St. Luke

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

“After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them out ahead of him in pairs, to all the towns and places he himself would be visiting. And he said to them, ‘The harvest is rich, but the laborers are few, so ask the Lord of the harvest to send laborers to do his harvesting’” (Luke 10:1-2).

Today is the Feast of St. Luke. He was a doctor who converted to the Church and the faith in the year 40 AD. He later accompanied St. Paul on his apostolic journeys, particularly the Second Apostolic Journey.

He wrote the Gospel that St. Paul preached. As St. Mark wrote the Gospel that St. Peter preached, St. Luke wrote the Gospel that St. Paul preached.

As St. Paul was preaching, St. Luke was taking notes and was going to put it all together later. He also wrote the Acts of the Apostles.

We could think of how his work has lasted down through the centuries, the legacy that St. Luke has given us. He must have been thinking of the harvest and the work and precision that he put into his Gospel. It must have been quite something for it to last such a long time, and has influenced souls down through all those generations. He has left an impact.

We could think of the legacy that each one of us wants to leave and pass on, and what's necessary to do a work that will last in the same way that the work of St. Luke has lasted. He must have been striving for perfection in his work.

In the Entrance Antiphon of today's Mass, it says, “How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of him who brings good tidings”(Isa. 52:7).

St. Luke has brought us “good tidings”—ideas that lift up our soul; truths about our life, about the world, about creation; beautiful things that change our whole panorama.

Among the other things that Luke has given us is a Gospel account of the infancy of Our Lord, which the other apostles don't narrate.We owe Christmas to St. Luke.

Just imagine all the preparations that are starting to be made for Christmas all over the world—in organizations, in cities, in countries, in households, in schools. We can attribute all that to St. Luke because of his narration of the Gospel message. He's somebody who has had a big impact on our lives.

When he was carrying out his work, putting it together, he must have had to interview many people and take note of many things. He was moved by divine grace. He was inspired by the Holy Spirit.

But the supernatural is built on the natural. He invoked all his natural talents to be able to write the things he wrote, and to write them in the way that he wrote them, that would have such a profound impact on hearts, souls, and minds.

He's passed on to us a remarkable Gospel account of the history of primitive Christianity—all the miracles, the teachings of Our Lord, and how the early apostles spread that message, also thinking of the harvest. “The harvest is rich; the laborers are few” (Luke 10:2).

When he wrote, he must have been very aware of how people would need to know Our Lord Jesus Christ—aspects of His character, what He said, the words.

Those words of Scripture, we are told, are like a “double-edged sword” (Heb. 4:12)—words that are going to penetrate minds, and hearts, and souls.

We're told in the first chapter of St. Luke, “After following up all things carefully from the very first” he made “an orderly account” (cf. Luke 1:3).

He went about his work with care, with the spirit of excellence; wanting to do a good job, aware of the impact his writing could have, down through the centuries.

He also indicates that he got the testimony of those who were eyewitnesses (Luke 1:2): people who saw the miracles of Our Lord, who heard the specific words that He said.

Among those people that he must have interviewed must have been Our Lady, who told him all about the Annunciation, the Visitation, and all about the Birth of Christ. These are things that are only contained in St. Luke's Gospel.

St. Jerome remarks that his finely wrought style is a reflection of the reliability of his sources (cf. St. Jerome, Letter). Thanks to the precision work that he did, we have an account of Our Lord's infancy, and many superb parables that he alone recounts.

He tells us the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). All the details that are contained there give very deep insights into the human character and also tell us beautiful things about Our Father God. He goes out to meet the prodigal son and also goes out to try and convert the older son.

He tells us about the Good Samaritan—mercy (Luke 10:25-37). Mercy is one of the main themes of the Gospel of Luke.

He's writing for the Romans, for the Gentiles, for the non-Jews. St. Matthew was writing for the Jews who had converted to the faith, and so, very frequently he talks about the things that were linked up to the Old Testament. St. Matthew says, “This happened to fulfill what was said by the prophet Isaiah“ (Matt. 8:17, 12:17, 4:14).

But St. Luke doesn't say anything like that, because he's not writing for the Jews. These Gentiles or the Romans would know nothing about Isaiah or the Old Testament.

The whole thrust of his Gospel is to show the universality of redemption, that Christ didn't just come for the Jews. Christ came for everybody.

He highlights the Good Samaritan, not a Jew, who carried out his good work of mercy (Luke 10:25-37).

He talks about the episode of Lazarus and the rich man: Lazarus, who lay at his gate with nothing. Yet, Lazarus is the one who is lifted up because of the mercy and justice of God (Luke 16:19-31).

He talks about the account of the two travelers on the road to Emmaus: “Were not our hearts burning within us as we went along the way?” (Luke 24:32).

