It’s so big and heavy I sometimes use it to hold my interior doors open whenever I air the house. It’s 900 pages and runs to well over a quarter of a million words. It’s a very good biography – it won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, in fact – and it’s an enjoyable read, but I’ve only ever managed to dip in and out of it, despite owning it for many years.
Khrushchev, who led the Soviet Union between 1953 and 1964, has been the subject of nine significant biographies in English, at least another three in Russian, two in French, and one in German. So you might assume that he must have been a very important figure but I think it’s still too early for history to have come to a mature judgement of that. He led the Soviet Union during the terrifying Cuban Missile Crisis and the construction of the Berlin Wall, so I think he will be of interest to historians and enthusiastic ordinary people for centuries to come – in the way that Metternich, or Montezuma, or Charles II still are. But he was a man who was made and ultimately deposed by the winds of history, not one who changed their direction. Will people still call themselves followers of Khrushchev in two thousand years? Or be reading any of his speeches? My dears, they don’t even do so sixty years after he lost power.
Jesus Christ, on the other hand, has only four biographies, and three of them use a lot of the same material – together they have far fewer words than William Taubman’s biography of Khrushchev. We know them as the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and that’s how they have been known since ancient times, although none of them actually identifies its author in its text. We owe the people who wrote these works nearly everything we know about Jesus Christ and His life, and excerpts from their biographies are read in our church every Sunday, and will be in literally millions of churches around the world this very day. Well over three thousand languages have had at least one of the Gospels translated into them.
Today we celebrate St Luke’s Day. So, what do we know about St Luke? Not very much. St Paul mentions a Luke, “the beloved physician”, in his Letter to the Colossians, and the Church has long believed he wrote both the Third Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which are really two halves of one work. He was probably a gentile, perhaps from Antioch, the city where followers of Jesus were first called Christians. He stayed with Paul to the end, as we heard in our first reading. But across his two volumes, which together constitute the largest contribution by any single writer to the New Testament, he never once tells us his name.
Some people find it unsettling that we can’t be certain who wrote the Gospels, just as some are troubled that the details of the Gospels don’t always tally, and that St John’s Gospel from the others even in the most basic and general respects. But different people naturally notice different details in the same event and remember it differently. After all, despite having multiple video recordings from different angles, nobody can ever agree on whether a penalty should have been awarded in a football match – look at what happened between Liverpool and Brentford in the Premier League yesterday.
God doesn’t batter us on the head and force us to believe. We want proof, but God gives us faith. We want a set of instructions to obey, but instead God gives us stories that change how we think – subtly at first, then compounding over a lifetime as we live with them day by day and week by week. We want security, and God sends us into the world to serve our neighbours in ways that often seem beyond our ability and leave us vulnerable.
The Kingdom of God seems to be like that – fragile on the edges, indestructible in its core. In our Gospel, Jesus sends seventy workers out to proclaim His good news and do good works. Luke doesn’t tell us a single one of their names. Christ says those who receive His messengers with peace should be told that the Kingdom of God has come near to them. An odd choice of language, isn’t it? Earthly kingdoms don’t generally come near to you – they might annex you or imprison you; they might tax you and make you fight in their wars; but they don’t generally come near to you. God’s Kingdom is clearly something very different from the kingdoms of the world – less commanding yet more transformative.
A big theme in Luke’s Gospel is the idea that the Kingdom of God is all around us, but has not yet arrived in all its fullness. It might be near us, or among us, but its ultimate reign of justice and peace is still some way off. But if we pay close attention, we will see flashes of this Kingdom of God around us, letting us know that in the end the darkness will not overcome the light.
Those flashes of God’s Kingdom don’t necessarily come in dramatic ways either. Our Gospel reading says that whenever the seventy are welcomed by the people of a town, eat what is set before them and cure the sick, then the Kingdom of God is near. It’s a fitting instruction to find in the Gospel traditionally associated with a doctor. Healing, and hospitality given and received, are signs that the Kingdom will prevail in the end.
One of our key tasks is to remain faithful to living out the values of the Kingdom in our daily lives even through the ups and downs of daily life. In our first reading, St Paul, who clearly feels he is near the end of his life, has kept faith with Christ and His teachings even though he has been left almost on his own as he faces a deeply uncertain future. But he calls for none of the wrongs that have been done to him to be held against their perpetrators, and he still has faithful Luke with him – faithful Luke, who is about to change the world with his biography of Jesus Christ, to which he never puts his name.
It is easy to get despondent at the state of the world, at least as much as people did in Khrushchev’s time at the height of the Cold War. But we usually aren’t looking in the right places to see God at work. Khrushchev’s name is on the spine of a 900-page book; Luke doesn’t tell us the names of the seventy. Yet it is through simple actions like theirs – welcoming a stranger, sharing a meal, or sitting with someone who is ill – that the Kingdom of God comes near, in ways that no earthly ruler can destroy. Keep your eyes fixed on Jesus, read from His life often, share hospitality and help others to heal, and you will be journeying towards the only prize that matters.
And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and for evermore. Amen.