Identity - Lesson 7

Dr. James Houston

Identity

th731-07

Portraits of Jesus in Luke and John

Lesson Transcript

We now turn to the third, or Luke’s, portrait of Jesus. Luke is unique in both providing a Gospel portrait as well as the first historical narrative of the Early Christian Church. He’s unique in having both a Gospel and also the Acts of the Apostles that describe this historical narrative. He’s been described as the explosive witness, for he’s challenging the Classical world like no other. Significantly, he does not claim Jesus is Lord as the other Gospels, but that Jesus is Lord of All: Lord of all Caesarism, all human dictators. And his message is to all the nations because he records Pentecost like no other. Pentecostal versus non-Pentecostal scholars are themselves divided how central is the role of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles.

Another modern feature is the rise of sociology and Luke is an excellent example of sociological legitimisation in justifying the Christian identity as being neither Roman nor Jewish, although the Apostle Paul’s legal trials are that he had been a Pharisee of the Pharisees par excellence. Yes, he had Roman citizenship, but now he was forever in Christ. In Christ is the pulse beat, as we’ll see, of Paul’s own identity. Forever there is now a wholly new citizenship.

Luke as narrator of his Gospel appears also be rewriting Matthew’s Gospel, now for a different readership—not Jew, but Gentile. Luke too is not a disciple like Matthew, but an educated Roman with the skills of a medical doctor and with a wealthy patron, Theophilus, to whom he dedicates his Gospel. He’s reassuring Theophilus that though the majority of the Jews have rejected the Jesus movement, yet its integrity is vouched for, requiring perseverance in its ministry of proclamation as God’s plan of salvation. Uniquely, Luke in passages affirmed this. And I can list them as follows. Luke 1:14–17, 31–35, 46–55, 68–79, all in the first chapter. And then in the 4:16–30 and again in13:31–35 and finally 24:44–49. He’s going to do the same thing later in the Acts of the Apostles.

With Jewish rejection, he emphasises strongly the inclusion of the Gentiles as the eschatological judgement that will prevail in spite of Roman law courts. Yet [his tension 00:03:33] is that the good news is for today. It’s a promise that’s immediately available and it’s to be acted upon today. So look at the references of Luke 2:11, 4:21, 5:26, 13:32–33, 19:5,9, and finally 23:42–43. It’s good news for those who are in need in 4:18–19. It’s for the sick who need healing in 5:30–32. It’s for the lost in 19:10. Luke also stresses it’s necessity, so that 40 of the 101 times it is [necessity that is used in the New Testament are given 00:04:38] in Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. Above all, Jesus must be in his Father’s house. He must preach the Kingdom of God. He must heal the woman demented by Satan. He must suffer and die then come into glory. This is the great theme that we find Luke emphasising.

[00:05:03]

Luke’s portrait of Jesus is depicted as a regal figure with a royal genealogy with which he starts in Luke 1. Yet he’s unique. His birth comes from a virgin like no other birth. It’s the work of the Holy Spirit. As the beloved Son, this has already been voiced in Psalm 2 and Isaiah 42. So that a Son, Luke [codes 00:05:35] this with Jesus and his Messianic role in 4:41. It’s proclaimed in his sermon in Nazareth in 4:16–30, rich then are all the acts and regal declarations proclaiming his earthly life. He fulfils all the Messianic roles, all the hopes, all the authority with which the Old Testament prophets and the Psalms foretold, especially in Psalm 110, which he recites. His followers as disciples are the beneficiaries of this new kingdom of righteousness, 18:26–30, but also messengers of judgement for those who refuse to believe. And again, you can see there are many passages that I’m not quoting to you simply for their length.

Only Luke describes the Ascension, linking Luke 24 with Acts 1 to show Jesus as both lord of all including the defeat of death, of mortality, but who also receives and gives the Holy Spirit. If it is not Christ who gives us the spirit, it is not the Holy Spirit, but a false spirit of evil. One of the dangers of the Pentecostal movement is to displace the authority of Christ with the authority of the Holy Spirit. There is no dysfunctional divine family. It’s Christ who gives us the Holy Spirit. It’s Christ who gives us salvation. It is Christ that gives, as I said, the Holy Spirit. This is his distinctive emphasis. It’s a betrayal of divine authority that is so personally given, so personally bestowed. So Luke then communicates so pastorally, yet both historically and theologically, that today he would turn seminary education upside down and inside out, so dynamic is his message about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. And Stephen is prepared to become the first martyr of the Church to voice this message. So if you want to follow further studies on this remarkable portraiture, I would refer you to Christoph Stenschke’s Luke’s Portrait of Gentiles Prior to Their Coming to Faith and Fernando Mendez-Moratella’s The Paradigm of Conversion in Luke, where he shows that this metanoia is radical indeed.

[00:09:00]

So now we come to the fourth portrait: the portrait of John as the disciple whom Jesus loved. Because John stands out so distinctly from the three Gospels, Johannine scholarship has become the focal industry of New Testament studies today. It’s huge. A summary of this you will find in Richard Baukham’s Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. He focuses on John in a very special way because John depicts Jesus in a completely different portraiture. We need to see that the history of the Gospel is being completely reshaped by the narrative that we find in John. Not that he’s contradicting in any way the earlier witnesses, but he’s indicating that this approach is so profoundly distinctive.