The whole of his Gospel is exquisitely crafted down to the last detail. It teaches us how to have an intimate personal relationship with Jesus, a heart-to-heart relationship, to recognize how the Word of Christ penetrates deeply into our hearts and soul: “Were not our hearts burning within us as we went along the way?”

He also omits certain things in his Gospel that would not be very pleasant for the Gentiles to hear. For example, the insults of the Roman soldiers at the foot of the Cross, jeering at Our Lord—he omits those things.

You can see that he's very clever in the way that he gets his message across. He omits the things that the Gentiles would not be encouraged or attracted to.

He doesn't talk about the woman who says, “Dogs must eat the crumbs that fall from the master's table” (Matt. 15:27). All those sorts of phrases that you might find in other Gospels, he very cleverly omits them.

You catch more leaves with honey. He uses attractive words and phrases to cleverly make the life of Christ attractive to the people who are listening to him.

He stresses Christ's love for sinners. Jesus came “to save those who were lost” (Luke 19:10). He talks about Our Lord forgiving the woman taken in adultery (Luke 7:36-50). He stayed in the home of Zacchaeus who was not well-regarded by his contemporaries (Luke 19:1-10).

He mentions the gaze of Our Lord that worked a transformation in Peter after his denials. “The Lord turned and looked upon Peter…after he heard the cock crow…went out and wept bitterly” (Luke 22:61-62).

That look of Christ reaches out to Peter in his lowest moment. It's a very poignant moment. It's as though saying that the heart of Christ reaches out and touches everybody who might be going through a low moment or a difficult moment, and calls them to conversion, to begin again, to wipe the slate clean. His mercy is apparent everywhere.

St. Luke tells us about Our Lord's promise of salvation to the repentant thief: “I tell you, this day you will be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:43).

He talks about the prayer of Our Lord for those who crucify and insult Him on Calvary: “Forgive them, Lord, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

In all these aspects we find St. Luke's Gospel very beautiful, very rich. It enters the heart in many ways.

He talks about the role of women in society, an unusual topic in the early centuries of Christianity. This plays an important part in St. Luke’s Gospel.

It promotes a Christian feminism. The feminism we hear about today tends to be a radical feminism, but it's an aberration. It's a twisting of the original feminism that comes from the Gospel.

Our Lord is all the time lifting up the women around Him, restoring their dignity to them. And the evangelist brings this out very clearly.

The widow of Naim: He stops what He's doing and where He's going. He stops in His tracks and goes to this widow, gives her His full attention, and performs a wonderful miracle for her (Luke 7:11-17).

St. Luke talks about the woman who bathes Christ's feet as a sign of her fervent repentance; she bathes His feet with her tears and wipes them with her hair (Luke 7:36-50).

He talks about the Galileans who put their goods at Our Lord's disposal to follow Him and to serve Him (Luke 8:1-3); the women who looked after Him in various ways.

He had two special friends who were women, two sisters from Bethany: Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42). He cured the stooped woman who had been bent over (Luke 13:10-17).

He stops to talk to the weeping women from Jerusalem, who show Our Lord compassion on His way to the cross: “Weep not for me, but weep for sinners. … If they do these things to the green wood, what shall be done to the dry?” (Luke 23:27-31).

We have a lot to thank St. Luke for. He's a great influence on our life.

We can also be reminded of the importance of our Gospel reading. When I came in contact with Opus Dei, maybe like you, I heard that it's good to read the Gospel for a few minutes every day.

I wondered, is it worthwhile doing anything for a few minutes every day? I was surprised at the idea. But then, probably most of us started to read the Gospel for a few minutes every day. And ten, twenty, fifty years later, we're still reading the Gospel for a few minutes every day.

We've been given a wonderful mechanism in which to know the Gospel—not a few minutes, but sometimes a word, sometimes a chapter, sometimes a phrase—but always, something. There is some little idea every day, an investment into our life and into our soul, of the words of Jesus, of the things He did, of the things He said. It's a great way to grow in familiarity with Christ in the course of our life.

Sometimes we might hear of people who boast that they read the Gospel for an hour every day. And you sort of wonder—well, I wonder—will they still be reading it next week?

It is difficult to get an hour, and sometimes Scripture is not the easiest thing in the world to read. But when you break it down piecemeal, just a few minutes every day, it becomes a very achievable goal.

A lady in Singapore once told me that we Catholics have more exposure to Scripture than any other Christian denomination. It's a rather interesting statement because we think that the Protestants give an awful lot of importance to Scripture and spend an awful lot of time reading Scripture.

But this lady said, “If we go to Mass every day, we get all the choices—pieces of Scripture selected out for us in the readings of the Mass, the Old Testament, the New Testament in a two-year cycle, and on Sundays on a three-year cycle. Many Protestants don't attend any service on Sunday, and they certainly don't go every day.”

