Reading Luke Together #15 – Luke’s strategies

I love it when I’m puzzled and stay puzzled about anything in Scripture. Not that this matters all that much, but I’m intrigued by Luke’s strategy in 3:18-22. He has a copy of Mark’s Gospel in front of him. Mark straightforwardly reports on John the Baptist in the wilderness – and then Jesus comes to him (Mark 1:4-11). Matthew also has a copy of Mark, and adheres to the obvious sequence (Matthew 3).

But Luke leaps ahead chronologically, and then dips back: John is doing John’s thing, but then Luke adds what happens some time later on – that Herod arrested him. Mark and Matthew report this at the proper time. But Luke’s “spoiler alert” seems to need to let the reader know this John who baptizes Jesus is a troublemaker, one the powers in this world can’t tolerate. So it’s the one who’ll land in jail (and be executed!) who baptizes Jesus. Is this the earliest clue of what will happen to Jesus himself? Are we already learning Jesus hangs with those the world despises?

Jesus wades into the shallow Jordan and is baptized – along with many others who probably didn’t pay him any special attention! We might say Jesus didn’t need to be baptized, being sinless and all. The Why? of his baptism is threefold. Just as Mary, holy enough to bear God’s son, underwent purification at the temple (Luke 2:22 – reported only by Luke!) to fulfill the Jewish ways revealed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, so Jesus went to be baptized to fulfill God’s new way. We also need to recall that Baptism is more than just a bath of forgiveness. The water symbolizes our thirst for God, and God’s pouring out of the Spirit on us, and our inclusion in the people of God – all fitting for Jesus! And then we might also observe that Jesus came, not so much carrying the weight of his own sin, but the sins of the world, of you, me and the others.

And then Luke launches into Jesus’ genealogy – deep into chapter 3. Matthew put his front and center starting in Chapter 1, Verse 1! And they go in reverse order of one another, Matthew commencing with Abraham and moving through chronological time toward the eventual birth of Jesus. Luke starts with Jesus and goes backward – and all the way, not to Abraham, but to Adam! Luke always emphasizes, more than the other Gospels, that Jesus is the Savior of everybody; he came for everybody, not just the chosen people of God.

I love Marilynne Robinson’s wisdom on those genealogies in Genesis, which trace everybody’s ancestry to Noah – which rules out the possibility that “differences between groups could ever be of a qualitative kind, deeper than differences within a family.” Ponder that a minute in light of the way some people feel about race or nationality! Luke’s genealogy suggests Jesus is everybody’s brother / cousin / kin. So we’re linked deeply to him if we know or believe it or not – and we’re at the same time linked deeply to all the other people.

Genealogies fascinate me – and they raise a flurry of theological issues. We are tickled to find prosperous ancestors – and although we firmly insist we earn and deserve what we have, we don’t mind having stumbled upon some generational wealth. Or the simple fact of being American or white! And then remember that when you go to the doctor, they ask you about family history, as there’s stuff in your genes that might just undo you physically. If that’s the case, how much more given your spiritual inheritance? And I admire my wife’s quest to trace her ancestry to try to locate the names and descendants of the slaves they held.

A few other little details in Luke 3: the dove descends “in bodily form,” which Luke adds in case you think it was just some spiritual hunch. And the dove over the water is a hint that new life, a new generation is dawning as it did for Noah after the flood. The genealogy runs through Joseph: I love Luke’s wink back to the visit of Gabriel to Mary: “Jesus was the son”… and then Luke inserts a parenthesis, “(as was thought)”… “of Joseph” (verse 23). It’s the legal ancestry, not biological in this case that matters.

And since Joseph basically “adopted” Jesus, we have an early instance of what will be Paul’s beautiful understanding of our lives in coming to Jesus (check out Romans 8:15 and Ephesians 3:20 as examples): God joyfully takes us into God’s family and treats us as daughters and sons!