One of our dangers is that we’re still using historical disciplines by which to understand the historicity of the New Testament. It’s true that we can study the contextual historical context of the Gospels and indeed of the whole life of the New Testament. That’s what social history tells us. But it’s much more than social history. It’s the history of God’s deeds. It transcends human disciplines of historicity. And that’s one of the controversies that we may have with those who want to give us a merely social context or a historical context for the New Testament. And this is where John is rebuking us. In fact. John’s Gospel is so distinctive that the other three human writers might seriously have said oh John, how sound is your presentation? We hear this time and again. And so we need a maverick like Richard Bauckham, who’s really a historian of ideas and he would say he’s not a New Testament scholar to apologise and say well, I write as a layman. Actually, it’s a very smart way of acting—as Kierkegaard does with his way of thinking.

[00:12:07]

So you’re invited to join this debate. We’re not talking about New Testament experts. We’re all aware that the writing of history is what is contextually considered authentic for that particular culture. And so under Roman culture, history was recorded by eyewitnesses, not old documents, but a personal account of those on the scene. And this is what John is claiming. He’s claiming I was there. I saw Jesus. I witnessed his miracles. I heard what he spoke. I was there even when I heard his intimate prayer in the upper room that the other disciples didn’t hear at all. I had to do it myself is what John is saying—there was nobody there that I could get support from. So why then do the other Gospels not record the raising of Lazarus from the dead? And John could defend it because he said I was there. I saw it all happen. The others weren’t present.

So we need sometimes to have a generous deference to people having mystical experiences that other people have never shared. And you can’t share a mystical experience. It’s yours. It expresses your uniqueness before God. And so in the apparent discrepancy of narratives in the Gospels, we find John ends by saying none of us can record all that Jesus did and said because he said things in a whisper to one person that he never shared with anybody else. And so we need awareness that each Gospel is written for an ever wider audience, not just for a particular school or a particular community. The idea that there’s a John community that was popularised a few years ago by scholars is really wacky because John is sharing what he wants to share with everyone.

[00:15:00]

And for John, he’s going to have a mixed readership of Jew and Gentile and so he starts right in the introduction with almost all the high titles imaginable. He’s communicating about the Incarnation as the coming of the Son of God. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. As Origen, the first great Biblical scholar of the middle of the 2nd century, points out in his commentary on John’s Gospel, none of the other evangelists manifested his divinity as fully as John does when he presents himself as I am the light of the world. I am the way, the truth and the life. As Augustine was to observe the same thing. And so we find the Gospel is historically reliable if someone who reads the narrative and believes it historically true gets an accurate view about the kinds of things that Jesus said and did and the true beliefs about Jesus’ death and resurrection. Such a person correctly grasps the kind of person Jesus was, how he lived and how he died and rose again.

[00:16:33]

This then implies that we do not prove the evidence of Jesus in the same way that we seek it of other human beings like ourselves. For Jesus is utterly different even though he is completely human. Hence, we have to be careful we don’t fall into the Chalcedonian heresy that Jesus was not really human. Bauckham steers us from this brink by affirming that the category of testimony in John’s Gospel combines a true element of historical reporting since John kept so close to Jesus as to be named the disciple that Jesus loved. Who is this John? We don’t know. He remains shadowy. We don’t find that he can be identified other than by the title he’s a disciple whom Jesus loved. The others are clearly given description—reality. But archetypally, figurally, John is the disciple that we all need to be.

And so what I’ve found so profoundly moving and it’s well meditated upon by Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century because, as we’ll see, the Cistercians have a remarkable meditative understanding of the Incarnation. Bernard says Jesus has two breasts: the breast of grace to forgive all sinners and the breast of mercy to forgive us daily our daily sins. To lean on the breast of Jesus is to profoundly be embraced by the Gospel. It’s profoundly to experience salvation. And so leaning between the two breasts, John hears a whisper of what is unique in the whole of the New Testament and that is listening to the discourse of the Trinity, of the Father in discourse with the Son, of the Son in discourse with the Father and of the Holy Spirit in His unity with the Father and the Son. And what has amazed me as I’ve often recently meditated on what is so deep, deep in the mystery of creation is that God we have no idea why in the creation of the cosmos still permitted chaos to threaten the creation. Can we ever enter into that mystery? That very mystery is echoed in John 17. Even in the embrace of the disciple, in the arms of the Father and the Son by the Holy Spirit, Jesus is still saying Father, keep them from the evil one. There’s no place safe enough for the Christian, no place safe for the Christian, unless we’re like the beloved disciple on the embrace of his breast.

[00:21:15]

Well, as we close, how intimately we need then to know what it is to be in Christ in order to read and to accept the Gospel.

So for your group discussions, may I suggest some more topics for you to reflect upon. First of all, history does repeat itself, so explore why Classical values and virtues are the new manifesto of secular intellectuals today and how does Mark’s Gospel express a polemic against this trend that is Classical and that is secular now. Secularists today are using the Classical tradition as their manifesto of heroic man.

Then, secondly, how can we use Matthew’s Gospel in dialogue with devout Orthodox Jews today without any bias towards anti-Semitism? Martin Luther made a colossal mistake in stirring anti-Semitism up to the point that Hitler quotes Martin Luther and his tracts for the Holocaust. Incredible! So we Christians have to revere Jews in a very, very special way, but we do so in the dialogue of Matthew.

And thirdly, how does Luke teach us to integrate personal and public life so that our political theology is intensely practical towards other living within political systems like Luke lived? And finally, how does John help you to understand and experience intimacy with Jesus Christ like no one else?

Yes, we live our life in many realms, like the portraits that are given to us of the Gospels.