We have the possibility of enormous exposure to Scripture. It's a great way of being very familiar with Scripture also.

Pope John Paul I, whose process of beatification has been moved forward in the last few days and weeks with the recognition of a miracle (update: he was beatified on September 4, 2022), wrote a very moving letter to St. Luke in one of his books, thanking St. Luke for the things that he wrote, thanking him particularly for the story of the infancy of Jesus, the story of His birth (Albino Luciani (John Paul I), Illustrissimi).

He mentions how one verse stands out above all the others in his account of the infancy of Christ: “Wrapped in swaddling clothes, he was laid in a manger” (Luke 2:7).

He highlights how that phrase has given rise to thousands and thousands of beautiful paintings. Many of the great Renaissance painters of the 16th century were fascinated by that phrase. They all drew scenes of Bethlehem—things that we have come to be familiar with in Christmas cards, paintings in churches, and other places.

They've taken those words of St. Luke and converted them to something visible, so little children can see, and the message can enter through their eyes. And we are like little children.

It's a great invitation to contemplate the life of the Holy Family in Bethlehem and to share in their daily life in Nazareth. Those paintings speak to us.

John Paul II liked to say that we go to the great spiritual mysteries “through physical signs and symbols” (John Paul II, Man and Woman He Created Them; Audience, February 20, 1980; Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 1146).

The words of St. Luke have given rise to wonderful physical signs and symbols. How many angels have been painted because of the beautiful stories of St. Luke—their appearance to the shepherds: “Behold, we bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people” (Luke 2:10).

The Gospel of St. Luke is all about bringing those “good tidings of great joy” to all the people. We're very much involved in this whole process and enterprise.

“The harvest is rich...” (Luke 10:2)—words that have to mean an awful lot to us. We're called to focus on the harvest, to think about the harvest, to dream about the harvest, and to think that with every little bit of work we do with human perfection, somehow, we help that harvest to come about, just like Luke and the very composition of his Gospel has produced a masterpiece. This has lasted through the centuries.

Tasks that are well done for God are of lasting value. This is the precious gift we always have at hand to offer Our Lord.

I was giving a retreat in Bungoma this weekend, and we borrowed a monstrance from the local church. Now there was a lot of wisdom in our ways and quite a history to that monstrance.

There is a man we got to know of remotely in Ireland who goes around churches and convents collecting old liturgical objects. One day, he got a beautiful monstrance, and it found its way to somebody who holds on to these things for me. And then, somebody from Nairobi was in Ireland and had the possibility of bringing it here.

But of course, it’s pretty heavy. I had to sort of dangle a carrot in front of this person and say, “Look, if you bring that monstrance, you can have it for your parish.”

That was a big carrot. This person carried this heavy thing all the way and got it through customs, in another little miracle. It ended up in a parish in Bungoma and that parish happened to be right beside the pastoral center in Bungoma where we had this retreat.

We borrowed it from the parish to use and to have Solemn Benediction during the days of the retreat. It's a very beautiful monstrance. It has a couple of decorative stones there. I don't think they're diamonds, but they look like diamonds. It's very ornate.

Before we sent it to Bungoma, we brought it to that man in the industrial area there who deals with these things. He cleans up liturgical items, does gold plating, and that type of work.

What was interesting was when I went to collect the monstrance from him or ask him about it, he waxed lyrical about this monstrance because they took it apart in order to clean the inside. This man got very excited because he loves these sorts of things.

He discovered inside the monstrance that there were two initials written there of the people who made it and the date, which was 1929. These people had made this monstrance, a beautiful item of decorative value, in 1929.

Now when that monstrance came here, we had no idea that it was such an antique. This man was getting very excited about it and said, “You know, I see a lot of nice things pass through my office here and we do a lot of nice things, but this is special.”

To me who knows absolutely nothing about these things, this was quite a revelation. It was interesting just to hear this man speaking eloquently about this particular item.

I began to regret a little bit that I had made the promise to give it to that place in Bungoma. In fact, I showed it to Father Cormac Burke—this monstrance—and he said, “That should remain here.”

Anyway, we had to fulfill our promises, and so it got there to Bungoma and we had an opportunity that weekend to use it. Knowing the whole history was quite something.

But also thinking about those two people who made that monstrance in 1929—I don't know if it was made in Ireland, or where, or how it got there. Maybe it was made in Italy, I don't know.

But they couldn't have had the slightest idea that almost a hundred years later, this monstrance, this beautiful item of liturgical worship, would be used in a retreat in Bungoma!

You never know where your beautiful work is going to end up; how God is going to use the efforts we put into certain things to create a lasting value. This monstrance is just one particular thing, but the Gospel of St. Luke is of another order.

