This Advent the priests and sisters of Sacred Heart Parish are offering each family in the parish a small gift – a copy of St Luke’s Gospel.  Behind that gift we are making a simple point; we’re saying, ‘this is why we are here’.  We’re also hoping that you’ll read it and find in its pages, as we did, something that draws you closer to Christ and which inspires you to serve him in serving others.

We’re offering you this particular Gospel because most of the Gospel readings we’ll hear at our Sunday Masses in the coming year will be taken from Luke.  Now each one of the Gospel writers presents his own distinctive portrait of Jesus, empha-sizing certain aspects of his character and highlighting what it means to be one of his followers.  So what does Luke emphasize that the others don’t?

In this Gospel there is constant reference of movement from one place to another.  The Gospel begins in the Temple of Jerusalem but the action flows between Galilee to Jerusalem a few times until it finally ends back in the Temple.  Now this is not to say that we simply end up back where we started.  In fact the writer Luke also wrote the Acts of the Apostles (which is really Luke II: the spread of the Gospel) and if we read Acts after Luke we see that Jerusalem was only the launching pad for something that would spread all over the world.  But the point behind all of this is that just as Jesus ‘journeyed’ until he reached the point where he would save us, so also should we think of our lives as his followers as a journey too; making our own personal pilgrimage, in the company of our parish family, step by step, from baptism to God’s kingdom.

While we’re on that journey, Luke hints that God can suddenly break into what’s happening in our lives and give it new direction.  He certainly did so with Zechariah and with Mary when he sent the Angel Gabriel to tell them about the new things that would happen in their lives.  Jesus did the same himself when he broke into the    

lives of fisherman and tax collectors and made them apostles.  All this tells us that God is interested in our lives and that he will intervene when we need a change of direction.

Besides this we learn that this God loves us more than we can ever imagine.  In Luke alone do we get the parable of the prodigal son, which presents God as a father who at the first sign of repentance runs to forgive the son who squandered his inheritance on all sorts of nonsense.  No cold-shoulder, no lecture; just a father who loves his child almost recklessly; that’s the God that Luke presents.

 He’s a God who is especially fond of those who are poor or weak or vulnerable.  Mary, in chapter one, praises this God for ‘casting the mighty from their thrones and raising the lowly.’  Soon after that God’s solidarity with the poor was shown when his own Son was placed in an animals’ feeding trough after his birth and visited by lowly shepherds.  When that child grew up he used these words as his mission statement:  “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor ...”  Luke’s Jesus was all for the poor regardless of what shape they came in.  The other side of that, though, is that he was very careful to warn his disciples about the dangers of getting too comfortable or wealthy in this life.  The story of Lazarus and the rich man is another that you only find in Luke and it is a sober reminder of the dangers of feathering your own nest and forgetting the poor.

While we’re on the subject, the historians will tell us that amongst those at the lower echelons of society at the time of Jesus were women.  Yet it is because of Luke’s Gospel that Jesus is recognised as one who ignored what society expected and gave woman a respect that the men of his time wouldn’t have even considered.  More than the other Gospels does Jesus refer to women in his teaching and much emphasis is placed on those  

women who journeyed with Jesus to the end.  

 Luke is also distinctive in presenting Jesus as a man of prayer.  He refers constantly to Jesus’ need to get off on his own to pray.  Thus we find him praying just before his baptism , and at his temptation, and at so many other significant times in his life.  Alongside this example, we also have very direct and practical teaching as when he talks about the widow pestering the unjust judge until he gives in to her and grants her request.  For those of us who feel guilty about constantly asking God for things in prayer, we should remember Luke and not be afraid to pester God for what we need.

Luke can also be described as the Gospel of the Holy Spirit because of how it tells of people who have been open to what God’s action in their lives and are then ‘filled with the Holy Spirit.’  This happens to Mary, and Zechariah and Elizabeth, John the Baptist and Jesus himself (The Spirit of the Lord is upon me ...).  If you read on into the Acts of the Apostles you’ll see the same thing happening to the likes of Stephen and Peter and Paul.  Again, this is Luke’s reminder to us to trust God, to open ourselves to his work in our lives and to be ready to be filled with the Holy Spirit.

These are only a few hints as to what to look for in Luke.  We hope you’ll make use of this little gift and gain much from it.