Things well done for God last down through time. If we do our work without interest or attention to detail, that cannot be pleasing to God or of service to others. If you think of how the service that the words of St. Luke have offered to centuries of people in all sorts of places all over the world—all professional work is a service.

We could think of the responsibility with which we should try to offer up every day for the glory of God and the things that we have in hand—the things we're able to do with our hands, with our minds, the talents that God has given to us.

He also points out the importance of certain virtues—of humility, of sincerity, of poverty, of detachment—the acceptance of the daily Cross, and the need for thanksgiving.

There's a writer in the early centuries, Eusebius, who calls St. Luke “the painter of the Virgin” because all the things he tells us about Our Lady—and indeed the paintings that have been made about Our Lady—can in many ways be attributed back to St. Luke. His Gospel is a fundamental source of knowledge about Our Lady.

It has inspired Christian art for centuries: the humility with which she accepted the message of the angel, the urgency with which she went to visit St. Elizabeth, the disposition that she and St. Joseph had on their journey to Bethlehem, and when they had to flee to Egypt.

We find out an awful lot of things from St. Luke. The Hail Mary will be attributed to him. There's no person in the history of the Gospel, except for Jesus Himself, who is described with as much affection as Our Lady.

He gives us the Magnificat, a beautiful prayer: “My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior…all generations will call her blessed since the Almighty has done great things in her” (cf. Luke 1:46-49).

A local woman praises Our Lady, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nourished you” (Luke 11:27).

Luke catches all these things. He talks about her faithful correspondence to her vocation. It's there all the time: “Son, why have you treated us so?” (Luke 2:48) at the finding in the temple. Twice, St. Luke tells us that she “pondered all these things carefully in her heart” (Luke 2:19,51).

We can see that Our Lady must have shared all these intimate moments with St. Luke, treasures, wonderful treasures that have inspired so many people over time.

When we take up the Gospels, we can do so with great reverence, appreciating the gift that we've been given, that legacy of St. Luke. It leads us to contemplate the noble and uplifting picture of Our Lord that he gives us.

In the Acts of the Apostles, he talks about the joy and the apostolic fervor of the early apostles, who went out very focused on the fact that they were few laborers.

Here is the importance of vocations, of thinking about vocations—dreaming vocations for the universal Church, for the Prelature of Opus Dei, for all the great evangelical thrusts that Our Lord wants in the coming century.

“The harvest is great.” And those words can move us to be enthused about the harvest, to look again at the harvest around us and to think ‘what can I do?’, to think out of the box, to think of new initiatives.

As we come to the 100th anniversary of the founding of Opus Dei, it’s a great moment to think with the mind of St. Josemaría of the greatness of that harvest, of all the great things that have been achieved.

And we know that if we're stuck someday, or a bit down, or looking for an answer to something, sometimes we open the Gospel, and some word jumps up out of the page and hits us in the face. Those words are very special. They reach deep into our soul.

We can find peace and serenity in contemplating those words and talking them over with Our Lord, made truly and substantially present in the Sacred Host in the tabernacle, bringing a new peace to our soul, to help us to begin again. “As many as touched him were saved” (cf. Mark 6:56).

Our Lord continues to impart this message of strength, courage, and peace to all people who come close to Him, especially when we come in contact with Him through the inspired Word, focusing on every syllable.

I said Mass for some elderly nuns once in Singapore. There was a 90-year-old there, or maybe 90-plus. I think she couldn't see very well, but she had a big magnifying glass. She was following the words: the words of the Mass and the words of Scripture.

It's as though she didn't want to miss a single syllable, because there was pure gold there that she had learned to savor in the course of her life. It was that pure spiritual gold that gave her pure spiritual joy.

Many joys of our life come from the Gospels. St. Luke's writings encourage us to have constant recourse to Our Lord, to turn to Him frequently, to seek out His mercy, and to talk to Him as the faithful friend who lays down His life for us (John 15:13).

St. Luke, we can ask you to help us to go deeper in all these things, to know well the person of Christ and the answers that Christ has to give to the 21st century—and how we have to be the bearers of those answers.

“Those words that you whisper into the ear of your wavering friend...”, said St. Josemaría in The Way (Point 973). Very often, those may be words of the Gospel.

The words divinely inspired by the Holy Spirit have a great power to bring us in contact with the Person of Jesus. We learn “the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus” (Phil. 3:8)—great richness.

We are told in the Second Vatican Council, Dei Verbum, the Decree on Scripture, that in Sacred Scripture we find “food for our soul,” since the Gospel is “the clear and perennial source of the spiritual life” (Vatican II, Dei Verbum, Point 21, November 18, 1965).

We can turn to Our Lady, who entrusted to St. Luke the message of her life to give it to us.

Mary, may you help us listen very attentively, more attentively every day of our life to the beautiful things that you have transmitted to us through the Gospel of St. Luke.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

SMF